Good neighbors : the democracy of everyday life in America

Resource Information

The work Good neighbors : the democracy of everyday life in America represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in San Francisco Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Good neighbors : the democracy of everyday life in America

Title remainder

the democracy of everyday life in America

Statement of responsibility

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Creator

• Rosenblum, Nancy L., (Nancy Lipton), 1947-

Contributor

• hoopla digital

Author

• Rosenblum, Nancy L., (Nancy Lipton), 1947-

Subject

• Electronic books
• Civil society -- United States
• Neighborliness -- United States
• Democracy -- Social aspects -- United States

Language

eng

Summary

How our everyday interactions as neighbors shape-and sometimes undermine-democracy "Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings. In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life-reciprocity, speaking out, and "live and let live"-comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

307.3/3620973

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Target audience

adult