Matson, Kevin. Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

== Summary ==
Kevin
Mattson’s Creating a Democratic Public explores
various activists and figures who attempted to form a more democratic public (a
“real” democracy where the public is at the center of political life). Mattson
defines a democratic public as a “place” where “citizens gather to deliberate
and make public judgments about local and national issues that affect their
lives.” (4) This book, Mattson believes, is beyond the typical academic history
(more in the cloth of Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson) and aims to use
history to better understand and grapple with the present; in this case, the
lack of a democratic public. Mattson writes: “This books takes contemporary
concerns about the state of American democracy and asks how things could have
been different. It is both a work of history and social criticism.” (6) Mattson
examines the Progressive Era, a time period when Americans “committed
themselves to reexamining political institutions and intellectual assumptions
guiding Americans into the modern age.” (7) The reform activists during this
time period (from muckrackering journalists to urban activists) accepted, to
varying degrees, that the American political system was corrupted and
influenced by many of the big corporations that emerged at the turn of the 20th
century. They thus advocated for democratic publics, via forums, universities,
and public schools, that would provide citizens a platform to debate the key
issues and, over time, reform and remake the American political system. Mattson’s
book focuses particularly on the urban center and how activists envisioned
cities to be potential spaces for democratic publics. Ultimately, the argument
of this book is that the “political thought and work of the activists and
intellectuals” of the progressive era can “inform our current hopes for a
better American democracy” as they provide an institutional basis to think
critically about constructing a better democracy. (10) While unsuccessful in
their larger vision, these progressive activists, Mattson contends, “succeeded
in replacing a nineteenth-century system of government ruled by bosses and
corrupt patronage with a more modern, efficient administration run by expert
civil servants and democratically elected officials.” (129)