# Improvising Democracy: The Public as Actor, Not Spectator **Date de l'événement :** 22/07/2026 * Publié le 22/07/2026 ### Date 24/07/2026 ## Chapô **Cet article est également [disponible en français](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/content/2026-07-22/le-public-improviser-la-democratie_u68bC5x6nX3JvkM8DuhH).**  **Behind the word "public" (public education, public services, public space) lies a single question: are we the passive beneficiaries of our institutions, or the agents who make and remake them? The legal scholar and philosopher Christopher Kutz, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former visiting professor at Sciences Po, makes it the heart of his latest book, _Publics in Action: The Self-Making of Civic Life_ (Oxford University Press, 2025), in which he casts the public as a form of improvisatory collective agency, drawn from the comparative experience of California, France, and Norway. That leaves the question this interview sets out to answer: in an age of democratic disenchantment and the privatization of the world, how can publics reclaim control over their shared institutions?** ## Corps du texte _**Question 1: In your book, you begin your argument by revisiting the concept of the "public" and its value for thinking about contemporary democracies. Could you explain what this concept refers to and what it helps us understand about current political issues?**_ Christopher Kutz (C. K.) : The book comes from my late-blooming realization that for all talk of “a public,” in fact we carry many different ideas of the “public” aspect of different institutions, from education, to safety, to health, to infrastructure, to democracy itself.  (The English language may be misleading in relying on that one word, “public,” whereas French uses a lot of different words, including “publique,” “en commun,” “étatique,” “national.”) I thought that by trying to put these different uses of the word into dialogue, I could show how we argue about and work out our commitments to politics and community.  I also meant the book to display how different liberal democracies – especially France and, as an American model, California, but also Norway, the UK, and Germany – work out distinct but legitimate kinds of public institutions. In the book, I then build a picture of the noun “public” from these different adjectival uses. And the broader picture that I develop is that we should understand the “public” as a collective agent rather than, say, a passive recipient of benefits or an abstract kind of owner of property or resources. The crucial public value, for democratic communities, is what I call “improvisatory collective agency”: our ability to connect with one another in making and remaking our institutions so they reflect our sense of shared purpose and self, adapt to changing circumstance, and reflect on the lessons that different communities, trying to solve the same kinds of problems, can teach us. My hope is that despite the frustrations of the current political landscape, this book can inspire those still working to build systems of education, justice, speech, and property that include all members of our communities in their dignity and creativity. _**Question 2: Your first chapter examines the relationship between publics and the notion of public goods, particularly as a way of thinking about the privatization of certain essential resources and services. What criteria make it possible to distinguish politically acceptable forms of privatization from those that are not?**_ > "The crucial question, for me, is not whether some institutions must be private or public, but whether how they operate fulfills our shared, public goals and values, worked out in democratic politics." C. K. : The major point I try to make in the first chapter is that “privatization” is not the opposite of “public,” but instead should be thought of as a way publics organize shared institutions.  What is “private property,” after all, but a system of rights and claims about land and goods, governed by public rules and protected by public force?  In an ideal world, publics make some resources private because doing protects individual privacy, or respects reasonable differences in how to use those resources, or promotes economic growth, or whatever – it’s based in a shared judgment about what our institutions should look like.   In practice, of course, private interests often seize control of our political institutions for their own benefit, and that is something we must fight. But as a general matter, I believe that there are many legitimate ways of controlling shared institutions either through direct public control or through private delegation. Water privatization is an example I discuss at length in the book. I argue that private management of water systems, as is common in France (and uncommon in the US, for instance), can be in the public interest, so long as the public retains a strong regulatory role. But I recognize, at the same time, that water can have very deep social meaning in particular communities, and that its privatization can pose real risks if public regulation is weak.  The other institution where I really wrestle with in this regard is prisons. I hate the idea of private prisons (which are, unlike in France, common in the US). I argue in particular that the pursuit of private profit is incompatible with the kind of physical and spiritual power associated with prison.  So if there is a limit on legitimate privatization, it will lie here. At the same time, is it possible that a private, secular, non-profit could operate some prisons better than the state, in a way that is practically better aligned with shared public values of dignity and reintegration? Surely.  So the question will be whether direct state operation matters symbolically in a way that would always outrank privatization. (We might also need to acknowledge that privatizing underperforming institutions may well make matters worse, and may come with an important symbolic loss.) The crucial question, for me, is not whether some institutions must be private or public, but whether how they operate fulfills our shared, public goals and values, worked out in democratic politics. We have to avoid ideological pieties of the extreme left and right.  _**Question 3: You devote another chapter to the analysis of a "global public" in the face of the climate crisis. You argue that economics alone cannot solve this crisis and that it is necessary to incorporate ethical reflection into the discussion. Why?**_ > "Resolving these questions involves what I have called improvisational politics – improvisational because the challenges of climate change are new, and nothing we have done in the past has fully prepared us." C. K. : Thanks for asking about this chapter, because for me it was the part of the book that convinced me I had something worth saying. There is one big problem with using economics as the dominant way to think about climate change: economics has only one fundamental value, which is the welfare (usually measured by the satisfaction of preferences) of the economists’ constituents: individuals taken one by one, across all time and space. This ignores a host of other, basic, value questions that cannot be answered by economics, and only enter into its analysis if they make it into individual preferences. This is just a consequence of its being a basically utilitarian ethical system.  For instance, a crucial question for countries today is how much to weigh the welfare of future people. Putting no value on their welfare seems obviously wrong – they have as much right as we, if not more, to good lives. But weighting their lives equally, since there will be (hopefully) an infinite number of future people, would mean reducing the quality of our own lives to almost nothing. So this is a value choice that has to be made, about who we are – a global public, or a globe of publics, living across time. And there is no magic economic or other philosophical formula to tell us the answer. At most, philosophy and economics can point us in the right directions. But resolving these questions involves what I have called improvisational politics – improvisational because the challenges of climate change are new, and nothing we have done in the past has fully prepared us. This chapter is also a place where I demonstrate the value of a global approach – of looking to how other places are building systems and institutions for the future, and pulling lessons from them. Jazz musicians call this listening with “big ears.” I take three lessons:  1. From France, the lesson that a confidence in state capacity – the legacy of _Gaullisme_ – can make a huge difference, such as France’s decarbonization of its grid by nuclear power.  2. From Norway, which has put its disappearing oil money into a socially-conscious sovereign wealth fund that will pay out for a thousand or more years, a lesson in extending national politics into a deep future. 3. From California (which I treat as a comparable liberal democracy – I am not too sure about the US as a whole anymore!), a lesson in building social systems that include all contributors to its society and economy, not just those with formal political status. I think all three of these lessons are crucial to responding to climate change, which is a problem that will require enormous, coordinated state action, a commitment to the interests of the future, and a as little care about political borders as CO2 itself. Bringing those lessons together, in a global and pluralistic way, is a job for politics, not economics. And there are no answers to be found, except through a process of mutual learning and experimentation. _**Question 4: Your book highlights collective agency through the role of public spaces, groups, and institutions. What is your view of commons theories, which are based on self-governance and argue that the public character of a resource should depend on users' participation in its governance?**_ C. K. : You’re talking about ideas of managing common resources explored by the great political scientist (and Nobel economics winner), Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s work has always been a big influence on me, because of the way she showcases the work that communities can do together. I think of it as a response to the kind of simpleminded libertarian theories that were popular in the US in the 1960s, that said that unless you give individuals private ownership stakes, they will overuse or abuse shared goods and resources. Ostrom pointed out that many communities are able to make use of common goods – grazing lands, waters, open spaces – in ways the defy the libertarian’s fear. Think about public parks. Sure, if there is no collective management or regulation of the parks, people might abuse them – playing music too loudly, or littering, or tearing up the grass.  But – with the exception of the Jardin du Luxembourg! – most parks don’t need a lot of police enforcement of the rules, because most people using the parks want to do so in a way that also respects the interests of others. We are actually very good about sharing things, when we can see the benefit of the rules regulating our common usage, and when we want to be able to enjoy these things over a long term. In other words, exactly as you say, the public character of a park is maintained by users’ participation in its governance, through their own restraint, and their respect for the legitimacy of common rules.  For me, one of the great contrasts as I move back and forth between France and the US, is how much France still is a country of shared, public institutions. The great exception in the US is our system of national parks, which used to be a model for the world, though they are falling now on hard times. On the other hand, I don’t want to say that every resource or good should be managed collectively. While I think there should be public parks, large and small, I don’t think all land needs to be collectively owned and managed. People want to use land in very different ways, and assuming they can do so without causing great nuisances to one another, there’s no reason to make each person’s use everyone’s business, as it were. Education is also in many ways a public good, in the economists’ sense – the benefits of education flow to all people, because states with many well-educated members are richer and more fair. But, while I think every state should have easily accessible publicly-managed education, I also think it is good to have a variety of private models of education available, to avoid the pitfalls of central control. And systems of public education that focus too many resources on a tiny number of direct beneficiaries – the problem with the systems of Grandes écoles, in my view – are also a problem.   _**Question 5: Your book briefly discusses the digital transformations brought about by the Internet and social media. How do you view the development of artificial intelligence, particularly the transformations it is bringing about in the public sphere?**_ C. K. : This is another great question. I wrote almost all of the book before the Generative AI models became public, so it is not something I talk about at all. But of course I have been thinking a lot about AI! I have noticed in conversations in France that people are generally more optimistic about AI than in the US. I myself am very worried – maybe because I live in the Bay Area of California, where most of the AI companies are also located, and so I am perhaps more inoculated against the hype of the companies, and also more worried about the megalomaniacal (and fascistic) politics that many of these company leaders increasingly display. If I were an optimist, I would say that AI holds great promise precisely because of its limitations. AI systems are not (yet) very creative, but they are very good at synthesizing lines of thought and research that humans have done, and this can be the basis for the kind of improvisation I talked about before/above. I can also imagine AI systems working as excellent facilitators of public conversations – that it becomes as much a part of the architecture of our public sphere as coffee houses were in London or Vienna in the 18th century. In Hélène Landemore’s newest book, she invokes the idea of Chesterton’s “jolly hostess” who makes all the guests at a party feel attended to and valued – this is her ideal of a participatory democracy. I guess an AI system could play that role, though having careful and individuated conversations, and then facilitating group discussions But, I am not in fact optimistic about any of these scenarios. I fear more the power of AI systems, deployed by malevolent actors, to shape our opinions and eroding our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood in word and image. I worry about corporate or state actors using AI systems to nudge us into beliefs or actions that they want. I worry about our own cognitive deskilling, as we lose the ability to read and critique, and instead just ask Claude for its summary and views. And as AI systems consume more and more of their own output, they will no longer be able to synthesize the human-made creative work they were built on. AI seems to me more likely to lead to Idiocracy than Athenian democracy. I think the only hope is an international, publicly generated and managed AI system, to protect these systems from corporate or individual state control. (I am glad that France is trying to work on its digital sovereignty.) But I don’t know about the chances of that.  I recently heard a lecture by Stuart Russell, a pioneer of AI who teaches also at UC Berkeley, who reported a conversation he had had with a corporate AI leader.  That person, Russell said, thought it would require a “Chernobyl-level” event to prompt governments to act – and that was a “best case” scenario.  I fear Russell is right. ### Thématique `#Démocratie` **Licence :** `#CC-BY-ND (Attribution, Pas de modification)` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)