Veteran Chicago community organizer Robert T. Gannett, Jr. will analyze the intellectual legacy
bequeathed by Alexis de Tocqueville, French philosopher, American traveler, and author of Democracy
in America, to Saul D. Alinsky, “radical” Chicago community organizer. Tocqueville issued a
challenge to America when he published his book in 1835–40. One-hundred years later, Alinsky
read Democracy, grasped the challenge, and created the modern profession of community organizing
to meet it.
Dr. Gannett will explain how and why community organizers have used Tocqueville and how their
work since 1939 has given ordinary citizens the ability to create self-governing institutions. Central
to their efforts has been the ability to invent a “politics of imagination” that can confront the hyperbole,
partisanship, and paralysis that mark national politics today. Gannett will conclude by speaking
of two campaigns of his own organizations in Chicago that demonstrate these possibilities.
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