You don’t have to look hard to find  complaints about the decline of  American civic life. Voter turnout is down;  many voluntary organizations have lost  members; people bowl alone rather than  in leagues. But in  The Good Citizen,  sociologist Michael Schudson argues that  things may not be all that bad. Drawing  on a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of  American history, he shows that there was  never a golden age of civic participation.  In his view, our current civic life is much  healthier than the critics suggest.

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