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Politics of engagement

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Republicanism was an intensive brand of politics; it was, heart and soul, a politics of engagement. It depended first upon people being deeply engaged with one another ("rejoicing and mourning, laboring and suffering together") and second upon citizens being directly and profoundly engaged with working out the solutions to public problems, by formulating and enacting the "common good." The federalist alternative t o this republican politics of engagement was a politics of radical disengagement (Kemmis, pg. 12)

Here, again, is the politics of engagement. Republics must be small so that people can be engaged with one another intensively and repeatedly enough to come to know and desire the common good. (Kemmis, pg. 16)