Rational choice theorists and political theorists have much to gain in open exchange, as shown in Jon Elster's masterly analyses of Alexis de Tocqueville (1993, 2009) and Russell Hardin's engagement with David Hume (2009). Thus, I appreciate Justin Buchler's insights into my book, and since my points of agreement with him will be obvious, I will focus on the areas of contention.

Missing from Buchler's otherwise cogent appraisal is the larger context for my civic engagement analysis. We should examine “civic engagement” more closely because it has been stretched beyond clarity and utility. For five centuries, the word engage has primarily connoted a combination of attention and energy. It still does in common parlance. When we worry about declining civic engagement, which we have done at increasing rates over the past two decades, we are really worrying about the elusiveness of attention and energy. As Buchler mentions, I parse civic engagement into its constituent parts: political, social, and moral engagement, which may travel together but often do not. My book focuses primarily on political engagement—attention and activity invested politically, which extends far beyond voting—and its role in making democracy work. Since the time of ancient Greece, democracy's citizens have almost always struggled to keep their attention and energy focused on political affairs. To the extent that we find this problematic, we might try a variety of means to do better, and we can discover some of the best means by creatively reading Tocqueville (who stresses the importance of both attention and energy much more extensively than anyone has realized).

Buchler understandably chooses to focus on a few arguments that relate to his own writings, especially my analysis of theories that claim political engagement alternately as an instrumental or intrinsic good. He implies that rational choice theory already possesses the relevant answers, but actually political theorists and rational choice theorists employ the concepts of intrinsic and instrumental value quite differently. When political theorists write about intrinsic goods, we are referring to things that are good in themselves, as opposed to being good as a means to achieving some further end. Aristotle classifies politics in that way, a pursuit choiceworthy for its own sake and an essential component of human flourishing. A surprisingly large number of political theorists regard political engagement in the same sense, and that is the view that I consider and contest as one component of a broader argument. Claims of intrinsic value can be used as a trump card to justify coercion or other undesirable means of promoting a good that people have not chosen of their own accord, and so those claims deserve careful consideration.

When Buchler elaborates on the well-known “irrationality of voting” argument, utility functions, and the “D term” to illustrate how rational choice theorists long ago resolved the intrinsic/instrumental issue, I worry that he is comparing apples and oranges and talking past the concerns of many political theorists (for whom instrumental value does not refer simply to the content of individuals' current utility functions). Similarly, his willingness to retain the term “civic engagement” in the way that we retain the word “food”—as long as we reject claims that either civic engagement or food possesses intrinsic value—relies on different meanings than the ones I employ. We should stop using the term civic engagement not because it is wrongly ascribed intrinsic value but because it encompasses so many concepts and practices that it no longer helps us to understand democracy. No one claims that the country's health problems (which include obesity, heart disease, and diabetes) could be radically improved by giving everyone more food. People do make such blanket claims regarding democracy's health and civic engagement.

Among our other areas of agreement, Buchler and I both recognize that our disfavored terms will not soon disappear—but we feel that conversations about democracy would be clearer if they did.