Toward the end of her excellent book, Nancy Rosenblum succinctly summarizes its contribution: “Citizenship is well theorized but not very well practiced. Neighborliness is well practiced but not very well theorized. My aim is to construct a moral and political theory of good neighbor” (234). In my view, she achieves this goal very well, but I am left with questions having to do with her view of citizenship and with how she approaches the underlying theme of the book, the “democracy of everyday life.”

Brilliantly written, the book draws from a wide range of literature, social science, and moral and political philosophy to explore the concept and practice of “neighborliness” in America. No doubt it will become a key text on this theme, paralleling (though differing in argument from) other classics to which she refers, such as Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

For Rosenblum, neighborliness consists of three core elements, each of which is elaborated in depth. The first of these is “reciprocity,” built on relations of trust, and occurring among “decent folk,” a signifier of “equality in this one respect: qua neighbor” (84). The second element is “speaking out,” the moral anger and indignation that occur among “decent folk” as they settle their differences, and through which they hold one another informally accountable. The third element she calls “live and let live,” referring to the often tacit ways in which neighbors negotiate their differences and boundaries of privacy and place, such as through reticence to report on neighbors for strange behaviors or through signaling assurance that we will not “disturb, injure, or exploit one another” (13).

A focus on good neighbors, she argues, provides a lens on “the democracy of everyday life in America,” which is different from “democracy proper” (235), yet represents an often ignored substrate that serves to underpin, renew, and resuscitate more formal democratic practices and institutions.

While the phrase “good neighbors” can evoke images of saccharine sentimentality, the author is quick to argue that the same characteristics of neighborliness that provide the substrate for democracy also can serve darker, more antidemocratic behaviors. Neighbors build walls, sometimes as acts of privacy but also as acts of exclusion—and Rosenblum's discussion of walls and neighborliness is timely, given current debates in the United States on its relations with its own geopolitical neighbor. She points to historical examples when neighborly trust and “minding our neighbor's” business” (145) were exploited by authoritarian regimes and nations at war for betrayal and surveillance. Under certain conditions, neighborliness becomes a force for exclusion and ultimately expulsion, as in the Japanese internment camps of World War II. Neighbors can also be violent, racist killers, as she outlines in a chapter on lynchings, but also can be “rescuers,” those who try to protect one set of neighbors from the abuse and hostility of another.

Despite the negative sides of neighborliness, Rosenblum insists that the democracy of everyday life “provides a ground, a place to stand, when consciously organized aspects of democratic public life are fragile or broken entirely. … The democracy of everyday life is the enduring substrate of democracy, which we fall back on at crucial moments to maintain our democratic bearings” (247). What is not made entirely clear in the book, however, is why and under what conditions the democracy of everyday life undergirds democratic practice, given that under others it seems to erode its basic values.

The problem (and the solution) for me lies in the following: while arguing that the democracy of everyday life found in practices of being a good neighbor is critical for democracy writ large, Rosenblum is also at pains to draw strong lines between the concepts of “good neighbor” and “good citizen.” For her, while both concepts are important, they represent different spheres, not to be conflated: “something is lost if the democracy of everyday life is overlooked or flattened out, or seen as valuable only insofar as it instantiates public democratic principles and practices.” She also distinguishes the democracy of everyday life from the “public realm of democratic institutions and practices” (236). Similarly, her focus on practices of citizenship is on more formal aspects of political participation, membership, and engagement. As she writes, “the democracy of everyday life is the remainder when government and political institutions and the organized association of civil society seem distant or corrupt or failed” (215).

While the analytical distinction between “good neighbor” and “good citizen” may be an important one, in working so hard to challenge the conflation that often occurs between the two, Rosenblum risks another conflation. By linking “everyday life” to the sphere of neighborliness, and citizenship to the realm of public and institutional forms of engagement, we lose in between the idea of “everyday citizenship,” or of “everyday democracy” (as distinct from her concept of the “democracy of everyday life”). Democracy is not only about the formal and institutional, but is also about how citizens engage and behave democratically at home, in private spaces, in communities, in quiet acts of resistance and voice. We are reminded of this in an important body of literature on everyday forms of citizenship and democracy—one which is largely missing from Rosenblum's work (perhaps because much of it comes from outside the United States). For instance, Kabeer's work Inclusive Citizenship (Zed Books, 2005) points to the importance of a “horizontal” view of citizenship, which includes concepts of solidarity and recognition, as well as of formal rights and justice. In Europe, Demos has published the Everyday Democracy Index (2008), based on the premise that democracy “must be rooted in a culture in which democratic values and practices shape not just the formal sphere of politics, but the informal spheres of everyday life: families, communities, workplaces, and schools and other public services” (7). Isin and Nielsen, in Acts of Citizenship (Zed Books, 2008), write about those small actions, not necessarily through formal modes of collective action or in relationship to institutions, through which subjects construct their citizenship.

To argue for paying more attention to everyday democracy and citizenship is not to argue for reconflating these with the concept of good neighbor. Rosenblum's distinction between the two is important. But in practice, one expects that if we drew a Venn diagram of neighborly acts which constitute “democracy in everyday life” and acts of everyday citizenship which are supportive of democratic culture and practice, there would be much overlap between the two. After all, it is often within neighborhoods that acts of tolerance and respect, voice and dissent, solidarity and cooperation occur in countless informal ways—though it is also true that not all neighborly acts are acts of citizenship, and not all everyday forms of citizenship are between neighbors.

By arguing on the one hand that “democracy of everyday life” is a substrate of democracy, but on the other that citizenship and democratic practice lie outside the domain of the informal and the everyday, we are left with a substrate that is highly porous, and which fails to distinguish the forms of neighborliness in everyday life that contribute to democratic practice from those which do not. Rather than distinguish the two, I would suggest that it is in their overlaps—when the informal acts of everyday democracy and citizenship are overlain with the everyday acts of neighborliness (or vice versa)—where stronger, more resilient and inclusive forms of both good neighbor and good citizen will likely be built, renewed, and sustained.