The Civil Society Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis promotes responsible democratic citizenship by supporting research, teaching, and public engagement, on the premise that individual and collective reasoning about value questions is an essential part of a flourishing democracy. The term “civil society” in our name refers to the non-state elements of a democratic society, which crucially include our formal and informal practices of thinking about and debating moral and political issues. We believe that the capacity to reason about value questions is an important complement to political action and civic engagement. We aim both to understand the nature of responsible democratic citizenship by asking theoretical questions in political theory, social epistemology, and moral psychology and to support the practices of responsible democratic citizenship by creating spaces for disagreement and dialogue about timely moral and political questions.
The Civil Society Initiative is a collaboration of the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science and is supported by the Frick Initiative and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.
For more information, please contact the Director of the Civil Society Initiative, Allan Hazlett.
