Good Neighbour Nation: The Democracy of Everyday Life

Neighbours make us miserable, disturb our sleep, provide company and care, rescue us in emergencies, betray us to political authorities. Our quality of life around home is vulnerable to neighbours’ ordinary vices and, sometimes, exceptional hostility and cruelty. No wonder we tell stories about our neighbours with feeling and navigate our give and take uneasily. Yet moral and political theorists have had little to say about neighbours, in contrast with their extensive treatment of principles and obligations that govern family and friendship , workplace, civil society, and political life. The ‘ good neighbour ’ would seem to fall between the poles of public and private morality. Nancy Rosenblum probes the ‘ democracy of everyday life ’ , often hidden, that shapes these relations. ‘Reciprocity’, ‘S peaking Out’, and ‘Live and Let Live’, the elements of ‘ good neighbour’ , are less well - theorized than the ideal of the ‘ good citizen ’ but better practiced. In this way the quotidian democracy of everyday life serves as an informal substrate for democracy, is a saving remnant for democratic failure, and deepens and humanizes democratic theory.

The lecture is the eleventh in a series funded by a generous benefaction from Dr S.T. Lee, who has funded lectures in humanities all over the world

‘The sun never sets on S.T. Lee’s projects’