Bringing Power Back Home: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

Although for generations the government of Vermont rested with the administrators of its 246 towns, the past thirty years have seen a slow but steady growth of central power. According to John McClaughry, Vermonters are in danger of losing true citizenship and therefore of losing their democracy as more and more decisions affecting their lives are made by distant functionaries. "[T]he place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community—that is where citizenship resides." Reiterating the central theme of The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (co-authored with Frank Bryan), McClaughry calls for a federation in Vermont of new political bodies called "shires," which would be big enough to take back the powers lost to the state and small enough to allow direct citizen participation.