Local mutual aid networks draw on it. General assemblies, direct democracy, the long evening

meetings in church basements and town squares, they trace a quiet line back to her recovery

of the public space as something more than a marketplace for redistribution.

Politics for her was an agonistic stage.

The word comes from the Greek agon, meaning a healthy contest, a public debate,

the friction of free people speaking and being seen.

She offered something else, too, the idea of alienated citizenship. A deliberate distance the citizen

keeps from the crowd, from the easy thrill of flag-waving patriotism, from doing what's always been

done just because it's always been done. She drew it from Socrates, the old gadfly of Athens,

who pestered people in the marketplace with questions

until their certainties fell apart in their hands.

What is justice?

What is courage?

The more they tried to answer, the less they knew.

That was his gift.

He paralyzed them on purpose, so they would have to actually think, the stop, and think,

she called it.

A pause, right before action that could save a person from doing something monstrous.

Her warning was stark.

Watching ordinary Germans become accomplices to mass murder,

she had noticed something chilling.

The people most certain of their old values

...