This is Philosophy Bytes with me Nigel Warburton.

And me, David Edmonds.

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When we think of democracy, we tend to think of parliaments, political parties, election campaigns, speeches and rallies and so on,

all part of the public domain. Robert Thelies believes that democracy should also contain

a private or solitary component. Robert Thelis, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hi Nigel, thank you for

having me. The topic we're going to focus on is civic solitude. What is that?

I think that there are distinctive duties that are civic that can be discharged only in isolation from others.

That's interesting because generally when we think of civic duties, their collective is a sense of

a group of people combining to take some kind of action. Yeah, and there's good reason for that.

Democracy, after all, is about collective self-government. It's about holding government to account.

It's about civic responsibility, which is

often collective. Turns out, though, that those collective public faces of our civic duties are not

exhaustive. Democracy in being a system by which we rule collectively as political equals requires of us that we understand one another.

And it turns out that collective public democratic action can obstruct our ability to understand one another.

So I'm imagining people turning out for a general election.

They all are in the streets queuing up to put across on a ballot paper.

They're collectively expressing their will.

What could possibly go wrong with them doing it collectively? Surely they can't do it

individually? Right. Well, what can go wrong is what brought them to the political views that

they're trying to express. We are groupish creatures. This is not an uncommon thought. And our groupishness,

...