The below amounts to little more than a promissory note for an argument. But its outlines feel right, and I’ll be developing them in the coming weeks.
One: Practices
Practices organize social life. Yet they’ve received surprisingly little attention in the study of politics—little by political scientists, still less by practitioners. We’re much more likely to run a regression on voting behavior than to study the physical and mental behaviors that make up the act of voting. This impoverishes our theorizing and, worse, keeps us from realizing the emancipatory potential of our social lives.
As I develop this project in the coming months, I want to advance two claims. First, the weaker claim that attending to practices generally—and integrative practices specifically—is analytically useful, especially for understanding this political moment. Any adequate theory of society must foreground their effects. Second, a stronger claim that integrative practices are ethically and politically essential. I take the world’s wisdom traditions to be unanimous in stressing the importance of integration for ethics. I want to suggest that they are no less necessary for the kinds of free and equal societies we desire.
By “practices”, I mean the kinds of activities that increasing numbers of sociologists spent the last half of the twentieth century studying:
A ‘practice’ (Praktik) is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice – a way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself or of others, etc. – forms so to speak a ‘block’ whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements, and which cannot be reduced to any one of these single elements. (Reckwitz 2002, 249-250)
Practices thus focus our attention on the micro, the immediate, the immanent. In this, they offer a particularly fruitful way to approach political life. Especially in North America, scholars approach politics through the lens of procedures, institutions, and (where they show any concern for theory) the principles underlying these. Theorists spend far too much time discussing whether so-and-so was a republican or a liberal. Much of that time would be better spent examining the underlying practices rather than their more abstract amalgamations as identities, norms, or institutions.
Today, we’re inundated with sweeping claims about social systems. Will “the institutions” or “the Constitution” successfully check Trump’s “fascism”? Will “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism” destroy us all? Has “liberalism” itself failed? I don’t deny that these questions carry important rhetorical value; in stressing to the public the danger that Trump and his ilk represent, it matters that we stress their reformulation of fascist aims. But for the theorist, questions pitched at this level of abstraction tend to be worse than useless. They immediately draw sides. They collapse categories and erase tensions. They mire us in terminological debates that confuse more than clarify. Market liberal: “By capitalism I mean free exchange among individuals. I don’t mean all that crony capitalism or externalities that are destroying the planet.” Leftist: “I’m fine with free exchange among individuals, but capitalism entails exactly the concentrated power and externalities that you’re defining away!” And round and round we go.
We’d get much further much faster in our social theorizing by instead attending to the ensembles of practices that these reified concepts represent. Liberalism (considered in its ideological aspect and not as an identity) is nothing more than a set of practices designed to protect the freedom and equality of individuals. We can enumerate these protective practices: habeas corpus, the rule of law, free expression, markets open to competition, and so on. Each of these general practices comprises any number of particular practices: free expression requires legal practices that delineate harmful from benign speech; commercial practices of editing, printing, and distributing speech; cultural practices that encourage debate and giving each their say; and so on. Any author who, in good faith, inquires “why liberalism failed”, would spend the bulk of a work by that title weighing these and related practices fairly, cautiously. An easy way to spot bad faith is finding little or no such analysis.
The same logic holds for other social domains. Conversations about “democracy” tend to be more productive at the level of participatory practices. Does our electoral system actually allow for the kinds of participation we think necessary to express our status as free and equal persons? Do they tend more toward subjecting us to rule or toward empowering us as equal rulers? Similarly, do commercial practices tend to foster freedom and overall flourishing? Those promoting easy access to solo entrepreneurial opportunities almost always do; those that allow Amazon’s bosses to create conditions under which employees feel the need to pee in bottles to meet quotas do not. It’s telling that market liberals are much more comfortable talking about the former than the latter, while the inverse holds true among many socialists. Practice-centric theory cuts against such affiliative epistemic closure by directing us away from concerns of ideological identity toward actual experience of harms and benefits.
Practices, then, can help us see social phenomena more clearly. Clearer seeing does not make progress inevitable, but it surely lightens the work.
So far, I’ve been talking about domains of practices: protective, participatory, commercial, etc. We could continue building out the list as we consider other aspects of our lives: contemplative practices, cultural practices, and so on. I want to suggest that regardless of their domain, we can also consider the extent to which practices are integrative or disintegrative.
By “integration” I mean the act of bringing into congruence our beliefs, feelings, and actions. We seek congruence in our inner and outer lives. The Apostle Paul offers in Romans a perfect picture of incongruence: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Here, each element—understanding, action, and affect (e.g. hatred)—is in disorder. We know this experience all too well. That’s why integration forms the primary concern of nearly all of the world’s religions and contemplative traditions. Their approach varies widely: Christianity prioritizes orthodoxy where Buddhism emphasizes orthopraxy. But for each, integration is seen as a necessary condition for living well.
Integrative practices are social phenomena in three ways. First, and most obviously, nearly every belief/feeling/action implicates those around us. We evaluate beliefs/feelings/actions based on their effects on us and others. This is the realm of ethics. Next, these domains are always already conditioned by the beliefs/feelings/actions of others. They are inherently social. This makes them the proper subject of social science. And third, because as individuals and as collectives we are constantly refining and refashioning our beliefs/feelings/actions, we concern ourselves with the congruence of social norms and institutions as well. Here, the systems are mutually implicated: more or less social congruence creates more or less opportunity for personal integration; congruent social institutions depend in large part on the integrated beliefs/feelings/actions of individuals. Abolishing slavery required not only shifting norms and legal institutions; it required changes of heart toward the enslaved themselves. All social change—for good or ill—exists in the interactions between personal and public congruence.
Two: Integration and Disintegration
These questions take on new urgency once we see that our current crises can only be described in terms of systemic disintegration. Witness the erosion of protective and participatory practices across liberal democracies. Americans, for example, are on the whole less free today to speak, or worship, or vote, or make reproductive choices than they were a generation ago. Similar losses have been felt elsewhere to varying degrees. The despots who now dominate public discourse have learned that liberal rights can be set against democracy, and vice versa.
Institutions do not collapse in isolation. Their disintegration brings personal costs. Escalating mistrust and outrage, compounded by the loss of freedoms we once took for granted, have cost us hope. We’ve lost the sense, born of the Enlightenment, that a better society can be built. A supermajority of Americans now expect their children's lives to be worse than their own. Those children will inherit a world more divided—between persons, between nations, between humanity and nature—than we once thought possible. Ours is a time of public decay.
Yet much of that decay is itself the result of individual desperation. No demagogue was ever elected by a contented people. Their power both taps and generates fear, anxiety, and anger. Many such feelings are unfounded, of course, but we cannot ignore our complicity in creating the conditions by which they thrive. We’ve allowed our hinterlands to sink into the economic distress that breeds fear and contempt. We abandoned the political will to avert a climate crisis. Our schools, little more than warehouses for a workforce in waiting, have failed entirely to provide even rudimentary lessons in understanding our minds, our emotions, and the basic practices of a happy life. It's little wonder, then, that the institutions of liberal democracy are proving incapable of preserving themselves. On their own, they never could. Their survival depends on another set of practices that cannot be reduced to legal protections, social norms, or the casting of ballots.
The problems run deeper still.
Modernity has seen incredible progress in developing new technologies—social, physical, digital technologies—that create unprecedented prosperity and have mitigated untold amounts of human misery. We’re not that far removed from a time in Europe when parents watched children starve in lean years. In our own lifetimes, we’ve dramatically cut global extreme poverty (though not nearly enough).
But are we happier? Are we better or more contented people? I suspect not. Reducing misery across lifetimes seems to do little for subjective well-being within lifetimes. We have short cultural memories. We’re also far more affected by what actually happens to us than what might have happened. What’s more, those same technological innovations carry new pathologies. Better markets not only increase access to goods and services; they also increase perceived needs and insufficiencies. Instagram simultaneously connects us while somehow making us feel worse about everyone, above all ourselves. We cannot respond to these facts by saying, as Deirdre McCloskey has said, “The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying.” The most pressing question is how and why refinements in some practices—better protective and participatory modes, more robust commercial practices—have done so little to make us feel better.
Some—especially conservatives—will read the above as an indictment of modernity. Our present disintegrations are to be expected from what MacIntyre called our “new dark ages”. I see things differently. The answer is not to roll back our progress across so many social practices. Rather, it is to seek equivalent progress in the integrative practices that still, all these centuries on, remain so unexplored.
It’s for this reason I believe that, as scholars and as citizens, we must be radical liberals, radical democrats, and radical integrationists all at once.
Three: What's Next
Think of integrative liberal democracy as a tripod, a set of mutually supporting structures that interact in ways we’ve barely begun to model.
Liberal democracy has long been criticized by communitarians for its inability to provide meaning. Against these critiques, some have argued that liberalism should itself offer a way of life. Both views rest on a category error. Liberalism (and democracy) can make space for meaning-generative practices. Public participation even constitutes some forms of meaning, such as my status as citizen. But liberal democratic politics cannot, of itself, sustain inner wholeness and systemic integration. Here other practices are needed, from contemplative practice that trains both our motivation and understanding of right action to cultural practices that create new spaces for us to share diverse experiences.
Once we see this, the need for new political, analytical, and personal perspectives becomes clear.
Politically, it’s clear that our present crises will not be solved along whatever margins are immediately addressable: economic growth, political reform, better voting procedures, and so on. Each is necessary; all are insufficient. (Nor, of course, is the answer revolution, which would only form deeper fissures.) Yet we are not powerless. We can remedy the sociological and economic grounds on which unrest rests. We can find new means to heal our epistemic environments. We can even challenge the premise that republics are grounded on conflict rather than coordination. The Madisonian ideal of pitting ambition against ambition only pits us against ourselves. It promises popular rule; we get rule by popularity instead.
We’re likely to find that alternative institutional models are nurturing the kinds of participatory and protective practices needed for stability and progress. For example, we’ve barely begun to plumb the full resources of citizen experience in deliberative settings, experience that extends not only to the minutiae of policy but also to the experience of harm and benefit. We should distribute democratic authority away from unrepresentative bodies that sit between one set of experts (the citizens) and another (civil servants). Sortition offers great hope here. None of these moves offers a cure, but together they can stanch decay and point us toward new sources and phenomenologies of politics.
Analytically, we need a new means of social theorizing that treats integration as a concern equal to traditional questions of liberal democracy. That is, we must look far deeper into the mutually implicated natures of our practices. Social scientists continue to ignore integrative practice. To measure inattention in my own field, I asked three frontier AI models to review the 2025 APSA program for any related ideas and activities (very generously defined), everything from meditation and church attendance to block parties and Rotary meetings. The percentage of related papers at APSA: about 2%.
We neglect integrative practices at our peril. Even setting aside the ancients, a long tradition of canonical political thought, exemplified best in 18th- and 19th-century thinkers like Smith and Grouchy and Tocqueville, argues that the health of the polity depends on the virtue of the citizenry. Virtue—perhaps the single best all-encompassing term for integrative practices in English—was seen as the foundation of political life.
Today, the thinkers most ready to discuss character or civic virtue are almost always conservatives, and many (increasingly most?) of these are skeptics of both liberalism and democracy. The most committed liberal democrats, meanwhile, tend to focus almost exclusively on procedures and principles. Yet it’s easy to name a long list of social questions that could be illuminated with serious study to the politics of integrative practices. Which contemplative practices work best to prevent racism? What legal responsibilities must media companies bear for their social consequences? How does the physical distance of rural life shape personal ethics and political outlook? What moral and cultural orientations are responsible for the slide in East Germany toward extremism? What can reverse this? How revealing that in the year 2026 we have no rigorous cross-national data on how cultural norms and political institutions affect empathy, or vice versa.
Social science was not always so myopic. Despite their many differences, both the first great theorist of liberal politics (Smith) and the first modern champion of democratic sovereignty (Rousseau) tried to ground political freedom and social agency on integrative development. Today, rigid divisions of method, vernacular, and ideology make this exceedingly difficult. Loosening such constraints would allow us to examine the inner ordering and outward reconciliation on which all social systems rest. A new field of Integrative Studies would capture this.
We must give integration at least as much attention as we do to the typical stuff of APSA panels. We need theory and practice that treat “integrative liberal democracy” as a complete whole.
Finally, as individuals, we should each undertake the hard work of identifying and pursuing practices that reduce our rage, our avarice, and our apathy. This is as much an ethical obligation as a political one. Here, the millennia-long traditions of contemplative science—ignored until recently by natural and social sciences in the West—offer great promise. Their greatest discoveries for day-to-day happiness and well-being can be adopted without metaphysical baggage. One needs no vows, for example, to practice the Four Immeasurables.
We can also challenge the assumption that a free society demands so little of us. Our present political model extends “doing one’s duty” to showing up on election day and little more, ignoring the work on ourselves and our communities that freedom requires. Full consideration of related problems will lead to a wholesale rethinking of our education systems, our built environments, and indeed the present relegation of inner development to religion or therapy.
Any hope for countering our present disintegrations lies in theorizing and building an integrative liberal democracy.
In more ways than one, the work begins with us.
