In 1897, the philosopher William James honored Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment—one of the first African American regiments to fight in the Civil War—by urging Americans to recommit to the ethos those soldiers embodied: “civic courage.”

James wasn’t glorifying war. He was pointing to the peaceable, constructive politics Shaw and his men fought to preserve: a politics in which “the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties.” Such nations, James said, “have no need of wars to save them.”

The heroism of Shaw, a white man, and his Black comrades lay not just in their martial valor but in their willingness to work together, at great risk, to test whether the ancient American ideal of unity amid diversity could survive their riven nation. That ideal embodied a distinctive tradition in American democracy: not just majority rule or the protection of rights, but the ongoing, often arduous effort of diverse citizens to build what Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and many other founders often described as a “commonwealth”: a polity authorized and governed by the people, in the interest of the common good. 

Today, we are again in urgent need of that tradition. But to renew it, we first need to recover it, and to tell a more complete story of what American democracy has always meant.

The standard story of American origins centers on rights: the rights of Englishmen claimed against the Crown, the natural rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and the constitutional rights codified in the late 1780s. 

That story is important, but it is incomplete. Alongside the language of fixed rights ran a robust tradition of creative common work.

The New England town meeting is the earliest example. From the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts........

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