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Books

Civic Solitude by Robert Talisse

John B. Min ponders temporarily stepping away from people for the sake of political understanding.

If you search for images of ‘solitude’, you will see a person gazing serenely into the ocean or at mountains. When you search for pictures of ‘civic’ (you will have to put ‘civic in democracy’, otherwise you’ll get Honda Civics), you will see people’s fists, bull horns, voting booths, or angry protests. These two disparate images are familiar to us – indeed, this is how we often think about both civic life and solitude. But does it make sense to advocate for civic solitude?

As Robert Talisse, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, acknowledges, this question may seem odd, because democracy is supposed to be about action – voting, electioneering, communicating, protesting, resisting, and mobilizing – not so much about solitude. Political self-isolation is especially nonsensical given the political unrest we’re experiencing these days. It is time to act, not philosophize! However, Talisse’s new book Civic Solitude (2025) makes a cogent case that civic solitude is required for responsible democratic citizenship.

This book is the third installation in a trilogy – the other two being Overdoing Democracy and Sustaining Democracy. In the first, Talisse makes the case that we sometimes overdo democracy by saturating it, while in the second book he makes the case that we ought to sustain democracy by maintaining civil interactions between citizens. This present book is a theory of what that interaction is and how to do it.

Philosophically, Civic Solitude is situated in normative democratic theory – ideas about what democracy ought to be – to which Talisse has made significant contributions for the past two decades. There’s a cottage industry of books on the dysfunction of democracy, where they argue under headings such as ‘Democratic Backsliding’, ‘Democratic Retreat’, ‘Democratic Pathology’, ‘Democratic Crisis’, and ‘the Death of Democracy’. Concerns about money in politics, the fascistic and authoritarian tendencies of leaders and institutions, oligarchical influence and power, and intractable polarization dynamics, point to the dysfunctions of democracy. Civic Solitude, meanwhile, offers normative ideals (democracy is a society of equals where citizens both choose and are responsible for their actions), diagnosis for our malaise (which is polarization), prescriptions for managing our malaise (that is, managing polarization), and aspirational ideals (creating spaces to make civic solitude possible). And although the book is philosophical, there are practical elements in it, too.

Make Democracy Great Again

The basic argument of Civic Solitude can be summarized in two parts. The negative argument is that the ills of democracy are inherent to democracy.

Polarization is the main problem considered here. This is the psychological and social tendency to go to an extreme position – causing strife, hatred, and seeing each other as enemies rather than equals. Polarization cannot be eradicated because it is endemic to democracy, Talisse maintains, but it can be managed. The ‘curative fallacy’ occurs “when one prescribes the preventative as curative” (p.13). For example, not eating sugar will prevent diabetes, but not eating sugar is not the cure for diabetes. Similarly, eradicating polarization is a prevention but not a cure for polarization.

The positive argument of the book concerns the necessity of civic solitude. According to this argument, democracy is rule by political equals. As equals, we are not only entitled to have an equal say in laws and policies, we are also equally responsible to one another. This requires us to participate and vote, listen to others, take on their perspectives, and be civil. More than that, citizens should take time off for reflection so that they can become better citizens.

The most interesting and important contribution to the discussion is the final chapter, ‘The Need For Solitude’. What is civic solitude? Civic solitude is taking a break from politics to develop one’s reflective capacity.

First, civic solitude has a time component. Talisse refers to civic solitude not as a permanent retreat from politics, but rather as an occasional retreat from politics as usual. In the Preface he alludes to American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau sitting alone by Walden Pond to ponder what he’s not advocating. It also has a space component. This has to do with the physical space to engage in reflections on politics – such as public libraries, parks, and museums – which then become minor laboratories of democracy. But what’s novel in Talisse’s proposal is conceptual or philosophical distance. He says, make some space between yourself and your own ideas. If you’re a conservative, you need to distance yourself from conservative ideals to entertain and learn from liberal ideas, and vice versa. Additionally, you need to distance your own concepts to take the perspective of those you think are crazy.

Moreover, Talisse argues that atopia (Greek for ‘displacement’) is needed. He illustrates this idea by pointing out that visiting strange times and places has benefits. Talisse makes the point that instead of interpreting writers, philosophers, and musicians to fit our own experience, there is value to visiting their time and place – their experience. For instance, in Talisse’s political philosophy class, students sometimes ask whether Aristotle was a conservative. When discussions go well, students realize that the very conceptual scheme of ‘conservative or liberal’ would not apply to Aristotle, as he lived in a time where the distinction did not apply. But the bigger benefit of the discussion is not to avoid miscategorizing Aristotle, but to displace the students from 2025 Tennessee to fifth century BC Athens.

Between Ideal & Practice

The book is tightly argued, clearly and accessibly written, and Talisse touches on some critical insights about the meaning of political equality, polarization dynamics, the value of the humanities, and conceptual distance. In a short review such as this, I cannot do justice to all the interesting ideas. However, I’d like to highlight some implications of the book that I recommend for further reflection in civic solitude.

Talisse artfully weaves together diagnoses, prescriptions, aspirational ideals, and practical suggestions, and he addresses an important philosophical issue that’s perennially present: the challenge of navigating between the Scylla of the ideal and the Charybdis of the practical. Talisse proposes a democratic theory that is not only aspirational but also realistic for people’of crooked timber’ like you and me. In this way, he avoids the either/or tendencies of contemporary political philosophy by combining both the ideal and the practical.

Given this goal, I would like to ask what, how, and why civic solitude? Talisse rightly argues that citizens need to develop distance in solitude – temporal, spatial, and conceptual – to manage polarization by creating spaces where they can be co-equals. In this context, Talisse aptly develops the concept of displacement, from the contemporary world with its categories and concepts, to somewhere foreign, like Aristotle’s polity or Confucius’s court. But besides atopia, I wonder what else needs to be developed?

One suggestion is moral virtues. Another is wisdom. Those are predictable. How about power? Power at its most fundamental means the capacity to achieve outcomes. People also talk about having power over someone to get them to do things they’d not otherwise do without the threat of force. Or people talk about the power to resist and counteract power imbalances or oppressive powers. All these are useful ways of talking about power. Thus, I would have wished to hear more about the power to manage polarization by creating spaces (in civic solitude) so that people can truly be political equals in a democracy.

How should democratic citizens develop atopia or displacement? Talisse suggests that when we’re in civic solitude we ought to develop the capacity for conceptual distance, which both requires and enables the development of perspective-taking and imagination.

To his credit, Talisse mentions humanities education. As a philosophy professor, I wholeheartedly agree that liberal arts education, which includes the humanities, is valuable not only in developing critical thinking skills but also in developing capabilities for better citizenship. However, it seems that humanities education (or liberal arts, or democratic education), although vital to democracy, is under great duress. So, the same political dynamics that give rise to polarization also undermine the education that affords the opportunity to develop depolarization.

The question of why civic solitude matters remains elusive. Talisse argues that civic solitude is a means to achieve responsible democratic citizenship rather than an end in itself. He does not advocate for a perfectionist theory of politics, which would mean that politics ought to aim at higher moral goods (for example, Aristotle’s perfectionism states that politics is the highest good for human beings). However, this brings us to a critical question: What is the goal of civic solitude and responsible citizenship? Considering the main arguments of the book, I believe the answer is ‘political equality’ – sharing and determining democratic life together, and being responsible for it. Political equality can be instrumentally valuable in attaining some goods, such as freedom. Or political equality can be intrinsically valuable, in and of itself. Thus, civic solitude matters to achieve political equality. Stated this way, Talisse's suggestion is at once radical and ultimately practical.

John B. Min is Philosophy Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, the College of Southern Nevada.

• Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance, Robert B. Talisse, OUP USA, 2025, 208 pages, £22.99 hb.