Overview
The social skills of citizenship is a concept developed in Agre's 'The Practical Republic' (2004), arguing that political philosophy suffers from a fundamental gap: it lacks a theory of the practical skills that make democratic life possible. Agre critiqued three prominent political theories — social capital, deliberative democracy, and civic republicanism — for being 'analytically flawed' because they all abstract away from the concrete, learnable skills that political participation actually requires.
Drawing on pragmatist philosophy (especially John Dewey) and institutional economics (especially John Commons), Agre argued that democratic citizenship is not primarily about holding correct beliefs or participating in formal deliberation, but about possessing practical skills: knowing how institutions work, how to build coalitions, how to frame issues, how to identify and cultivate allies, how to navigate bureaucracies. These skills are social in nature — they are learned through participation in institutional life, not through individual study.
Key Elements
Significance
This concept represents the mature synthesis of Agre's thinking about democracy and technology. It connects his early AI work on practical skill and situated action to his later political theory, arguing that just as AI had wrongly modeled intelligence as abstract planning, political theory wrongly models citizenship as abstract deliberation. In both cases, Agre argued for attending to the concrete, embodied, situated practices that actually constitute competent action.