Democracy and Disconsent explores the history of popular unrest in the United States and its contribution to democratic customs and values. Particular attention is paid to how this history was embedded and informed four important moments in 21st-century mass violence: rioting in Ferguson in 2014, Charlottesville in 2017, Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Such acts of social and political 'disconsent' are constitutive features of citizen-based democracy: the eruptive and visible grammar used by people to maintain and change their communities.
Popular unrest and violence in the United States is set within a deeper history of rituals of disconsent first practiced by citizens and non-citizens in ancient Mediterranean societies. Through such actions people put early democratic theory into practice and showed they understood unrest and revolt as morally grounded actions which sometimes supported and sometimes amended established institutional practices and community routines.
"Daniel Monti’s Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection is a fresh, deeply original interpretation of violence in America. It stands on a strongly argued foundation of social learning about the exigencies of living together in a multiethnic, multireligious society." - Donald L. Horowitz, author of The Deadly Ethnic Riot
"This lively and engaging book about civil unrest and "disconsent" in America today is timely. When most of us across the world are pessimistic about the stability of American democracy, Dan Monti manages to discuss the competing forces of liberalism and illiberalism -- in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter and even the 6 January Capitol insurrection -- and yet remain relatively optimistic. Let us hope he is right!" - Professor Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin
American Democracy and Disconsent
Liberalism, Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection
Routledge Press 2024
Engaging Strangers
Civil Rites, Civic Capitalism, and Public Order in Boston
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 2013
Long considered one of America's most civically contentious and unwelcoming cities, Boston became a more peaceful and congenial place to live and work at the end of the 20th century and top of the 21st century.
The dramatic change in the city's culture is captured in a series of essays detailing the important ways in which everyday and exceptional people came to practice a more congenial set of civic virtues in their race, ethnic, and social class relations.
Boston isn't the only American city where these new civic virtues were being practiced. But given its history, its transformation was noteworthy and the lessons it can share with the rest of America are vital to our democracy.
"...it is astonishing that no one (until now) has sought systematically to analyze comity-based civility as an urban...phenomenon..." Monti "has undertaken the task of showing...how comity-based civility has worked since the raucous 'culture wars' of the 1960s and 1970s..." Monti "reminds us that for a hundred and fifty years self-styled experts on city life...have contended that American cities...seemed about to come apart at the seams. And he takes on their arguments in a non-academic, jargon-free...style reminiscent of Daniel J. Boorstin in his classic...book The Genius of American Politics." - Zane Miller, author of Boss Cox's Cincinnati
The American City presents a nuanced and compelling view of urban life as a vital combination of liberal and conservative ways of making a world that makes sense to the people who reside and work in cities and enriches their civic lives.
"The American City explores big questions about how we live now with a tantalizing mix of historical and sociological analysis. Although Monti addresses weighty matters that have inspired deep reflections from major social theorists, he does so in a simple, modest, and personal style that is exceptionally engaging." - Stephen Thernstrom, Harvard University
"This is a very valuable addition to the literature on urbanism: a blend of sociology, political science, and history; a blend of hope and realism; of capitalism and community; of liberal and conservative perspectives. It amounts to a new ethical philosophy of urbanism by one of the few Americans qualified to write one." - Roger Lotchin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Monti's wonderful book illustrates an important theme: if American cities are not Utopia, neither are they the social disaster zones portrayed by their more apocalyptic critics. Extensively researched, The American City is an extended personal reflection on America's urban experience. This appealing and highly readable book will unquestionably stimulate debate and discussion." - Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin
The American City "evokes the consensus histories of the 1950s in its elucidation of a conforming and progressive civic culture." "Tensions are smoothed over by principles we all share, reconciling private interests to the public good." "At a time when the field of urban history is struggling just a bit for identity, here is an effort that in its audacious overview and assertive optimism will remind historians that the American urban experience is a great and enduring story." - John C. Schneider, Tufts University
"Despite the tendency of social theorists, scholars, and journalists to focus attention on instances and arenas of conflict, American cities have held together remarkably well, blending disparate residents into...civic communities that have supported increasing prosperity and political stability." "In essence, The American City is a personal reflection on Tocqueville's problem of how to create democratic forms of social order in an open society." - Carl Abbott, Portland State University
"The depth of research and the fascinating detail flagged up is a reason for reading the book alone." Monti's argument "is based upon an encyclopedic knowledge of urban America that few other writers can rival." The "book is a work of major significance." - Nigel McGurk, Director, Erimax - Land, Planning & Communities Land, Planning & Communities, Hale, England, United Kingdom
Race, Redevelopment, and the New Company Town
State University of New York Press 1990
One of the first books to highlight the value of corporate, political, and grassroots engagement in the redevelopment of cities, Monti shows how the rebuilding of American cities can satisfy both elite and non-elite aspirations for effective city building and civic enrichment.
"Conventional -- or perhaps politically correct -- wisdom these days among those of us who study the American city is that urban redevelopment tends to be a one-sided affair." "Race, Redevelopment, and the New Company Town is intended as a modest corrective to this conventional view. Daniel Monti argues that redevelopment has the potential to satisfy diverse interests." "Critical to positive redevelopment...are the ability and willingness of corporate enterprises to play a role anticipated for them many years ago...as stewards of the common good, enhancing the political life of the city while sponsoring its physical rejuvenation." - Barrett A. Lee, Pennsylvania State University
Monti "has gotten close to the events, institutions and people he has studied...He has also understood them, and applied that understanding not only to some perceptive theorizing, but also to policy analysis for the improvement of the St. Louis community." "Much that he has written can be profitably applied to may other American cities. - Herbert Gans, Columbia University
Monti's "work shows an enormous capacity for empirical detail while he never loses sight of the larger questions. I have been struck by his restless curiosity about every aspect of social life and by the enthusiasm with which he plunges into research. In reporting his findings, he is articulate, even eloquent." - Peter Berger, Boston University
Monti's book "will become a 'must read' volume in urban studies, urban economics, and urban sociology." He "provides the unique service of documenting that urban redevelopment and housing programs have not been simply replays of Pruitt-Igoe." - John Palen, Virginia Commonwealth University
"Dan Monti's study of the Fairview School District was in-depth and a revealing description of the impact of gangs on school-age youth and the school environment...Read and take heed, this is happening in your school district." - Superintendent, Fairview School District
"Wannabe is a very well written, very interesting, and certainly of great importance in understanding how our society is to deal with some of its most intractable problems. I was struck by the fact that gangs serve as a focus of identity for those who join them, not because it is a new idea, but because our schools have been systematically stripped of an affective qualities -- anything the might provide an alternative sense of identity." - Diane Ravitch, The Brookings Institution
"This is a book that generates rich insights into a disturbing societal problem bedevilling our entire nation. People who deal with children but who have little personal knowledge about the neighborhoods and streets where children live their private lives...will gain a new outlook on...how best to approach the challenge of formulating constructive efforts of prevention and rehabilitation...across the United States." - Thomas Shannon, National School Boards Association
"Wannabe is a poignant reminder of just how difficult it will be to develop public policy designed to control the 'youth gangs' which so terrorize both urban and suburban neighborhoods. Dan Monti's contribution is the brutal honesty of his work...God help us! We will need it." - Robert Destro, Catholic University School of Law, Former member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights
"Many putative authorities (wannabes of another sort) on gangs...are naive. Not so Professor Monti. With other fine teachers, he often likes the young people he comes to know, but he never sentimentalizes them...Though he understands that the young sometimes try to appear immutable precisely because they are not, he also knows how to ask questions and to listen with a concentration that may draw a young person toward reflection." - Edwin J. Delattre, Boston University
A Semblance of Justice
St. Louis School Desegregation and Order in Urban America
University of Missouri Press 1985
A Semblance of Justice was the first and to date the only book ever to consider school desegregation as a vital cultural ritual rather than an educational innovation or big and threatening policy change in the administration of urban schooling and urban political life.
"A Semblance of Justice makes a fascinating and likely controversial analogy between school desegregation and the ritualized rebellions of primitive peoples in which relatively powerless groups formally act out their resentment and frustration by challenging the established social structure without actually threatening that structure with destruction and its accompanying chaos. These periodic rituals, far from endangering the social status quo, tend to legitimate it." "A Semblance of Justice provides in painful detail how this process worked in St. Louis." - Derrick A. Bell, author of And We Are Not Saved
"And despite a generation of travail over integration, the poor, inner-city schools remain largely minority. The Norfolk decision...would affirm these realities. "These natural" spending disparities have...been described by Daniel J. Monti...in his book, a Semblance of Justice."
"Still Separate, Still Unequal" The New York Times, Monday, March 10, 1986
"Monti looks at two court-related racial balance cases..." but along the way "becomes in turn historian, politician, critic, and moderator in order to comment on the relationship of desegregation to education, justice, and stability." by extension, Monti finds that "the entire civil rights movement was a ritualistic rebellion of the have nots against the haves, the powerless against the powerful -- a modern day morality play -- acted out in the real world of the nation's neighborhoods and communities." - Marrio D. Fantini, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Publications
Book
Published book: 'Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and Capitol Insurrection'
Research
Research on social unrest, race, ethnic relations, and cities
Presentations
Invited speaker at conferences and universities
Grants
Recipient of grants for research projects on social issues