Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. By Archon Fung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336p. $39.50.

The United States harbors the hope that participation can improve policy. In January 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton discussed with General William Sherman how to resettle tens of thousands of freed people on the abandoned plantations of the Sea Islands, near Savannah. They included 20 African American religious and civic leaders in their deliberations that produced the short-lived 40-acres policy. Stanton suggested that the process of this decision, as well as its content, would “electrify the nation.” David Lilienthal suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a brand new method of government in the manner in which it included the “grass roots” in the process of electrification. The War on Poverty brought with it an emphasis on maximum feasible participation that Daniel Moynihan explained was part third rail and part poorly devised policy.