Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of citizens deeply involved in public life. Today Americans are lamenting the erosion of his ideal. What happened in the intervening centuries? Daniel Kemmis argues that our loss of capacity for public life (which impedes our ability to resolve crucial issues) parallels our loss of a sense of place. A renewed sense of inhabitation, he maintains -of community rooted in place and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way-can shape politics into a more cooperative and more humanly satisfying enterprise, producing better people, better communities,...