What holds a democracy together when elections are contested, institutions are distrusted, and citizens have stopped seeing each other as fellow citizens? In seven Socratic seminars, Dr. Farhang Mossavar-Rahmani works through the foundations of civil society, the mechanics of power, civil disobedience, polarization, and globalization — always with one eye on America and one on Iran, where the consequences of civil society’s failure are not theoretical but lived. The seminar room itself is the argument: that honest deliberation across difference must be taught, modeled, and chosen, because it does not arise on its own.