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The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives
A passionate defense of local politics in an age dominated by global media empires.
Concern over the present state of the world—its tensions and disparities--fosters in many people the uneasy combination of two urgency and powerlessness. We feel that something must be done before it is too late, but we have little idea of what we as individuals, or as families, or as groups of friends, can possibly do to stem the tide.
This book explores the choices we have. It considers the options for civil society, and for the individual within today’s political culture. It offers a strong critique of the prevailing model of modernity in developed countries, a model which is being exported and imposed on the rest of the world.
The solution lies in our own hands. We need to rethink the choices we make on a day-to-day the ways we use our time, the family lives we live, the sorts of goods and services we consume, the quality of democracy we are able to exercise. The individual, the local, and the global are inextricably intertwined, in positive as well as in negative ways. Passivity and indifference at the individual level contribute greatly to collective dismay at the condition of the world.
Concern over the present state of the world—its tensions and disparities--fosters in many people the uneasy combination of two urgency and powerlessness. We feel that something must be done before it is too late, but we have little idea of what we as individuals, or as families, or as groups of friends, can possibly do to stem the tide.
This book explores the choices we have. It considers the options for civil society, and for the individual within today’s political culture. It offers a strong critique of the prevailing model of modernity in developed countries, a model which is being exported and imposed on the rest of the world.
The solution lies in our own hands. We need to rethink the choices we make on a day-to-day the ways we use our time, the family lives we live, the sorts of goods and services we consume, the quality of democracy we are able to exercise. The individual, the local, and the global are inextricably intertwined, in positive as well as in negative ways. Passivity and indifference at the individual level contribute greatly to collective dismay at the condition of the world.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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September 6, 2007
Put the phrase everyday life in the title of a book and there's a pretty good chance I'll read it (de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life being, of course, the gold standard). I found this one while browsing somewhat randomly through the library. Sorry to say that it didn't deliver much.
Ginsborg's central thesis is that our family/individual-oriented culture of "work and spend" (and watch TV) is slowly leading to tyranny (both political and economic). He argues that we must leave this domestic, "familist" space on a vector through civil society to the political, that representative democracy must be held in check with greater direct participation. Fair enough. He, however, does little in the way of offering a vision of what that would actually entail, instead spending the bulk of the book defining and investigating his terms: the family, civil society, politics; it is as if the final hundred pages of the book are missing.
Ultimately, this is a minor work. It is more synthetic than composed of its own original, interesting ideas, its bibliography better than its bulk.
Ginsborg's central thesis is that our family/individual-oriented culture of "work and spend" (and watch TV) is slowly leading to tyranny (both political and economic). He argues that we must leave this domestic, "familist" space on a vector through civil society to the political, that representative democracy must be held in check with greater direct participation. Fair enough. He, however, does little in the way of offering a vision of what that would actually entail, instead spending the bulk of the book defining and investigating his terms: the family, civil society, politics; it is as if the final hundred pages of the book are missing.
Ultimately, this is a minor work. It is more synthetic than composed of its own original, interesting ideas, its bibliography better than its bulk.
Displaying 1 of 1 review