Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781926845845)

"Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher ... His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world."--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

Meet the "fast zombie citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style 'likes' replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here.

Since the publication of A Civil Tongue (1995), philosopher Mark Kingwell has been urging us to consider how monstrous, self-serving public behaviour can make it harder to imagine and achieve the society we want. Now, with Unruly Voices, Kingwell returns to the subjects of democracy, civility, and political action, in an attempt to revitalize an intellectual culture too-often deadened by its assumptions of personal advantage and economic value. These 17 new essays, where zombies share pages with cultural theorists, poets, and presidents, together argue for a return to the imagination--and from their own unruly voices rises a sympathetic democracy to counter the strangeness of the postmodern political landscape.

Mark Kingwell is the author of sixteen books and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.


Author: Mark Kingwell
ISBN-10: 1926845846
ISBN-13: 9781926845845
Publisher: Biblioasis
Language: English
Published: 10/16/2012
Pages: 300
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/24/2012