The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century

James Cairns is Assistant Professor in the Contemporary Studies Department at Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford. He is the co-author, with Alan Sears, of A Good Book, In Theory: Making Sense Through Inquiry.

Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is the author of Retooling the Mind Factory: Education in a Lean State (2003).

List of Exercising Your Democratic Imagination Textboxes
Acknowledgements

1. Democracy as an Open Question
2. Political, Social, and Economic Democracy
3. Citizenship and Inequality
4. There and Not There: Representation and Participation
5. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Democracy, and the State
6. The Power of Knowing
7. Democracy and Body Politics
8. The Struggle Continues

Glossary
References
Index

Cairns and Sears have written an entertaining and informative popular guide to democracy for the twenty-first century filled with fuel and insight for igniting the democratic imagination.? A must-read for anyone interested in opening their thinking to a wider world of ideas.

Elaine Bernard, Harvard University

In a time of history when established democracy is being challenged everywhere by movements in the streets, The Democratic Imagination provides a readable and provocative analysis of the different ideas about democracy fuelling these conflicts. You'll never think about democracy in the same way again.

Judy Rebick, activist and author of Occupy This!

By re-opening 'the question of democracy' to those who refuse to limit it to a matter of well-functioning markets and periodic elections, Cairns and Sears prime the democratic imagination for a new era of popular struggle.

Nikhil Singh, New York University

A useful supplementary reading that will be genuinely helpful in drawing students new to political science into key debates around what 'real' democracy looks like.

David Kahane, University of Alberta