The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives

This meditation on participatory democracy examines the intimate contexts in which political participation is influenced, constrained and nullified. Historian Ginsborg (Berlusconi, etc.) considers how advertising cocoons individuals in an ""imaginative hedonism"" of private consumerist fantasies; how families become immured in a blinkered ""work-and-spend"" mode that obscures social obligations; how women, exhausted by the double shift, lack time for politics; and how television puts opinion formation under the control of media monopolists. Ginsborg's is a lucid, nuanced critique of contemporary political culture, informed by social commentators from Aristotle to bowling-alone theorist Robert Putnam. Less cogent is his call for the supposedly ossified institutions of representative democracy to rejuvenate themselves with injections of direct democracy. Like many in the participatory democracy movement, Ginsborg is suspicious of media-driven mass politics. Instead, he offers a strategy of participatory micro-initiatives that he feels will spur global change, including a program of ""molecular transformation""-green consumerism, car-sharing -by which individuals and families might resist ""an invasive material culture."" His program is hardly a compelling alternative, or supplement, to electoral politics aimed at winning control of the government. Ginsborg presents an incisive diagnosis of the ills of the body politic, but his proposed treatment is less than persuasive.