Return to the Long Revolution: The Case for Participatory Democracy (Paperback)

This book is about the challenge of our time to re-imagine a democracy that empowers everyday citizens to participate in remaking the communities in which they live and work. Raymond Williams' `long revolution', the struggle over 200 years to establish a democracy which accords citizens' rights and social justice, the opportunity for all `to create meaning and value', has halted. The neo-liberal state has left public services in ruins and is dismantling the framework of democracy itself. This restructuring of the polity has to be understood against the collective action predicaments of our time. Yet the possibility of confronting them has been systematically undermined by diminishing the public sphere of democratic collective purpose and cooperation. Responding effectively to this conjuncture of change depends not upon distant vanguard leaders but on engaging everyday citizens to become conscious of their fractured worlds, through re-making their communities. Ranson argues that the practices of participatory democracy can thus transform the nature of citizenship from passive subjects to active citizens.