Public space and democracy Book

A timely look at the ways new technologies affect public life and power relationships.

Moving from classical Greece to the present, Public Space and Democracy provides both historical accounts and a comparative analytical framework for understanding public space both as a place and as a product of carious media, from speech to the Internet. How, the authors ask, is the political process of representation-so central to democratic politics since the seventeenth century-affected by the explosion of speed in the media? These essays make a powerful case for thinking of modern technological developments not as the end of public space, but as an opportunity for reframing the idea of the public and of the public space as the locus of power.

Contributors: Sylviane Agacinski, Institut des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Benjamin R. Barber, Rutgers U; Marcel Detienne, Johns Hopkins U; Paul Dumouchel, U of Quebec, Montreal; J. Peter Euben, UC Santa Cruz; Marcel Hénaff, U of California, San Diego; Jacqueline Lichtenstein, U of Paris; Anne Norton, U of Pennsylvania; Tracy B. Strong, U of California, San Diego; Sigheki Tominaga, Kyoto U; Dana R. Villa, UC Santa Barbara; and Samuel Weber, UCLA.

A philosopher and anthropologist, Marcel Hénaff is professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Minnesota, 1998) and Sade: Invention of the Libertine Body (Minnesota, 1999). Tracy B. Strong is professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Frederich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (2000), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (2001) as well as other books and articles. He was editor of Political Theory from 1990 to 2000.