Astra Taylor is the author of The People's Platform (winner of the American Book Award) and made two documentary films, Zizek! and Examined Life. Taylor's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, n+1, and The Baffler, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in New York City.
Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy... She
unpacks it, wrestles with it, with the question of who gets
included and how...she excavates the invisible assumptions that
have been bred into our idea of democracy... Taylor's work is alive
to paradoxes, ambiguities, and hard questions that don't offer easy
answers. --Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show We live in an age that
demands that we rethink democracy from the roots--and teach
ourselves to think again as citizens. Smart and engaging, Astra
Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist makes a formidable contribution to
meeting those pressing generational challenges. --Danielle Allen,
author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of
Independence in Defense of Equality A brilliant, deeply learned
discourse on democracy, equality, and how the second might save the
first, by one of the most incisive thinkers on participatory
politics today. --Molly Crabapple, author of Brothers of the Gun
What a lot of trouble democracy has been! Over the years it's been
hijacked by its enemies, its reforms have backfired, it has evaded
challenges, it has refused to heed its prophets. But as Astra
Taylor reminds us in this timely and sagacious book, there is no
substitute. The fate of the world depends on it. --Thomas Frank,
author of Listen, Liberal What is this thing called Democracy?
Google the question and you will exceed one million hits. But for
an honest and illuminating answer, read this book--every single
word. Searching, lucid, visionary, Astra Taylor takes a deep
oceanic dive into the history, meaning, uses, and promise of
democracy--moving from Plato's Greece to Syriza's Greece, from the
Global South to post-Communist East, from slavery to fascism,
liberalism to neoliberalism, Occupy to the Commons. She knows what
most political scientists don't: that democracy is a promise
unfulfilled, and in our strivings to achieve it nothing is
guaranteed. But we can't live without it.
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination Astra Taylor is a rare public intellectual, utterly
committed to asking humanity's most profound questions yet entirely
devoid of pretensions and compulsively readable. Now she plunges
deep into the crisis that underlies so many others: the sorry state
(and the exhilarating promise) of this thing called democracy. At
once richly historical and immediately relevant, this wise, lucid
and unflinchingly honest book deserves to be at the center of
public debate. --Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough "Moths
never reach the moon, but they navigate by it; we humans may never
reach democracy, Astra Taylor tells us, but we navigate by its
ideals. This is a beautiful, revelatory book about ideas and how
they matter in everyday life, by the only writer who could herself
navigate so gracefully among factory workers, contemporary
economics, and ancient Athenian history."
--Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
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