Defiant Publics

Daniel Drache is Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto.

“Drache is well read and committed to his subject, and the book is littered with excellent quotations from leading contemporary thinkers and activists.”Times Higher Education “On reading this book, the activist will understand how to arouse wider political participation, and the skeptic will be concerned that established power uses the same technology to manipulate a passive public. For a broad and non-specialized audience, the book opens a discussion about the nature of politics in the twenty-first century.”Robert Cox, York University“Drache makes a courageous and controversial stand against much that is taken for granted by elites in our global order. He is optimistic that fluid but ‘Defiant Publics’ are moving towards an unknown but different world, seeking citizenship in a diverse and renewed global public domain. Yet his analysis leaves us aware we should also keep an eye on the possible unintended consequences of what might now be occurring.”Geoffrey Underhill, Universiteit van Amsterdam“Widespread military adventurism, resurgent violent populisms, faux democracies drenched in cynicism, and looming ecological crises on an unimaginable scale: the world we inhabit seems to be one absent of hope or possibility. Daniel Drache’s fascinating Defiant Publics jolts us out of our too-easy dystopian imaginings by showing us the ways in which multiple publics are struggling to create dynamic new futures.”Imre Szeman, McMaster University“Daniel Drache’s new book builds on the best of democratic theory developed in the twentieth-century nation-state, to conceptualize a non-territorial, non-traditional account of global democratic politics for our time. Defiant Publics identifies the new social actors in a de-hierarchized polity and challenges our ways of understanding political deliberation.”Peer Zumbansen, York University

• List of figures viiAcknowledgements viiiIntroduction: Goals and Values that are Inescapably Public 11 The Crowded Public Sphere and its Discontents 242 Market Fundamentalism and the Worried Public 543 Digital Publics and the Culture of Dissent 894 Nixers, Fixers, and the Axes of Conformity 1155 Infinite Varieties of the Modern Public: Novelty, Surprise, and Uncertainty 144Appendix: Critical Human Rights Conventions of the Global Public Domain 172A Note on Sources 179Select Bibliography 184Index 187