Attention is given to American culture. Not the culture of WalMart and the cineplex but culture as it is lived closer to the ground like local culture and neighbourhood culture. The focus is on the choices that individuals make about how to shape the fabric of their lives, and about the mechanisms that make those choices available. The perpetual and symbiotic relationships linking the cultural with the political and economic spheres are a recurrent theme.

A new Council of Europe reference framework of competences for democratic culture! Contemporary societies within Europe face many challenges, including declining levels of voter turnout in elections, increased distrust of politicians, high levels of hate crime, intolerance and prejudice towards minority ethnic and religious groups, and increasing levels of support for violent extremism. These challenges threaten the legitimacy of democratic institutions and peaceful co-existence within Europe. Formal education is a vital tool that can be used to tackle these challenges. Appropriate educational input and practices can boost democratic engagement, reduce intolerance and prejudice, and decrease support for violent extremism. However, to achieve these goals, educationists need a clear understanding of the democratic competences that should be targeted by the curriculum. This book presents a new conceptual model of the competences which citizens require to participate in democratic culture and live peacefully together with others in culturally diverse societies. The model is the product of intensive work over a two-year period, and has been strongly endorsed in an international consultation with leading educational experts. The book describes the competence model in detail, together with the methods used to develop it. The model provides a robust conceptual foundation for the future development of curricula, pedagogies and assessments in democratic citizenship and human rights education. Its application will enable educational systems to be harnessed effectively for the preparation of students for life as engaged and tolerant democratic citizens. The book forms the first component of a new Council of Europe reference framework of competences for democratic culture. It is vital reading for all educational policy makers and practitioners who work in the fields of education for democratic citizenship, human rights education and intercultural education.

The underlying question of this collection of essays focuses on the very core of our democratic culture. It asks how one can actively take part in its political, legal, educational, informational, social, cultural and economic mechanisms. Advanced technologies have given rise to a vast array of tools enabling a culture of participation. New forms of civic engagement have emerged, as well as a new conceptualization of active citizenship. These developments encouraged the authors of this collection to address legal, social, political, philosophical, and media aspects of the emancipatory potential of participatory democracy. They focus on specific case studies stretching across various places and spheres, from the Canadian media legislature, community organizing in low-income neighbourhoods of the USA, the Knesset of Israel, the Roma minority in Poland, and legal texts of Austria, to the online sphere of art and digital democracy. The key advantage of this book thus lies in its multifaceted consideration of seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined and ubiquitous, concepts of democratic societies around the globe.

The authors interviewed over 5,000 citizens in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Great Britain, and the U.S. to learn political attitudes in modem democratic states. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This volume addresses the key question of the intersection of sociology and politics, and asks what a non-Marxist cultural perspective can offer the Left. Written by leading scholars, it develops new conceptions of social critique, new techniques of interpretive analysis, and new concepts for the sociology of democratic practice. It is a volume for the twenty-first-century, where global and local meet, when critical theory must examine its most fundamental presuppositions.

Explores the significance of Dewey’s thought on democracy for the contemporary world.

Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of their engagement, and the ways they choose to act constitute the cultural aspect of civil society. Central to this cultural aspect of civil society is the “culture of democracy,” including normative values, individual interpretations, and interaction norms pertaining to features of a democratic society, such as civility, independence, and solidarity. The culture of democracy varies in different contexts and faces challenges, but it shapes civic actions, alters political and social processes, and thus is the soul of modern civil societies. The Culture of Democracy provides the first systematic survey of the cultural sociology of civil society and offers a committed global perspective. It shows that, as everyone is eager to have their voice heard, cultural sociology can serve as an “art of listening,” a thoroughly empirical approach that takes ideas, meanings, and opinions seriously, for people to contemplate significant theoretical and public issues.

Follows the work of a range of public intellectuals like Aronowitz, Giroux, hooks, Mouffe, and West, and argues for a 'radical democracy' capable of subverting traditional divisions of 'left' and'right.'

This innovative work of historical sociology locates the origins of modern democratic discourse in the emergent culture of printing in early modern England. For David Zaret, the key to the rise of a democratic public sphere was the impact of this culture of printing on the secrecy and privilege that shrouded political decisions in seventeenth-century England. Zaret explores the unanticipated liberating effects of printing and printed communication in transforming the world of political secrecy into a culture of open discourse and eventually a politics of public opinion. Contrary to those who locate the origins of the public sphere in the philosophical tracts of the French Enlightenment, Zaret claims that it originated as a practical accomplishment, propelled by economic and technical aspects of printing--in particular heightened commercialism and increased capacity to produce texts. Zaret writes that this accomplishment gained impetus when competing elites--Royalists and Parliamentarians, Presbyterians and Independents--used printed material to reach the masses, whose leaders in turn invoked the authority of public opinion to lobby those elites. Zaret further shows how the earlier traditions of communication in England, from ballads and broadsides to inn and alehouse conversation, merged with the new culture of print to upset prevailing norms of secrecy and privilege. He points as well to the paradox for today's critics, who attribute the impoverishment of the public sphere to the very technological and economic forces that brought about the means of democratic discourse in the first place.