This interdisciplinary and international collection explores the role of the arts in shaping contemporary religion and politics. The authors ask about the future of viable communities and democratic cultures in a postmodern world, looking for clues in artistic practices and institutions and their impact on how people create history and interpret texts. The collection shows that the arts are central to struggles over the shape of society in the new millennium.

Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America.

In this book, some of our most prominent cultural critics explore the relationships between culture and politics as played out in the world of novels, television, museums, and even fashion. The authors - John Simon, Greil Marcus, Arthur C. Danto, and other well-known commentators from across the political spectrum - examine the arts in their relation to democracy and consider whether and how they serve one another.

In 1932 George Counts, in his speech "Dare the School Build a New Social Order?" explicitly challenged teachers to develop a democratic, socialistic society. In Democratic Social Education: Social Studies for Social Change Drs. Hursh and Ross take seriously the question of what social studies educators can do to help build a democratic society in the face of current antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism and intolerance. The essays in this book respond to Counts' question in theoretical analyses of education and society, historical analyses of efforts since Counts' challenge, and practical analyses of classroom pedagogy and school organization. This volume provides researchers and teacher educators with ideas and descriptions of practice that challenge the taken-for-granted meanings of democracy, citizenship, culture, work, indoctrination, evaluation, standards and curriculum within the purposes of social education.

A collection of essays by distinguished scholars, this book delineates a substantial conception of democracy, the great promise as well as the pitfalls of a democratic mentality and culture. These essays go beyond the institutional and formal descriptions of democracy to its underlying cultural context — expressed both historically and analytically, descriptively and normatively.

This work by the late and great sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan, paints the great panorama of the Middle West, where egalitarianism is the most cherished value, and money is the most important vehicle of life. How art finds a place in this society is shown in the specific struggle between the architects, businessmen, unionists, and educators of Chicago. Into such specifics Duncan reveals the place of supposedly abstract theories developed by John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Thorstein Veblen, and above all, Louis H. Sullivan, whose school of architecture presents both a new form of physical design and a new order of society. The rise, seeming defeat, and final triumph of Sullivan's principles of order in architecture are related to his social and aesthetic theories of form in society. In democratic society, all individuals must be capable of art, just as all individuals share in art as experience. Sullivan's description of the development within the individual of the idea of architecture is treated as an allegory of such development in the spirit of democratic values. His life is offered as a parable of the problem facing American artists as they attempt to root art in democratic culture. In Sullivan's words: "The critical study of architecture becomes not merely the direct study of art, but "in extenso, a "study of the social conditions producing it. The study of a newly shaping type of civilization. By this light, the study of architecture becomes naturally and logically a branch of social science. . . ." Duncan's exceptional volume, written with grace and clarity, registers the achievements of this Chicago School, showing how culture and democracy reached a special moment of consensus with the money-based economy of our time.

Demonstrates how activists and others use art and popular culture to strive for a more democratic future. Doing Democracy examines the potential of the arts and popular culture to extend and deepen the experience of democracy. Its contributors address the use of photography, cartooning, memorials, monuments, poetry, literature, music, theater, festivals, and parades to open political spaces, awaken critical consciousness, engage marginalized groups in political activism, and create new, more democratic societies. This volume demonstrates how ordinary people use the creative and visionary capacity of the arts and popular culture to shape alternative futures. It is unique in its insistence that democratic theorists and activists should acknowledge and employ affective as well as rational faculties in the ongoing struggle for democracy. “Nancy S. Love and Mark Mattern have collected a first-rate set of studies that illuminate the intersection between art and politics in the contemporary era. The text demonstrates how activist art and cultural politics can promote democratic politics and how democracy is enriched and enlivened by activist art projects. This book should interest everyone concerned with the fate of art and democracy in the contemporary era and how they can help nourish each other.” — Douglas Kellner, author of Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere

In Democratic Society and Human Needs Noonan examines the moral grounds for liberalism and democracy, arguing that contemporary democracy was created through needs-based struggles against classical liberal rights, which are essentially exclusionary. For him, a democratic society is one in which human beings collectively control necessary life-resources, using them to promote the essential human value of free capability realization. His critique of globalization and liberal-capitalism vindicates radical social and economic democratization and provides an essential step towards understanding the vast discrepancies between rich and poor within and between democratic countries.

This book examines fundamental questions about funding for the arts: why should governments provide funding for the arts? What do the arts contribute to daily life? Do artists and their publics have a social responsibility? Challenging questionable assumptions about the state, the arts and a democratic society, Lambert Zuidervaart presents a vigorous case for government funding, based on crucial contributions the arts make to civil society. He argues that the arts contribute to democratic communication and a social economy, fostering the critical and creative dialogue that a democratic society needs. Informed by the author's experience leading a non-profit arts organisation as well as his expertise in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this book proposes an entirely new conception of the public role of art with wide-ranging implications for education, politics and cultural policy.

"At a time when the forces of administrative despotism are on the march and Winfreyesque rhetoric passes for moral leadership and intellectual sophistication, Brian Danoff and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., have assembled a compelling collection of timely essays on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, that liberal thinker of the first rank who endeavored to see f̀urther than the parties' without any pretense to post-partisanship, who understood that more democracy is not always the answer to every problem of democracy, and who concerned himself with educating democratic peoples so that they may live together as free citizens rather than exist independently as dependent subjects. This fine collection situates Tocqueville within the history of ideas, ancient and modern, and examines the significance of his observations, predictions, and prescriptions as they pertain to a wide variety of topics with contemporary relevance. The chapters in this volume articulate the proper relationship between political theory, political science, and political practice, emphasizing the necessity for genuine republican statesmanship while honestly wondering about its chances given the trajectory of late modern America."--Travis D. Smith. Concordia University, Montreal.