“Sectarian stalemate and violence, long characteristic of politics in Northern Ireland, seem today to be the politics of us all. In this highly readable, engaging and erudite book McCartney sets out from Northern Ireland to understand such ‘denominational politics’, the ways we divide ourselves and each other by naming who is and who cannot be ‘one of us’. Intermingling personal experience and philosophical reflection, reading political speeches alongside fables, films and other fictions, he explains how authoritarian and populist forms of politics work and finds a path towards more open-ended ways of thinking and of weaving together a politics of democratic neighborliness beyond violence. This is a lively, hopeful and deeply humane book of interest to anyone involved in projects aimed at giving new life to the ideal of democratic free association and combination”.