Deepening Democracy

Archon Fung is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Erik Olin Wright (1947-2019) was Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He authored many books, including Classes, Interrogating Inequality, Class Counts, Deepening Democracy (with Archon Fung), and Envisioning Real Utopias. Joel Rogers is the Noam Chomsky Professor of Law, Political Science, Public Affairs, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directs COWS, the national resource and strategy center on high-road development that also operates the Mayors Innovation Project, State Smart Transportation Initiative (with Smart Growth America), and ProGov21. Rogers has written widely on party politics, democratic theory, and cities and urban regions. Along with many scholarly and popular articles, his books include The Hidden Election, On Democracy, Right Turn, Metro Futures, Associations and Democracy, Works Councils, Working Capital, What Workers Want, Cites at Work, and American Society: How It Really Works. Joel is an active citizen as well as academic. He has worked with and advised many politicians and social movement leaders, and has initiated and/or helped lead several progressive NGOs (including the New Party (now the Working Families Party], EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network], WRTP (Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership], Apollo Alliance (now part of the Blue Green Alliance], Emerald Cities Collaborative, State Innovation Exchange, and EPIC-N (Educational Partnership for Innovation in Communities Network). He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 living Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. Cohen's essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper's. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

As we lose sight of alternatives, there is no more important political and theoretical task than to develop real utopias, real in that they are based on existing institutional experiments, utopian in that they challenge ruling ideas of the epoch. In Deepening Democracy, the latest volume in the Real Utopias series, Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright have brought together cases of what they call 'empowered participatory governance,' cases in which popular political participation becomes a vehicle for equity and efficiency. From Chicago public education to panchayat reform in Kerala, from habitat conservation in the United States to participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, we have case studies that enable Fung and Wright to think through the practical problems of real democracy. This is an inspirational political critique but at the same time a program for critical politics.