Reconstructing Democracy

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada. Patrizia Nanz is president of the European University Institute (EUI). She is a coauthor of No Representation Without Consultation: A Citizen’s Guide to Participatory Democracy. Madeleine Beaubien Taylor is the Chief Executive Officer of Network Impact and coauthor of Connecting to Change the World: Harnessing the Power of Networks for Social Impact. She previously taught with the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University.

This is an urgent manifesto for the reconstruction of democratic belonging in our troubled times. In their theorizing of democracy as a resonant dynamic of local engagements, civic practices, and forms of collective agency, Charles Taylor, Patrizia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor offer robust philosophical and empirical solutions to the deep need for reestablishing a sense of trust in citizen participation and solidarity.