The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives

A passionate defense of local politics in an age dominated by global media empires.

Concern over the present state of the world—its tensions and disparities--fosters in many people the uneasy combination of two sensations: urgency and powerlessness. We feel that something must be done before it is too late, but we have little idea of what we as individuals, or as families, or as groups of friends, can possibly do to stem the tide.

This book explores the choices we have. It considers the options for civil society, and for the individual within today’s political culture. It offers a strong critique of the prevailing model of modernity in developed countries, a model which is being exported and imposed on the rest of the world.

The solution lies in our own hands. We need to rethink the choices we make on a day-to-day basis: the ways we use our time, the family lives we live, the sorts of goods and services we consume, the quality of democracy we are able to exercise. The individual, the local, and the global are inextricably intertwined, in positive as well as in negative ways. Passivity and indifference at the individual level contribute greatly to collective dismay at the condition of the world.

Paul Ginsborg taught at Cambridge before becoming professor of contemporary European history at the University of Florence. He has become vigorously involved in Italian civic affairs, especially in reaction to Silvio Berlusconi, and his critical biography of Berlusconi reached the top of the Italian non-fiction bestseller charts. He is also the author of A History of Contemporary Italy and Italy and Its Discontents.