In ENOUGH: A PEDAGOGIC SPECULATION, Robbie McClintock criticizes education and culture and searches out, not the predictable, but the possible. To open the sense of possibility, McClintock postulates a distant future in which people have a collective trust in personal autonomy. They prize, not change, but stability, not the market, but the commons, and not more, but enough -- neither too little nor too much. From this future vantage, McClintock looks back on a basic question: Why have people confused education with the practice of schooling? This question leads to a full analysis of modernity, for the global practice of compulsory schooling uses the same principles as other ubiquitous parts of modern life -- industrial corporations, sovereign nation-states, global commerce, and the bureaucratization of medicine, the military, and social life. What principles are essential to contemporary life? In response, McClintock addresses important topics -- how we think about experience; how we understand the acting self; how we represent life in time and space; how we judge value in material, political, and cultural life; what we choose as our controlling purposes; and how we shape and situate our educational effort. With lucid examples from everyday experience, McClintock clearly contrasts the principles of life in the modern era with ones that may characterize a postmodern time. ENOUGH offers neither policies nor predictions. It asks all, as persons reflecting on how they want to conduct their lives, to consider possibilities. It encourages aspiration based, not on probability, but on hope -- on desire for what a person judges to have significant human worth. The autonomous pursuit of possibility enables each person to add, in a vital, historical sense, to the drama of human achievement, to the self-creation of life itself. Each person, each seeking unique possibilities, interacts to conduct a personal life, lived through a vastly complicated network of reciprocal interactions, stretching from the intimate to the all-inclusive. Education -- each of us self-organizing our emergent capacities for conducting life in all its complexity -- unfolds as each of us works to control what takes place in life, as best each can.

This is a robust and relevant collection from a truly distinguished group of political theorists actively rethinking the promise and perils of democracy. The book is coherent in its focus on a common theme and aim: to advance and refine the political project of promoting democratic theory and practice. While the contributors are admirers of the promotion of various models of democracy they also express distinct approaches and concerns. Each builds on and expands the central theme of democracy and ultimately contends with potential limits of current configurations of democratic life. While to some extent they share common concerns they express considerable dissent and fruitful opposition that deepens and advances the debate. Contributors explore democracy from different perspectives: law and constitutionalism, globalization and development, public life and the arts, pluralism, democracy and education, and democratic listening and democratic participation. The contributions point towards new ways of living and thinking politically, new directions for contending with some of the more significant and seemingly intractable political problems, challenging conventional presuppositions about democracy by expanding the boundaries of what kinds of democracy may be possible. The book critiques liberal notions of democracy that forefront rational autonomy and a citizenship characterized by narrow self-interest, and critique naive claims that any infringement on the rights of the autonomous individual must invariably lead to authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Instead contributors suggest that the abandonment of the res publica in pursuit of private interests may well lead to arid politics or authoritarianism. Citizens are called upon to be more than just voters but rather define themselves by participation in a community beyond their self-interest-in fact arguing, like Aristotle, Rousseau, Jefferson and Arendt, that we are only human when we participate in something beyond ourselves, that we forge and preserve our political community by our commitment to and participation in robust debate and meaningful political action. Contributors are not only revolutionary scholars that challenge problematic streams of democratic theory and traditions, but are deeply involved in shaping the character and constitution of the American body politic and promoting debates about community and citizenship and justice around the world.

In ENOUGH: A PEDAGOGIC SPECULATION, Robbie McClintock criticizes education and culture and searches out, not the predictable, but the possible. To open the sense of possibility, McClintock postulates a distant future in which people have a collective trust in personal autonomyl. They prize, not change, but stability, not the market, but the commons, and not more, but enough -- neither too little nor too much. From this future vantage, McClintock looks back on a basic question: Why have people confused education with the practice of schooling? This question leads to a full analysis of modernity, for the global practice of compulsory schooling uses the same principles as other ubiquitous parts of modern life -- industrial corporations, sovereign nation-states, global commerce, and the bureaucratization of medicine, the military, and social life. What principles are essential to contemporary life? In response, McClintock addresses important topics -- how we think about experience; how we understand the acting self; how we represent life in time and space; how we judge value in material, political, and cultural life; what we choose as our controlling purposes; and how we shape and situate our educational effort. With lucid examples from everyday experience, McClintock clearly contrasts the principles of life in the modern era with ones that may characterize a postmodern time. ENOUGH offers neither policies nor predictions. It asks all, as persons reflecting on how they want to conduct their lives, to consider possibilities. It encourages aspiration based, not on probability, but on hope -- on desire for what a person judges to have significant human worth. The autonomous pursuit of possibility enables each person to add, in a vital, historical sense, to the drama of human achievement, to the self-creation of life itself. Each person, each seeking unique possibilities, interacts to conduct a personal life, lived through a vastly complicated network of reciprocal interactions, stretching from the intimate to the all-inclusive. Education -- each of us self-organizing our emergent capacities for conducting life in all its complexity -- unfolds as each of us works to control what takes place in life, as best each can.