Individual Choices and Global Politics
Amit Prakash
THE POLITICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: MAKING CHOICES, CHANGING LIVES by Paul Ginsborg Penguin Books, 2007, 214 pp., 295
April 2007, volume 31, No 4

The volume under review is an analysis of everyday local politics with a view to inventing new forms of democracy to foster participative citizenship. Taking off from the experience of a local civic protest movement in Florence in 2002 – what the author calls Florentine Laboratory for Democracy, the volume seeks to analyse fundamental issues about individual choices and global politics. The volume argues that there is a “need to ‘reappropriate’ … the sorts of life we live and the contexts in which we live them …” by offering “strong critique of the prevailing models of modernity in developed countries” (p. 7), which is being exported to the rest of the world. All democratic countries grapple with similar issues, located as they are in the “concentric rings of connection” between “material culture of everyday life, larger communities and worldwide patterns of consumption and production”. Given the fact that these connections are driven by concerns of economic profits and national power rather than “impulses of equity and solidarity” (p. 5), differential benefits flow to various sections of the populations located in the global North and the global South.

The author asserts that the “trend of contemporary history seems … to point towards a steady … assertion of global individualism” (p. 51). While the same individualism can be seen in autonomy, rights and freedoms and opportunities, it can also be seen to create a sense of alienation from society and communities. The choices that the positive interpretation of this

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