Real politics: at the center of everyday life

Abstract

At the centre of this work is a concern with the relationship between rhetoric and political action. For the author, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should therefore approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, the author finds in the writings of Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and Elshtain critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual goals. She reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past decades, this book advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable political discourse. The author champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order.