A Politics of the Ordinary. By Thomas L. Dumm. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 240p. $55.00 cloth, $18.50 paper.

Extract

Exploring the ordinary is a reasonable and fun way to get through the day. Thomas Dumm takes the exploration along a cart path toward democratic politics, dramatizing the intersections and reciprocal influences of everyday life and political events and the forces of conformity and normalcy that shackle the ordinary. The working technique is juxtaposition, the kind of display that one finds in the store windows of, well, ordinary life in towns and cities. The pantheon of familiar figures and texts includes Emerson, Thoreau, Nixon, Disney, alien depictions, Lowi, Wolin, Cavell, the King's Two Bodies, Baudrillard, and many more, all offered as showcase for the book's main claim that the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic imagination.