Twenty-first century democracy

Topics in this collection of essays range from a utopian-style foray into possible structures for democratic governance at the global level to a Hobbesian analysis of the ongoing challenges that democratic theory faces; from an assertion of the importance of social and economic equality to a recognition of the limits of solidarity in the real world of pluralistic and divided societies in which we live; from identification with the cosmopolitan and the international to a defence of the national and the local; from a predilection for direct democracy and the lost community of republican theory, past and present, to a recognition of the fairly circumscribed ways in which these can ultimately be expressed in our day.