Public Things

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be?
Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of ¿pursuing in common the objects of common desires,¿ Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things¿infrastructure, monuments, libraries¿that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be ¿gathered up¿ refers to the work of D. W. Wi