Writing is a solitary enterprise—but it takes a village to make a book.
I thank my longtime literary agent and friend Rafe Sagalyn for persuading me that this was a book worth writing; and also the Renaissance woman, filmmaker, and writer Astra Taylor, for urging me to stop making excuses and just do it.
I am grateful to my New School colleague and friend Elzbieta Matynia for inviting me to teach a course on people power and modern democratic revolts in Wrocław, Poland, in the summer of 2014, and to the students in this course who were veterans of Maidan in Ukraine and the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2011—I learned a lot that summer, most of it disquieting.
The following summer, I had the opportunity to teach the same course in the politics department at the Technische Universität Dresden, thanks to an invitation from Professor Hans Vorländer. My students in Dresden were mainly left-wing activists trying to counter the growing influence of the city’s far-right nationalist group Pegida; conflict was in the air, and some of it involved the very meaning of modern democracy.
Drafts of the present book were read in whole or in part by Stan Draenos, Jay Eisenberg, Greil Marcus, Ruth Miller, Bruce Miroff, Kresimir Petkovic, Helena Rosenblatt, Rafe Sagalyn, Astra Taylor, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici. I was also able to read parts of the book at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, where I am grateful for the encouragement I got from my colleagues and friends Robert and Peg Boyers, Henri Cole, William Kennedy, and Rick Moody.
Once again, I feel privileged to be able to publish a book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux—and to work, once again, with one of my favorite editors ever, the incomparable Alex Star. We first collaborated when Alex was editing the journal Lingua Franca, and he remains a paragon of intelligence, wide reading, and literary acumen.
The book was finished during a sabbatical from the New School for Social Research—what an honor to be able to teach at an institution that, historically, has stood tall for liberal and democratic ideals.
And through it all I had by my side my dear friends Michael Schober and Don Harrison; Tim Marshall and Janet Roitman; Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Maurizio Pacifici; Chivas Sandage and Vivian Felten; Gary Knoble and Robert Black; and, lucky me, my wife, Ruth Miller, a small-d democrat of the purest sort, and the kind of interlocutor who makes life worth living—even when the political horizon seems almost hopelessly dark.
Manhattan, February 2, 2018