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This chapter addresses Du Bois's inquiry into his own exemplarity, his status as both an exemplar or “exception” and an example of “the Problem.” It offers an interpretation of Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois's 1940 autobiographical exploration of his life and the life of the “race concept,” as a counterpoint to William Connolly's account of identity and difference. Read together, Du Bois and Connolly demonstrate how identity categories shape democratic life; but Du Bois takes a further step, discerning those places in Connolly's work where race is elided and gesturing toward an alternative model of self-fashioning in a racially divided society.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the controversy sparked by the Virginia General Assembly's introduction of a joint resolution on January 10, 2007, atoning for Virginia's part in the enslavement of Africans and calling for racial reconciliation. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to come to terms with political theorists' reluctance to treat race and racial injustice as fundamental to the study of modern democratic life. Drawing on the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, the book examines how his efforts to craft a usable past from unspeakable loss can inspire efforts to conceive alternative, more democratic futures. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter discusses democracy promotion in America, which is the dominant theme of the Wilsonian tradition. The institutions and character that the spirit of democracy calls forth assure that the good functioning of the other aspects of liberal internationalism is reinforced. Woodrow Wilson's guiding concern from a young age was not simply to understand the historical origins of democratic life as a scholar, but as an activist to promote the well-being of democratic society and institutions at home and to do as best he could for the sake of world order to foster such ideals and practices elsewhere around the globe. In order to pursue his life's calling of explaining democracy to his fellow Americans so that its promise would be strengthened, Wilson turned himself to the complex and difficult task of laying out analytically the foundations of this way of life.

This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.

This chapter examines hope and play in relation to the necessary conditions of democratic life by offering a reading of Jonathan Lear's book Radical Hope and Lars von Trier's film Melancholia. Both Radical Hope and Melancholia explore the loss of holding environments and the world-loss that results. Both also pose the question of how and whether attachment to world and to others is possible in the absence of public things. Melancholia may be read as a parable of capitalism or climate change as well as the human alienation and melancholy they engender. Radical Hope brings these possibilities together as it tries to understand the melancholy and resilience of the Crow people who suffered under white conquest, but managed to retain some of their land to this day.

This chapter examines the history of democratic schooling partly to understand why that history should be problematic and partly to underline that those problems do indeed have a history—that they are in some cases far older and more enduring than modern consciousness might suppose. Since Thomas Jefferson envisioned a public school system as a way of cultivating civic virtue and meritocracy, and Horace Mann proposed common schools as a way to impart civic unity in an age of immigration and factory labor, reformers have imagined the schools as the forge of democratic life. However, the schools do not operate under the best of circumstances. Besides the persistent problems of insufficient funding and profound inequality in the social and economic backgrounds of their students, the schools are asked to serve two democratic masters: the democratic value of meritocracy and individual opportunity, on the one hand, and the democratic value of equality, on the other. We sometimes suppose that because these are “democratic” ideals, they must be compatible. In fact, to advance one is often to compromise the other. This point is illustrated using the example of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.