Mark Kingwell 
Unruly Voices 
Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination

“Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher … His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world.”—Naomi Klein, author of
No Logo


Meet the “fast zombie’ citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style ‘likes’ replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here.


Since the publication of
A Civil Tongue (1995), philosopher Mark Kingwell has been urging us to consider how monstrous, self-serving public behaviour can make it harder to imagine and achieve the society we want. Now, with
Unruly Voices, Kingwell returns to the subjects of democracy, civility, and political action, in an attempt to revitalize an intellectual culture too-often deadened by its assumptions of personal advantage and economic value. These 17 new essays, where zombies share pages with cultural theorists, poets, and presidents, together argue for a return to the imagination—and from their own unruly voices rises a sympathetic democracy to counter the strangeness of the postmodern political landscape.


Mark Kingwell is the author of sixteen books and a contributing editor for
Harper’s Magazine.

Table of Content

Introduction: Empathy and the End of
The End of Democracy


1. The Shout Doctrine

2. ‘Fuck You’ and Other Salutations: Incivility as Collective Action Problem

3. Masters of Chancery: The Gift of Public Space

4. All Show: Justice and the City

5. The American Gigantic

6. The Tomist: Francis Fukuyama’s Infinite Regression

7. Ways of Not Seeing: on Deyan Sudjic’s
The Language of Things

8. The Philosopher President Sets Forth: A Monologue

9. Intellectuals and Democracy

10. What Are Intellectuals For? A Modest Proposal in Dialogue Form

11. The Work Idea: Wage Slavery, Bullshit, and the Good Infinite

12. Throwing Dice: Luck of the Draw and the Democratic Ideal

13. As It Were: On the Metaphysics Ethics of Fiction [n.b.: the word ‘Metaphysics’ appears with a strikethrough]

14. Language Speaks Us: Sophie’s Tree and the Paradox of Self

15. The Trick of It: Poetry and the Plane of Immanence

16. Self-Slaughter, Poetry, and the Interfaith Blurb Universe


Postscript: The (In)dividual, Beyond the Uncanny Valley

About the author

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a contributing editor for
Harper’s Magazine, and has written for publications ranging from
Adbusters and the
New York Times to the
Journal of Philosophy and
Auto Racing Digest. Among his twelve books of political and cultural theory are the Canadian best-sellers
Better Living, The World We Want, and
Concrete Reveries. In order to secure financing for their continued indulgence he has also written about his various hobbies, including fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art.