There are other books about democracy and participation in politics. I want to take a moment to explain why I wrote this book.

There is no personal motivation quite like injustice. The feeling of being wronged, treated unfairly or seeing others treated in such a way often stirs in us anger and an admirable determination to stand up to defend ourselves and others. As individuals faced with small-scale injustices, many of us are pretty good at fighting our corner. We march up to counters to give our two cents. We stay ‘on hold’ over the phone with excruciating labyrinths of interactive voice response (‘dial 1 then 3 if you’d like to, later press 2’) to defend our rights. We spend years taking legal action against neighbours over ownership of some hedgerow (so I’ve heard anyway). Even though the efficacy of those actions may be guaranteed by a collectively enforced constitutional order, and threat of competition in relatively free markets, both market and court remedies for injustices work on a logic of relatively independent decisions that can add up to wider change. Yet many of us seem to feel that on the greatest issues we face together as both local and global societies, things are hopelessly unjust. Collective injustices like the unequal distribution of morbidity, violence, insecurity and systematic discrimination seem so ingrained and wicked that when we are faced with overcoming them, the familiar individual motivation to fight wrong is sucked away into a collective ennui and inertia. While many people recognize suffering, everyone has a slightly different take on its remedies, or is just worn out by the whole thing. Wider change requires more strategic decisionmaking and more consciously collective kinds of social action. We might admit that we do need politics, but individuals who want to effect political change often don't know where to start.

I have been convinced that when we feel lost in the complexities of how best to do politics, the ideal of democracy gives us something to come back to. Democracy promises so much precisely because it has provided a coherent set of ideas for dealing with collective injustices as they arise. We all necessarily have different experiences; we see the world differently and we will disagree.