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.

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

"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.