The School of Public Life

Drawing on two decades of interventions in politics and culture, Fred Dewey's The School of Public Life records the author's efforts to revive and rethink public space from Los Angeles to Berlin and beyond. Drawing on manifestoes, lectures, letters and experimental texts, the book chronicles one person's efforts to focus on and secure what is attacked and simulated from every direction: the power of the people. From his work in neighborhood councils and directing Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, Dewey reexamines community life, art, history and self-government against the abyss of economics, parties and constructed powerlessness. The book explores the works of thinker Hannah Arendt, the poet Charles Olson, dancer and poet Simone Forti and lessons to be drawn from the New England town meeting, artist Joseph Beuys' Office for Direct Democracy, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, experiments at Black Mountain College and Beyond Baroque, and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.