Dana Villa sets out to explore what he sees as a distinctively modern problem shared by the theorists he discusses: How can “a sense of agency and public power” be “either generated or restored amongst a ‘crowd’ of increasingly dispersed and privatized individuals” (p. 11)? Villa begins Public Freedom on familiar ground: a critique of a liberal conception of freedom as leading to an impoverished public and private realm: “The dyad of rights and interests effectively circumscribes our moral, political, and social world, as well as our conception of what freedom is or can be” so that political liberty appears as “almost entirely instrumental”: The public realm is simply a place to press one's interests (p. 5). But he does not seek recourse in civic republicanism, conceding that “the civic republican tradition has often displayed a deep-seated resistance to pluralism and anything resembling open-ended argument” (pp. 2–3). He navigates between these notions, recognizing the importance of individual rights and institutional protections, but also identifying how political and associational life can give “opportunities for the gradual education and generalization of interests” (p. 20).

If Villa has harsh words for the Right, which views the problem of contemporary politics as one of character (p. 22), then he is equally unsympathetic to the “fantasy of global solidarity and resistance” characteristic of the Left, which fails to grapple with how to “institutionalize freedom in the late modern world” (p. 21). Depicting a Schmittian world in which constitutional freedoms stop where fear begins, he suggests that we must reclaim a “constitutional patriotism” that actualizes our role as citizens (p. 26).

The author then offers a set of chapters that can be read, in part, as vignettes: incursions into different diagnoses of and responses to the dislocation of public freedom in modernity.

In Chapter 2, Villa takes up Tocqueville, attributing the scholarly interest in his notion of “civil society” to a desire to locate a “newly born, newly active political and associational life” in a realm “without the official sponsorship of the state” (p. 28). He reframes our understanding of Tocqueville, arguing that the fundamental distinction articulated by Tocqueville is not between civil and political society, as commonly conceived, but between local and centralized organizations of power. Civil society, thus, is not simply a realm of nonpolitical associations, but is connected to questions of creating a publicly oriented society.

In Chapter 3, Villa brings together Tocqueville and Hegel. Contrary to interpretations that see them as engaged in wholesale critiques of individualism, he makes clear that each offers a more complex emphasis upon both public liberty and individual rights. The problem of modern politics, Villa suggests, may be that “we currently suffer too much, rather than too little, identification and integration” (p. 83). Chapter 4 completes the discussion of Tocqueville, this time allied with Arendt and against Jürgen Habermas, to argue that public life needs to be grounded in something “sturdier than constitutional law and institutional frameworks”: religion, for Tocqueville, and a “shared feeling for the world,” for Arendt (p. 106).

Chapter 5 undertakes a reinterpretation (or rehabilitation) of John Stuart Mill. For Villa, “Mill really did want ordinary people to understand political processes and to have some say in the decisions that shaped their lives” (p. 123). He sees in Mill's educative democracy both a question about our own political maturity and a call for a form of participation that “would be a vigilant and informed attentiveness, one driven by the desire to hold our representatives to account” (p. 140).

Chapter 6 uses the Frankfurt School to explore how the “culture industry” provides a powerful form of mass education by teaching: that the only escape from work is leisure as a “commodified amusement” (p. 152); that society rewards members who conform; that one can become lucky; and that desire is always aroused but never fulfilled. Villa, thus, contextualizes Habermas's project to discover the conditions of rational discourse freed from ideological distortion and “media-manipulated” opinion (p. 176).

In Chapter 7, Villa contrasts the approaches of Theodor Adorno and Arendt not only to address what it means to understand Auschwitz but also to identify modernity's role in its creation. Although a critique of instrumental reason looms in both readings, Villa differentiates between Adorno's contention that we must reconcile ourselves to “the nature we ourselves already are” (p. 253) and Arendt's claim that the human world is a necessarily artificial world in which “solidarity must be mediated by an institutional, worldly reality” (p. 253).

In Chapter 8, Villa takes up Michel Foucault's well-known critique of liberalism for failing to diagnose the ubiquitousness of techniques of power. Foucault's diagnosis extends to a more general, and problematic, skepticism about the possibility of anything like a public realm as the site of public freedom. The chapter focuses on Foucault's middle period, perhaps missing in the process a fuller exploration of his own rethinking of these categories of domination, freedom, and politics.

The next chapter is an energetic revisiting of Arendt and Martin Heidegger that takes aim at the view that Arendt's Heideggerian ties (whether intellectual or otherwise) demonstrate her antidemocratic and elitist sympathies. Villa contends that Arendt's debt to Heidegger does not lie in his political existentialism but in a methodological approach to how “one might go about recovering experiences and meanings that a layer of obfuscating tradition had plunged into obscurity, if not complete oblivion” (p. 318).

The final chapter ends on an Arendtian note: “The idea of community that haunts the Western tradition” is “one that repeatedly sacrifices the fact of human plurality on the altar of unity, wholeness, or oneness” (p. 352). Arendt becomes the theorist of “positive, public liberty,” one in which we all share a responsibility for caring for the “freedom and durability of our public world” (p. 353). What emerges is a notion of public freedom that rests on an Arendtian notion of care, a Frankfurt School critique of the media industry, a Tocquevillean challenge to centralized power, and a Mill-inspired belief in the educative possibilities of democracy.

Villa's analysis is rich with insight and nuance, giving renewed life and new perspectives to a range of texts. There is not a chapter that fails to provoke thought and reflection on our contemporary times. There is sometimes a noticeable lack of engagement with secondary scholarship. One might be surprised, for example, to find only three works of Foucault scholarship cited in Villa's chapter on Foucault and no citations in an extended discussion of Arendt's debt to the Romans. At times, Villa's rhetoric does not do justice to the carefulness of his argument. In his diagnosis of the ideological forces of mass culture, for example, he describes the “NASCAR crowd” as “partial victims of a deprivation in education and experience” (p. 203). He points, as well, to our “complicity in our collective infantilization” (p. 207). And he applauds the almost heroic effort of “academic specialists” to forgo entertainment and “face the grim realities of what is being done in our name” (p. 208). Perhaps my reaction is borne of my own enjoyment of NASCAR. Or perhaps it arises from a desire to save my admiration for those who risk their lives, well-being, and careers in pursuit of these same goals.

Most significantly, though, I am not ultimately sure if Villa actually shows how public freedom addresses the very real world stakes he lays out. Early in the book, he dramatizes the problem: “It is increasingly taken for granted—by politicians, policymakers, editorial page writers, and the people themselves—that our ‘national mission’ is less to realize democracy than to ‘be competitive’ in the international marketplace—even if this means layoffs in the tens of millions” (pp. 7–8). Villa's point is that “global capitalism” breeds docility (p. 8). The implication, if the scenario is to have any meaning, is that realizing democracy would mitigate the economic impact of this global market. Although global capitalism often serves more as a term of disapprobation than of analysis in this account, I am not sure, to state it in its crudest terms, how public freedom saves jobs. In fact, as sympathetic as I am to the argument, I am unsure what it actually means to care about a public realm, or what effect it will have, or what my next step should be, or what programs or institutions I should support in the face of overwhelming global economic forces, manufactured media, and interest group politics. Perhaps that is not a fair criticism, though: The power of the diagnosis may reveal the near impossibility of the solution.