This book has a very long history. My politics and my worldview were a product of a time very long ago—the 1960s. I was part of the New Left in the U.S. as an undergraduate (1964–68) and as a graduate student (1968–74). My values and my understanding of politics were shaped by a movement that struggled for racial justice, to stop the Vietnam War, and to challenge corporate power. But while my core convictions have not changed, reality today is in many ways different from what it was in the 1960s. I have attempted to develop new language and new concepts to make my old values relevant to the lived experience of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

In the student movement of the 1960s, we believed in something called “participatory democracy”—the idea that people should have much greater influence over decisions shaping their lives than was possible through voting in periodic elections. While our youthful dreams of radical change were not realized as the United States moved steadily rightward in subsequent decades, I have held on to that vision of a society in which ordinary people were empowered. This book is an effort to give that idea of participatory democracy new relevance and new urgency.

With ideas that have gestated over 60 years, I have accumulated more intellectual debts that I can possibly acknowledge here. First and foremost, there is a group of friends and close colleagues who have sustained me over many decades of continuous conversations and debates. This group includes Peter Evans, Larry Hirschhorn, Carole Joffe, Karl Klare, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Marguerite Mendell, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Reich, Margaret Somers, Howard Winant, and the late Erik Olin Wright. Matthew R. Keller and Marian Negoita have worked with me for almost 20 years exploring the complexities of government-sponsored innovation in the U.S. and other nations. My co-editor for Democratizing Finance, Robert Hockett helped to deepen my understanding of finance and credit.