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Is shame dead? With personal information made so widely available, an eroding public/private distinction, and a therapeutic turn in public discourse, many seem to think so. People across the political spectrum have criticized these developments and sought to resurrect shame in order to protect privacy and invigorate democratic politics. Democracy and the Death of Shame reads the fear that 'shame is dead' as an expression of anxiety about the social disturbance endemic to democratic politics. Far from an essential supplement to democracy, the recurring call to 'bring back shame' and other civilizing mores is a disciplinary reaction to the work of democratic citizens who extend the meaning of political equality into social realms. Rereadings from the ancient Cynics to the mid-twentieth century challenge the view that shame is dead and show how shame, as a politically charged idea, is disavowed, invoked, and negotiated in moments of democratic struggle.

This essay begins to unpack their significance for how we think about the relationship between democratic citizenship and opposition to anti-democratic movements and their leadership.

This essay interprets Hannah Arendt's concept of the "social question" through a reading of her controversial essay "Reflections on Little Rock." I argue that Arendt's social question refers to social climbing and not simply poverty, as she initially suggests. The social-climbing framework illuminates "Little Rock" in two ways. First, it explains why Arendt opposed mandatory school desegregation, which she saw as black social climbing, that is, African American citizens and the NAACP using the US courts and federal government to raise the status of African Americans to the level of whites. Second, and more significant, it provides a framework for criticizing "Little Rock" with Arendt's own standards and criteria in mind. Reminded by Arendt of the suspect politics of social climbing, we can see something she did not: segregation was not "natural" association but an institution established after the Civil War to protect white social climbing and social advancement.

Recent works have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that if shame is felt for the right reasons, toxic forms of shame may be alleviated. Rereading Hannah Arendt's biography of the "conscious pariah," Rahel Varnhagen,Locke concludes that a politics of shame does not have the radical potential its proponents seek. Access to a public world, not shaming those who shame us, catapults the shamed pariah into the practices of democratic citizenship.

Film, painting, disease, nationalism, mass media, literature, family values, capital punishment, music lyrics, theater, UFOs, the Statue of Liberty, and Appalachian hollers are some of the cultural texts subject to political analysis in this impressive volume of sixteen essays. Neither are these cultural sites presumed to be transparent nor are their investments fully known. They are problematized, pluralized, specified, and contextualized in terms of such political categories as liberalism, communitarianism, privacy, civility, nationhood, citizenship, community, the will, responsibility, the common, revolution, public sphere(s), and the political itself (p. 19). This approach, which Jodi Dean terms an "interface" between cultural studies and political theory, captures how cultural forms such as film and literature cannot be decoupled from their political moorings, just as a political concept like citizenship is always embedded with cultural meanings.