Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance. By Mihaela Mihai. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 312p. $90.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

tems to understanding, facilitating, and monitoring connections” (p. 142). Chapter 8 ends the book by helpfully summarizing its key insights. This summary does not do justice to this thoughtprovoking book. It has much to offer many different readers, from those interested in beating back democracy’s present dysfunction, to normative theorists who want a skillful example of how to blend theory with qualitative research, to deliberative democrats who want a new and creative take on their field. At the same time, and precisely because the argument is generative and provocative, I wish to raise several constructively critical observations and questions. First, in a book at least partially dedicated to pushing deliberative democratic theory in a new direction the authors might unintentionally have provided an argument against the theoretical program’s usefulness when it comes to addressing their central concern. Put simply, the connectivity problems the authors focus on are comprehensible without knowledge of deliberative systems theory—as they demonstrate in Chapter 1. The source of solutions are the actions of everyday citizens trying to work through the problems they face, not experts trained in political theory (p. 144). And the solutions these local actors come up with—talk with your neighbors, infuse activism with creativity and playfulness, seek the opinions of those to be served by technocratic agencies, and so forth— do not clearly benefit from being translated into the language of deliberative democracy. This suggests the question: What value does a deliberative democratic approach provide in understanding and solving communicative issues in today’s democracies? Further, what reason is there to hold onto the framework of deliberation in this context, once doing so requires stretching its core concepts to accommodate both the systemic and now the connective turn? Second, in arguing for abduction and a case-based political theory, the authors invite questions about their cases and findings. For instance, how generalizable are the characteristics of successful connective practices that the authors put forward in Chapter 6? Australia and the United Kingdom have much in common, and the book’s argument would have been stronger if it included a discussion about what we should expect to find in different democratic contexts. One might suspect, for example, that connective practices of the sort described by Mending Democracy require a certain degree of democratic institutional stability, trust, and development to have their desired effects. This, of course, is the sign of a good book, as it suggests clear paths forward for future research. Third,Mending Democracy sometimes seems to fall prey to Jon Elster’s criticism of participatory democracy for being more concerned with by-products rather than ends (“The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland, eds., Foundations of Social Choice Theory, 1986). By this I mean that the actual goals of the actors chronicled in the book are sometimes oddly deemphasized. Indi constituents likely wanted a representative and a government more attune to their desires. KNAG wants to end coal seam development. And British citizens want a better health care system that is easier to use. What is often missing from the book is a discussion of whether what makes a political practice successful for connectivity purposes also makes it good for achieving the desired ends of the actors, and whether it is fair or sensible to pursue connectivity if and when such an overlap is absent. Fourth and finally, I wonder if the frame of mending and repair slightly warps the meaning or implications of the authors’ findings. The practices covered in the book don’t have to be understood as fixing something damaged. Grannies prompting local reflection on complex environmental issues by knitting in public, as well as the other connective practices chronicled in the book, can instead be seen as just what a healthy democracy needs to prosper. Importantly, this seems to be the authors’ point. The thrust of their argument is that large-scale top-down interventions, things that do look like emergency efforts to repair something broken, are insufficient because they overlook the basic communicative needs of a democracy that shift and change depending upon context. In this sense, rather than give examples and detail a theory of democratic mending or repair, I think the authors paint a picture of something different and maybe more important—perhaps we might call it democratic nurturing. This emphasizes that democracy is not merely an appliance that might break and need a visit from a repair person, or a piece of ripped clothing needing some stitching but also or rather a living thing that requires constant care and attention to ensure that it prospers. What this routine care looks like, often overlooked in a literature that focuses on institutional design and abstract theories that only meet practice during efforts of emergency resuscitation, comes into focus in this important book.