ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what the author term 'learning democracy', in particular to explore the importance of collective space in civil society where people can learn deliberative sensibilities, with diverse others. It draws on historical narratives from one particular 'experiment in democratic education', an alliance between workers' organizations and progressive elements in universities forged, in England, at the beginning of the last century, to illuminate how degrees of democratic vitality, reciprocity and self/other understanding might once have been facilitated. The chapter is mainly grounded in the particularities of a 'post-industrial' city in the United Kingdom, and yet is of ubiquitous relevance at a time of anxiety about democracy and at the rise of fundamentalism in many similar cities, in various countries. The personal and political, history and the present, psyche and society, author's own narrative and those of diverse others, were all implicated in asking how this had come to be; and of how learning democracy, could possibly be renewed.
