Introduction

This book has highlighted several political, ideological, social, economic and cultural themes. These have included pressure to rising inequality and poverty, to short-term personal profit, environmental damage, disempowerment, colonisation and alienation. We have also heard about powerful counter-themes: valuing diversity and treating it with equality, struggling against discrimination and for sustainability, for equal individual and collective rights and recognition, and for more say in what happens to us in society. If the politics over us has become harsher and more individualising, the personal politics between us seems set in a kinder direction, with more emphasis on egalitarian roles and relationships. Bottom-up movements continue to challenge top-down formal politics. Pressures for participation battle with the most powerful rekindling of populism since the days of pre-war fascism and state communism.

The plea to connect

Current pressures are also reminders of much earlier calls for change and of one particular form they took. Here we may find clues for achieving change for the future. One enduring strand has been framed in terms of connection and reconnection, highlighting separations and inequalities of their own times. During a period, as now, when the gulf between personal and formal political values seemed ever to be widening, that past precedent may offer insights worthy of reconsideration.