When the writer Fred Dewey died unexpectedly in 2021, largely unsung at the time but increasingly recognized in Europe and the US as a startlingly original political thinker, this manuscript, five years in the writing, was fortunately saved and is finally publicly available.
Without the Consent of the People was written as a direct response to the post-2016 landscape of Bernie, Trump, Black Lives Matter, and January 6th. Dewey's amazingly fresh insights constitute a valuable primer for the way we all might begin to conduct ourselves as citizens, presaging the appearance of ICE on US streets and the decay of the international human rights order.
Dewey's new book is a heartfelt invitation to America, invoking Thomas Paine, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and others, an invaluable portrait of civic disintegration and re-building, with clear-eyed, incisive prescriptions of how we can come together and co-create a country all of us will want to live in.
Fred Dewey (July 11, 1957 - June 2, 2021) was a writer, artist, publisher, educator, and civic activist. He was the co-founder of the Neighborhood Councils Movement in Los Angeles. He directed the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2010, and launched the Beyond Baroque Books imprint, editting and publishing over twenty books on Ammiel Alcalay, Simone Forti, Jean-Luc Godard, Daniel Berrigan, Abdellatif Laabi, Jack Hirschman, Christoph Draeger, Ed Ruscha, Diane di Prima.
In the mid-1990s, Dewey founded The Hannah Arendt Working Group in Los Angeles. In 2010, Dewey led the free, public seminar on the works of German-born American political theorist Hannah Arendt in Berlin, Paris, London, Oslo, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles, at public spaces, squats, and universities.
Dewey was on the faculty of the fine arts graduate program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He also taught at the Freie Universität in Berlin and Cal Arts in Valencia, California.
Dewey's previous book was The School Of Public Life.
The Fred Dewey Legacy Project (FRDLP) is made up of an international team of stakeholders who aim to preserve Fred's legacy by promoting the efforts of a cultural leader whose published texts and political activism only recently began to gain their much deserved reception. This publication was produced with the support of:
Brooks Roddan - publisher, co-editor of the project. The whole project emerged from the vision of Roddan in 2017 for a pamphlet by Dewey on the political landscape after the failure of the movement around Bernie Sanders and the first election of Trump.
Jeremiah Day - collaborator of Dewey's for over two decades, co-editor, and author of introductory text.
Sue Spaid - long-time colleague of Dewey, co-editor and author of the Afterword.
Lucas Reiner - artist, champion of Dewey's social and cultural program, contributed photographs of Dewey's Santa Monica apartment, and an illustration.
Renée Petropoulos -artist and long-time confidant, contributed an illustration proposing a monument to Dewey.
"Fred Dewey was a pragmatic idealist. His tireless community projects were propelled by his belief in the public good. Theory and practice. What many don't know is how deeply Fred Dewey engaged with ideas, on a daily basis, in the most visceral way. He was a clandestine scholar. Compiling this book was an amazing labor of love by the five editors who were also his friends. Now more of Fred's work can be known." — Chris Kraus
"Going against the grain of almost all North American leftist thought, Dewey puts culture and imagination at the center of political life.... Dewey reaches back to both American constitutional principles and extraordinary moments such as the Montgomery bus boycott to guide us through the importance of what he calls 'first principles,' ways we can learn to govern ourselves." — Ammiel Alcalay
"Fred Dewey's last quantifiable inscribing is not random marking conveyed via the abyss of abeyance, but one of committed fortitude." — Advanced praise for Without the Consent of the People -- Will Alexander
