The idea of "community" is both central to democratic idealism and a sentimental trap: the utopian vanity of Candide's garden: the introversion and simulation of community gardens, the pretend solidarity of affinity and values.
 
To be real, a community must become local and political. It must become a democracy.
 
The Localist Manifesto reforms Rousseau's idea of the General Will (The Social Contract, 1762), and Proudhon's idea of Mutualism (General Idea of Revolution, 1851) to sustain an anti-state democratic theory, based on personal sovereignty or subsidiarity, that reconciles the concepts of participatory governance and voluntary cooperation under localist or municipalist political theory. To do so, the Manifesto incorporates the problem of psychology within enlightenment: the limitations within a system reason to be feared as "public madness" but which is none other than the persistence of belief within knowledge and religion within politics. 
 
The book is, in two parts, a broader political theory credentialed by decades of successful direct political experience, and a practical application focused on the politics of climate change and how to demonstrate transformative economic change in the most difficult and entrenched industry: energy. 
 
The Localist Manifesto articulates a political theory - that democracy must be municipal, epistemological and intellectually led for it to be capable of positive government in an industrially displaced and therefore unstable world.
 
This is not just a theory. The Localist Manifesto also demonstrates a proven pathway to implementation, based on 30 years of success drafting and winning adoption of landmark U.S. laws - and implementing record-smashing community energy transitions in a country otherwise devoid of such leadership: the United States of America.
 
A proven pathway that does falls into neither political Party narrative, The Localist Manifesto champions neither deregulation nor regulation. It does not promote socialism, not green capitalism, nor a return to nationalism, not internationalism, nor finally proletarianism. Turning its back on all these and their albatross, imperialism, this book turns firmly to localism. 
 
It is new. 
 
This was no small undertaking. Though related to both, it is neither Direct Action nor Autonomism. It is not, finally, resistance. It is a marriage of participatory democracy with economic anarchism. But it is also not merely a theory. Its author's voice comes not from criticism, rhetoric, nor exposition, but by example - by "positive dialectic" - having undertaken truly daunting, historic actions both epistemologically and politically for three decades in the energy industry, the fulcrum of modernity and collapse. It is a kind of Occupism, but a positive rather than negative, governing rather than resisting, and seeking, not censoring, individual knowledge and power. 
 
The author, a philosopher and historian, has broken into the castle of energy for decades, with trophies to show for it. His long list of groundbreaking projects contains neither lofty abstractions nor mere symbolic gestures. Leapfrogging the technical domain, he has demonstrated the theory you are about to read, not merely espousing it or pretending someone else is doing it somewhere else. His account is first-hand.
 
Review Quotes
 
"Fenn's thought is in the tradition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Manuel Gonzales Prada"
-- César Lévano La Rosa, 2017

Table of Contents
 
INTRODUCTION
 
THEORY
Public Madness
Spectacle of Resistance
Museum of the Republic
Enlightening Power
Slavery and Representation
Case Study 1: Representative Leftism
Fiction and Stasis
Democracy
Trespass and Bypass
 
PRACTICE
The Localist Constitution
The Localist Platform
Case Study 2: Participatory Trespass
A New System
Demonstrations
Obstacles
The Art of Bypass
Steps