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Intro -- Praise -- Title Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Democracy's Timeline -- Introduction -- Part I: Assembly Democracy -- Part II: Electoral Democracy -- Part III: Monitory Democracy -- Image Credits -- Index -- About the Author -- By the Same Author -- Copyright.

"A disturbing in-depth exposé of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world. One day they'll be like us. That was once the West's complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them. Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. These governments mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of administration based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents. Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the older "despotism" to make sense of how these regimes function and endure. He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other's resources while breeding worldwide anxiety and threatening the values and institutions of democracy. Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends. And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit"--

Democracy urgently needs re-imagining if it is to address the dangers and opportunities posed by current global realities, argues leading political thinker John Keane. He offers an imaginative, radically new interpretation of the twenty-first-century fate of democracy. The book shows why the current literature on democracy is failing to make sense of many intellectual puzzles and new political trends. It probes a wide range of themes, from the growth of cross-border institutions and capitalist market failures to the greening of democracy, the dignity of children and the anti-democratic effects of everyday fear, violence and bigotry. Keane develops the idea of 'monitory democracy' to show why periodic free and fair elections are losing their democratic centrality; and why the ongoing struggles by citizens and their representatives, in a multiplicity of global settings, to humble the high and mighty and deal with the dangers of arbitrary power, force us to rethink what we mean by democracy and why it remains a universal ideal

"Predictions of the coming collapse of Chinese politics are today commonplace, however this thought-provoking book explores a radically different alternative. China, it argues, is a one-party-dominated political system whose surprising levels of public support and resilience in the face of serious economic, environmental and social problems suggest that it is more durable than most outside observers suppose. China is not an ailing 'autocracy', a case of 'crony capitalism' or a blindly repressive 'authoritarian regime'. The rulers of China are in fact experimenting with a wide range of locally-made democratic tools designed to win the trust and loyalty of their subjects. Examples probed in this book include the injection of accountability mechanisms into state bureaucracy, the toleration of independent public opinion leaders, the growing reliance of Party officials and corporate executives on public opinion polls and 'democratic style', and the calculated use by Party officials of digitally networked media as early warning devices. Written for students and teachers, researchers and general readers fascinated by the rising global power of China, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter shows why locally-made democratic practices often favour one-party rule and why China is becoming a globally significant political laboratory: a 21st century testing ground for a new type of top-down popular government at odds with power-sharing democracy as it was known during the past generation."--Publisher's website.

We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage public silence and concentrations of unlimited power, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Exploring examples of clever government surveillance, market censorship, spin tactics and back-channel public relations, John Keane seeks to understand and explain these trends, and how best to deal with them. Tackling some tough but big and fateful questions, Keane argues that 'media decadence' is deeply harmful for public life

At the moment, no other European city attracts so much fascination as the city of Berlin. An unrivalled symbol of modern urban life, Berlin is a dynamic city whose inhabitants, in the course of the past two centuries, have lived through both the rapid growth and the violent destruction of the institutions of civil society, several times over. This volume situates itself within these developments by presenting, for the first time in English, a sample of the best, recently written essays on contemporary civil societies, their structural problems, and their uncertain future, written by scholars

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- contents -- PROLOGUE A Citizen Extraordinary -- PART I England, 1737-1774 -- 1 Thetford Days -- 2 The Ruined Citizen -- PART II America, 1774-1787 -- 3 The Empire and the Orphan -- 4 The Birth of America -- 5 War -- 6 Public Insults -- 7 The Federalist -- 8 The Woes of Peace -- PART III France and England, 1787-1802 -- 9 Rights of Man -- 10 Executing a King -- 11 Prison to Dictatorship -- PART IV America, 1802-1809 -- 12 Growing Old in America -- NOTES -- INDEX

Cover; Half-title; Series-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Introduction: surplus violence; Muskets, terrorists; Thinking violence; Civilisation; Barbarism?; Why violence?; Uncivil wars; Ethics; Ten rules for democratising violence; Further reading; Index.

Amid fears of terrorism, rising tides of xenophobia, and loose talk of 'anti-globalisation', John Keane mounts a defence of global civil society, stressing the need for new democratic ways of living. Keane's provocative reflections draw upon a variety of scholarly sources to breathe new life into contemporary political thinking

In this book, John Keane examines the causes of the worldwide re-popularisation of the term 'civil society'. The text traces its reappearance in a range of contexts and attempts to clarify the conflicting grammars and vocabularies of its language.

Este ensayo nos proponemos plantear una nueva perspectiva acerca de una tendencia inquietante que está configurando nuestro mundo en estos primeros años del siglo x x i: e l auge del despotismo. nos preguntamos si los regímenes de poder que se ponen de manifiesto en países como Rusia, Vietnam, Arabia Saudita, Turkmenistán, China y Brunei, y los Emiratos árabes Unidos tienen características en común, a pesar de ser a su vez tan diferentes en otros aspectos. La respuesta es afirmativa; empezando por su concentración geográfica en la región euroasiática, definida ampliamente de tal suerte que incluya el espacio territorial que se extiende a lo largo de Rusia, Turquía, las monarquías del golfo e Irán en el oeste, atravesando las repúblicas de Asia central, China y Japón, hasta Indonesia, Australia, nueva Zelanda y Fiji en el extremo este. Esta región es el nuevo centro gravita-cional geopolítico del planeta. Este ensayo explica por qué el despotismo, término en desuso, merece ser retomado, y porqué los regímenes despóticos de nuestro tiempo no deben considerarse simplemente como un tipo de estado territorial. ; This essay sets out to make new sense of a disturbing trend shaping our world in these early years of the 21st century: the rise of despotism. It asks whether the regimes of power displayed in countries otherwise as different as Russia, Vietnam, Iran; Saudi Arabia; Turkmenistan; China and Brunei, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates share things in common. It answers that they do, beginning with their geographic concentration in the Eurasian region, broadly defined to include the territorial spaces stretching from Russia, Turkey, the gulf states and Iran in the west through to the central Asian republics, China and Japan, Indonesia, Australia, new zealand and Fiji in the far east. The region is the new geopolitical centre of gravity of our planet. It is also the heartland of the new despotisms, which are proving to be powerful actors, both in the region and within a wide range of global settings. The ...

La relación entre las ideas de identidad nacional, nacionalismo y democracia es el tema central del artículo. El concepto de "nación" en la Edad Moderna, especialmente en la teoría de T. Paine sobre la indisoluble unidad de los conceptos de nación y de gobierno democrático y la doctrina de la autodetenninación nacional del siglo XIX son los puntos de partida para una explicación del nacimiento del nacionalismo, resaltando cómo en la idea original no existía una percepción de la diferencia entre identidad nacional y nacionalismo y cómo se infravalora el potencial antidemocrático de la lucha por la identidad nacional. El autor presenta su tesis de que ya que los mecanismos democráticos facilitan la transfonnación de la identidad nacional en nacionalismo, la democracia es mejor servida abandonando la doctrina de la autodetenninación nacional y considerando un sentido compartido de identidad nacional como una legítima pero limitada forma de vida. El corolario de esta tesis es que la identidad nacional, un sopone imponante de las instituciones democrálicas, es preservada mejor restringiendo su ámbito en favor de las identidades no nacionales, lo cual puede reducir la posibilidad de su transfonnación en nacionalismo antidemocrático. En este senlido el autor señala cómo la emergencia en el contexto europeo de una Ciudadanía Europea puede servir como antídoto contra los peligros del nacionalismo.

In this critical commentary, John Keane defends, extends, and reasserts the role of history in democratic theory through an articulation of seven methodological rules: (1) treat the remembrance of things past as vital for democracy's present and future; (2) regard the languages, characters, events, institutions, and effects of democracy as a thoroughly historical way of life and handling of power; (3) pay close attention to the ways in which the narration of the past by historians, leaders, and others is unavoidably a time-bound, historical act; (4) see that the methods that are most suited to writing about the past, present, and future of democracy draw attention to the peculiarity of their own rules of interpretation; (5) acknowledge that, until quite recently, most details of the history of democracy have been recorded by its critics; (6) note that the negative tone of most previous histories of democracy confirms the rule that tales of its past told by historians often harbor the prejudices of the powerful; and (7) admit that the task of thinking about the past, present, and future of democracy is by definition an unending journey. There can be no Grand Theory of Democracy.

Las crisis políticas suelen describirse como súbitos puntos de inflexión, momentos de dramatismo extremo, puntos críticos en los que todo está en juego, en los que se necesitan juicios y decisiones audaces. Sin embargo, sabemos por arqueólogos, paleontólogos, historiadores y otros expertos que la transformación y/o el derrumbe de los órdenes antiguos y su sustitución por nuevas organizaciones de poder suelen producirse con lentitud. Su ritmo es el de la larga duración, lo que significa que sus consecuencias radicales requieren tiempo para materializarse. Las rupturas que se producen lentamente son mucho más difíciles de detectar, y aún más de analizar, pero deben ser una parte central del análisis de la democracia contemporánea y de su futuro incierto, o al menos eso es lo que argumenta el proyecto de la democracia cuántica. ; Political crises are normally described as sudden turning points, moments of gripping drama, flashpoints when everything is up for grabs, when bold judgments and decisions become necessary. But we know from archaeologists, paleontologists, historians and others that the radical transformation and/or ruination of old orders and their replacement by new power arrangements often happen slowly. Their rhythm is that of the longue durée, and that means their radical consequences take time to materialise. Slow-motion ruptures are much harder to spot, let alone to analyse, but they must be central to the analysis of contemporary democracy and its uncertain future, or so the Quantum Democracy project argues.