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"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.

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.