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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.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Editor's preface -- Foreword -- Introduction: John Keane -- 1 'Crises of crisis management': elements of a political crisis theory -- 2 'Ungovernability': the renaissance of conservative theories of crisis -- 3 Social policy and the theory of the state -- 4 Theses on the theory of the state -- 5 Legitimacy versus efficiency -- 6 Some contradictions of the modem welfare state -- 7 The separation of form and content in liberal democracy -- 8 Competitive party democracy and the Keynesian welfare state -- 9 Political culture and Social Democratic administration -- 10 Alternative strategies in consumer policy -- 11 European socialism and the role of the state -- 12 Reflections on the welfare state and the future of socialism. An interview -- Index

Books of great political insight and novelty always outlive their time of birth and this reissued work, initially published in 1985, is no exception. Written shortly after the formation of Charter 7, the essays in this collection are among the most original and compelling pieces of political writing to have emerged from central and Eastern Europe during the whole of the post-war period

"Written shortly after the formation of Charter 77, the essays in this collection are among the most original and compelling pieces of political writing to have emerged from central and Eastern Europe during the whole of the post-war period. Václav Havel's essay provides the title for the book. It was read by all the contributors who in turn responded to the many questions which Havel raises about the potential power of the powerless. The essays explain the anti-democratic features and limits of Soviet-type totalitarian systems of power. They discuss such concepts as ideology, democracy, civil liberty, law and the state from a perspective which is radically different from that of people living in liberal western democracies. The authors also discuss the prospects for democratic change under totalitarian conditions. Steven Lukes' introduction provides an invaluable political and historical context for these writings. The authors represent a very broad spectrum of democratic opinion, including liberal, conservative and socialist"--From Google Books.

With a unique narrative combining moving life stories and scholarly insight, this book offers a radical re-appraisal of Indian politics. The book demonstrates why Indian democracy is of global importance and why its pathologies are a cause for alarm: as much for India as for the future of democracy the world over.

This volume brings together preeminent scholars from around the world in a collection of essays that point to a changing and broadening agenda of democracy. Themes addressed include challenges to democracy in established democracies and in transitional societies, the media and communications, globalization, criteria of democracy, religion, culture, civil society, and the internationalization of the democratic ethos