Power and Humility: The Future of Monitory Democracy
Cambridge University Press, 8/30/2018
EAN 9781108441377, ISBN10: 1108441378
Paperback, 492 pages, 22.8 x 15.1 x 2.6 cm
Language: English
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.
Introduction
Part I. Indigenisation
1. Asia's orphan
democracy in Taiwan, 1895–2000
2. Indigenous peoples
Part II. Communications Revolution
3. Monitory democracy 4. Wild thinking
5. Lying, truth and power
6. Silence, early warnings and catastrophes
Part III. Re-Imagining Equality
7. Capitalism and civil society
8. The greening of democracy
9. Child citizens
Part IV. Democracy beyond Borders?
10. Quantum metaphors
11. The European citizen
12. Antarctica
democracy at the end of the world
Part V. Violence, Fear, War
13. Does democracy have a violent heart?
14. The triangle of fear
Part VI. Why Monitory Democracy?
15. Is democracy a universal ideal?