Power and Humility

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and Distinguished Professor at Beijing University. His many published works include Democracy and Media Decadence (Cambridge, 2013) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (2017).

• 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?

'There are very few scholars in the world with the intellectual capacity that is needed to understand the past, present and future of democracy on a truly global scale. John Keane is undoubtedly one of them. For those of us that thought - even hoped - that John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy was his magnum opus, we must now deal with an even more ambitious contribution to the field. In calling for a radical stretching and refiguring of the imaginary horizons of democracy, Keane is pushing back the most basic boundaries of human understanding and raising profound questions about the future of politics in the twenty-first century. Written in a style that is as accessible and entertaining as it is devastatingly precise and informative, this is quite simply a brilliant book.' Matthew Flinders, University of Sheffield