The New Despotism / John Keane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keane, John, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authoritarianism.

Democracy.

Democratic centralism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government 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 old term “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 global anxieties 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Dark Times, Again

Wealth, Money, Power

A Phantom People

Media Power

Velvet Fists

Why Despotism?

Democracy’s Future

Further Reading

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed May 18, 2021)

ISBN:

9780674246690

0674246691

9780674246713

0674246713

OCLC:

1148884831