John Keane

Civil society : old images, new visions

Openings. Democracy. Gramsci. Global Trends. Disputes. Nationalism. Uncivil Society. Power and Publicity. Endings. Index.

Structural transformations of the public sphere

We are living in times in which spatial frameworks of communication are in a state of upheaval. The old hegemony of state‐structured and territorially‐bound public life mediated by radio, television, newspapers and books is being rapidly eroded. In its place are developing a multiplicity of networked spaces of communication which are not tied immediately to territory, and which irreversibly fragment anything resembling a single, spatially‐integrated public sphere within a nation‐state framewrok. The conventional ideal of a unified public sphere and its corresponding vision of a republic of citizens striving to live up to some “public good”; are obsolete. Public life is today subject to “medievalization”;, not as Habermas defined it in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit, but in the different sense of a developing and complex mosaic of differently sized, overlapping and interconnected public spheres. This restructuring of communicative space forces us to revise our understanding of public life and its “partn...

The Future of Representative Democracy

The Future of Representative Democracy poses important questions about representation, representative democracy and its future. Inspired by the last major investigation of the subject by Hanna Pitkin over four decades ago, this ambitious volume fills a major gap in the literature by examining the future of representative forms of democracy in terms of present-day trends and past theories of representative democracy. Aware of the pressing need for clarifying key concepts and institutional trends, the volume aims to break down barriers among disciplines and to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars. The contributors emphasise that representative democracy and its future is a subject of pressing scholarly concern and public importance. Paying close attention to the unfinished, two-century-old relationship between democracy and representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on current problems and dilemmas of representative democracy and the possible future development of new forms of democratic representation.

Eleven theses on markets and civil society 1

During the modernization of the concept of civil society that took place in the Atlantic region between the years 1776 and 1848, every commentator on commodity production and exchange thought of markets as an organizing principle of civil society. Some praised, some criticized, some remained ambivalent about markets and their ethic of possessive individualism. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) generally admired the civilizing thrust of markets, but (in Book V) it lamented the decline of martial spirit and the pauperization and “drowsy stupidity” produced by the great wheels of commerce and exchange. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) referred positively to the enterprise and wealth of the “civilized society” and the doux commerce of the Americans who struggled against the British Empire; later (in Agrarian Justice, 1797) he proposed a far-reaching system of market-correcting grants, paid for from government inheritance taxation, to assist the newly married, the sick and the old. Hegel later noted the hectic dynamism of markets—civil societies were seen as modern inventions in which the Bürgerstand permanently unsettle and revolutionize social needs and produce a “rabble of paupers”. That way of thinking about civil society prepared the ground for the most savage early modern critique of bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Marx’s attack on civil society as a self-paralyzing bourgeois society dominated by the ruthless Journal of Civil Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 25–34, May 2005

The Future of Representative Democracy: Editors' introduction: Rethinking the future of representative democracy

The fusion of representation and democracy The invention of representative democracy is often said to be among the distinctive achievements of modern politics. It came as no easy victory. In its European homeland, it took seven centuries (and quite a few rebellions and revolutionary upheavals) to consolidate representative institutions. Church hierarchies had to be resisted in the name of true religion. Monarchs had to be brought under the control of assemblies. Legislatures then had to be subjected to democratic election, and in turn these democratic elements had to be grafted onto pre-democratic institutions of representation. The model of representative democracy that resulted is today familiar – within the European region, the United States, Chile, Japan, India and other countries – as a cluster of territorially bound governing institutions that include written constitutions, independent judiciaries and laws. These institutions guarantee such procedures as periodic election of candidates to legislatures, limited-term holding of political offices, voting by secret ballot, competitive political parties, the right to assemble in public and liberty of the press. Compared with the previous assembly-based forms of democracy associated with the classical Greek world, representative democracy was different. The ancient world knew nothing of representation; it did not even have a word for it. The citizens of Athens, for instance, thought of their democracy as direct and participatory.

Monitory Democracy? The Secret History of Democracy since 1945

This chapter proposes a fundamental revision of the way we think about democracy in our times. Its starting point is the observation that the history that is closest to us is always the hardest to fathom: the living characters, institutions and events that shape our daily lives like to keep their secrets, to hide their long-term historical significance by submerging us in a never ending flow of random developments, which impair our sense of perspective and weaken our ability to understand where we have been, what we are currently doing and where we may be heading. This knack of recent history to hide its significance from us, its ability to pass cleverly unnoticed right under our noses, is the target of this chapter. It tries to tell a secret. It pinpoints an epochal transformation, which for some decades has been taking place in the contours and dynamics of democracy, without much comment or conceptualization. It reveals something striking: from roughly the mid-twentieth century, representative democracy as our parents and grandparents experienced it has been morphing into a new historical form of democracy. The chapter rejects dead or zombie descriptors such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘capitalist democracy’ or ‘Western democracy’.

Cosmocracy A global system of governance or anarchy

The world today is falling under the influence of a new form of governmental power that has contradictory effects – both positive and negative – on governments and societies everywhere. This new polity can be called cosmocracy. Over time it has developed a certain coherence and uniqueness that now give it its identity. Understood as an emerging system of political power, cosmocracy is without precedent. It demands bold new political thinking, if only because it defies all previous textbook treatments of government. Cosmocracy has four basic features.

“Comparative Silence” Still?

This paper revisits the longstanding debate about journalism, academic scholarship, and their connections with the powerful forces of surveillance that shape the lives of contemporary democracies. Drawing critically on the practical findings of Edward Snowden and others, we offer an analysis of the “Five Eyes” intelligence collection and sharing arrangements between the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and the responses it has elicited from journalists and academic researchers. We show how and why journalists and academics have been deterred from researching and reporting on the significance of Five Eyes activities to the public. The paper provides a new account of the Five Eyes project, helped along by the findings of journalists, including the NSA data-gathering schemes exposed by Edward Snowden. Then we examine the uneven outputs of journalists and academics. Finally, we will show why Edward Snowden’s revelations must be seen as just one contribution to our understanding of a much longer historical trend; and we show why the work of other, less well-known journalists is vital for explaining and understanding a surveillance programme that arguably has profound threatening implications for the future of journalism, university scholarship, and the ideals and institutions of democratic citizenship.

Eine kurze Geschichte über die Zukunft von Wahlen

Wahlen gelten in Demokratien als die bestmogliche Art und Weise, eine Regierung zu bestellen und gutes Regieren sicherzustellen. Mitunter gelten sie sogar als ‚zeitlos‘ und als ein unverhandelbares Merkmal des demokratischen politischen Lebens. Diese globale Orthodoxie des Wahlens gerat jedoch seit einiger Zeit unter Druck: Die Verdrossenheit der Burger mit den Parteien wachst, die Unterstutzung fur populistische Parteien steigt, direktdemokratische Experimente spriesen aus dem Boden und in manchen Kreisen wird das Wahlen als wertlose Verschwendung von Zeit, Geld und Energie angesehen. Solcherart unter Druck geraten, scheint die Leidenschaft fur das Prinzip „eine Person, eine Stimme“, das seit 1789 den Kampf um die Demokratie beflugelte, im Sterben begriffen zu sein. Allerdings ist unsere Zeit zugleich vom Willen gepragt, ausgehohlte Wahlen nicht das letzte Wort der Geschichte sein zu lassen. Es gibt nicht nur deutliche Anzeichen fur ein groses Interesse an einer Wiederherstellung ‚freier und fairer Wahlen‘; es werden zugleich viele Anstrengungen unternommen, ihnen neues Leben einzuhauchen und sie mit neuen Formen anzureichern. Was sich herausbildet, sind neue Formen gewahlter und nicht gewahlter demokratischer Reprasentation, die sich vielleicht am besten unter dem Begriff der monitory democracy fassen lassen.

The Future of Representative Democracy: Acknowledgements

The Future of Representative Democracy poses important questions about representation, representative democracy and its future. Inspired by the last major investigation of the subject by Hanna Pitkin over four decades ago, this ambitious volume fills a major gap in the literature by examining the future of representative forms of democracy in terms of present-day trends and past theories of representative democracy. Aware of the pressing need for clarifying key concepts and institutional trends, the volume aims to break down barriers among disciplines and to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars. The contributors emphasise that representative democracy and its future is a subject of pressing scholarly concern and public importance. Paying close attention to the unfinished, two-century-old relationship between democracy and representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on current problems and dilemmas of representative democracy and the possible future development of new forms of democratic representation.