Bøker av John Keane

The definitive biography of Tom Paine, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his death

This companion volume to John Keane's Democracy and Civil Society features essays by leading writers from Eastern and Western Europe and provides new answers to a series of difficult questions: What precisely is meant today by the distinction between the state and the non-state realm of civil society? Why has that distinction, so crucial throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and then apparently lost without trace, again become sharply topical? For what intellectual and political purposes can the distinction be used and whose interests might it serve?John Keane has collected a varied sample of the best and most provocative European writing produced on the subject over the past two decades.Contributors include Norberto Bobbio, Carole Pateman, Agnes Heller, Helmut Kuzmics, Norbert Elias, Pierre Rosanvallon, Karl Hinrichs, Claus Offe, Helmut Wiesenthal, Alberto Melucci, Jacques Rupnik, Jena Szucs, Mihaly Vajda, Z.A. Pelczynski and Vaclav Havel.

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.

In this provocative book, John Keane calls for a fresh understanding of the vexed relationship between democracy and violence. Taking issue with the common sense view that 'human nature' is violent, Keane shows why mature democracies do not wage war upon each other, and why they are unusually sensitive to violence. He argues that we need to think more discriminatingly about the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies. He probes the disputed meanings of the term violence, and asks why violence is the greatest enemy of democracy, and why today's global 'triangle of violence' is tempting politicians to invoke undemocratic emergency powers. Throughout, Keane gives prominence to ethical questions, such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and argues that violent behaviour and means of violence can and should be 'democratised' - made publicly accountable to others, so encouraging efforts to erase surplus violence from the world.

John Keane, a leading scholar of political theory, tracks the recent development of a big idea with fresh potency - global civil society. In this timely book, Keane explores the contradictory forces currently nurturing or threatening its growth, and he shows how talk of global civil society implies a political vision of a less violent world, founded on legally sanctioned power-sharing arrangements among different and intermingling forms of socio-economic life. Keane's reflections are pitted against the widespread feeling that the world is both too complex and too violent to deserve serious reflection. His account borrows from various scholarly disciplines, including political science and international relations, to challenge the silence and confusion within much of contemporary literature on globalisation and global governance. Against fears of terrorism, rising tides of xenophobia, and loose talk of 'anti-globalisation', the defence of global civil society mounted here implies the need for new democratic ways of living.

One day they'll be like us. That was once the West's complacent assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them.

Vaclav Havel is revered as one of the 20th-century's great playwrights, dissidents, and honest champions of democracy. This study reveals a Havel, dramatising the key moments of joy, misery, triumph and tragedy on which his life has turned.

This work looks anew at the belief that we are in an era of more intense violence than ever experienced before. It includes a demonstration of how the term "violence" is riddled with paradoxes. There is also an examination of the prospects for greater civility which rejects simple-minded pacifism.

* This is an engaging and lively text which will interest a wide audience* The book presents a tightly woven historical and comparative analysis of the idea of the a liberty of the pressa in both European and American culture* Offers brilliantly original research. .

It is only a decade ago that the eighteenth-century distinction between civil society and the state seemed old-fashioned, an object of cynicism, even of outright hostility. In this important new book, John Keane shows how, in a wholly unexpected reversal of fortunes, this antiquated distinction has since become voguish among politicians, academics, journalists, business leaders, relief agencies and citizens' organizations. John Keane examines the various sources and phases of the dramatic world-wide popularization of the term. He traces its reappearance in a wide range of contexts - from China to Tunisia, from South Africa to the emerging European Union - and clarifies the conflicting grammars and vocabularies of the language of civil society. Considerable care is taken to highlight the different possible meanings of the distinction between civil society and the state. Keane also takes the reader into previously uncharted intellectual territory by demonstrating that the civil society perspective contains unharnessed potentials: that it is possible to develop bold new images of civil society that alter the ways in which we think about matters such as power, property, violence, politics, publicity and democracy. Written with style and imagination, this important book by John Keane will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics, media studies, sociology, social and political theory, and to a broader public audience interested in the central debates and political developments of our time.