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MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
No easy remedies for an ailing liberal democracy
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy
By Manuel Castells
(Polity, £12.99)
MANUEL CASTELLS'S latest book has a wide sweep, going beyond his previous expertise in radical urban sociology to explore the nature of the rupture of the relationship between those who govern and the governed.
He starts from what he describes as the gradual collapse of a political model of representation and governance — liberal democracy itself. It isn’t that people have been rejecting the notion of democracy per se, he argues, rather that they have lost trust in democracy as it actually exists, or doesn’t actually exist, in so many countries today and his book focuses on the causes and consequences of this rupture, although without offering solutions.
More from this author
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes challenging insights and thought-provoking criticisms of a number of widely accepted assumptions on the left
MARJORIE MAYO recommends a disturbing book that seeks to recover traces of the past that have been erased by Israeli colonialism
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
