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.

The notion of the democratic deficit has a history in political studies but, in Castells's view, the current situation marks a new phase. Since the economic crisis of 2008, fraudulent banks have been rescued with taxpayers’ money while essential services affecting people’s lives have been cut — the effects of neoliberal globalisation in practice.