Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
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No easy remedies for an ailing liberal democracy
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
JOHN GREEN relishes the record of a life well lived in the service of the fight for justice and socialism
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.
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