IN A brilliant reassessment of the challenges posed to liberal democracy by the radical governments that came to power in Bolivia and Venezuela, scholar John Brown makes an incisive observation.

His book, Deepening Democracy in Post-Neoliberal Bolivia and Venezuela (Routledge, £130), examines the democratic gains enjoyed by hitherto excluded popular sectors under the anti-system outsiders Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez.

Nonetheless, their authoritarian reflexes comprising a form of “illiberal de-democratisation” vexed observers — not least the Anglo-American scholarly establishment — who had bought into a particular species of democracy under neoliberalism as the “only game in town.”