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No easy remedies for an ailing liberal democracy
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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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