New releases by Interpol, Phoebe Bridgers, Lambchop
Latest editorial
No easy remedies for an ailing liberal democracy
ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
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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