An Australian Book Review Best Book of the Year

A disturbing in-depth exposé of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world.

One day they’ll be like us. That was once the West’s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them.

Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents.

Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the old term “despotism” to make sense of how these regimes function and endure. He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other’s resources while breeding global anxieties and threatening the values and institutions of democracy. Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends. And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit.

"Keane insists that only by dissecting the new despotism’s supple, but no less shady, political techniques can we understand how it renders its subjects compliant and seemingly grateful…Rich and insightful…stands out as a major contribution to contemporary debates about democracy’s prospects. He paints an unnerving portrait of a possible global future in which democracy, in any defensible sense of the term, has been demoted and marginalized." - Boston Review

"A brilliant re-interpretation of tyranny…There’s scarcely a reader anywhere in the Western world who won’t read Keane’s description of this new form of tyranny without a cold chill of recognition and perhaps the fear that all this insight comes too late to help…Stands out at once as a vital book for the times." - Open Letters Review

"Keane…has long been one of the world’s most erudite, original, astute, and passionate students of democratic politics. With this latest offering he injects one hell of a scary book into an already frenzied world…Keane’s core message is clear: we democrats may abhor these new despotisms, but we cannot afford to underestimate them…Demand[s] us to stop and take a good look at what is going on around us." - Inside Story

"If you ever held the assumption that despotic regimes are old-fashioned, technologically ‘backwards’ countries, where old men rule over poor and uneducated people, you are in for a ride…This book will undoubtedly shift the analytical lens through which we view despotic regimes…The new despotism is less prone to implosions reminiscent of the Soviet Union or breakdowns as witnessed in Latin America. If it is that durable, it constitutes an attractive alternative to liberal democracy. This means that the self-regard, the feeling of invincibility and the arguable complacency of such democracies are misplaced. You have been warned." - LSE Review of Books

"[A] dire and sweeping assessment…Despotism, [Keane] warns, could be the future of democracy if people don’t wake up and confront the threat." - Washington Monthly

"Important because it brings an acute understanding of democracy to focus on its potential fate…[Keane] makes a strong case in The New Despotism for the urgent need to understand this global trend…Offers not just a lively argument with numerous examples, and a rich assembly of sources through detailed endnotes, but also a writing style that commands attention." - Australian Book Review

"This new political world is brilliantly described…His definition of the changing contours of democracy is so startling…Keane teases out the way despots—although they call themselves leaders—subvert democracy to seize power and then subvert the structures of the state to hold it. They rule not as ruthless autocrats but rather by co-opting ‘the people’ to buttress and strengthen their power." - Canberra Times

"Keane’s short book The New Despotism—drily filleting the new threats to liberal democracy—is essential." - Australian Book Review

"Keane’s key point is that today’s despotic states aren’t some kind of hybrid regime on the way to democracy, or in transition or fragile. They are a new type of political rule that’s here to stay and may even live on after the collapse of Western democracies." - Dagbladet Information

"Explores how populist leaders across the globe are holding sway on their ‘subjects,’ and offers ideas for challenging the new despots…A seminal analysis of the aberrations of democracy and the rise of what he calls ‘the new despotism.’…Drawing on his sustained engagement with democratic institutions, Keane delineates the contours of contemporary changes in a compelling manner…The linchpin of this novel form of despotism, Keane maintains, is voluntary servitude." - The Wire