Dark Times, Again
1. A survey from twenty-seven countries found that 51 percent of interviewees were “not satisfied with the way democracy is working,” while 45 percent were “satisfied.” Richard Wike, Laura Silver, and Alexandra Castillo, “Many across the Globe Are Dissatisfied with How Democracy Is Working,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2019, https://
2. Larry Diamond, “Democracy after Trump: Can a Populist Stop Democratic Decline?,” Foreign Affairs, November 14, 2016; see also “Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart,” Foreign Affairs, July / August 2019.
3. The quotations are from Diamond, “Democracy after Trump”; Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA, 2018), p. 20. See also Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York, 2018), pp. 1–10.
4. Kim Parker, Rich Morin, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Pew Research Center, Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts, March 2019, https://
5. The word “fracasomania”—the propensity to see failures everywhere—was coined by Albert O. Hirschman and discussed in his Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (Cambridge, MA), p. 12. The biological metaphor appears throughout David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London, 2018); compare the quite different treatment in John Keane, Power and Humility: The Future of Monitory Democracy (Cambridge, 2018).
6. Prime Minister Mark Rutte, “The EU: From the Power of Principles towards Principles and Power,” Churchill Lecture, Europa Institut at the University of Zurich, February 13, 2019, https://
7. John Keane, “Mexico: The Cactus Democracy,” The Conversation, July 18, 2017, https://
8. Informe Latinobarómetro 2018 (Santiago de Chile, 2018), pp. 34–35; Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, How to Kill a Democracy … the Indian Way (Oxford, 2020).
9. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York, 2018); Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2019); and John Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence (Cambridge, 2013).
10. Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (New York, 1919), p. 125.
11. David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections (London, 2018); Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2016); Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton, NJ, 2016); Shawn W. Rosenberg, “Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism,” University of California, Irvine, 2019, https://
12. P. Diamond, The End of Whitehall? Government by Permanent Campaign (London, 2019).
13. Ajay Gudavarthy, India after Modi: Populism and the Right (New Delhi, 2018).
14. “ ‘At War with Russia’: EU Parliament Approves Resolution to Counter Russian Media ‘Propaganda,’ ” Russia Today, November 23, 2016, https://
15. “No One Can Lecture Turkey about Human Rights: Turkey’s Erdoğan,” Hürriyet, December 10, 2018, http://
16. Su Changhe, “需将西方民主从普世知识降级为地方理论” [Western democracy must be demoted from a universal idea to a local theory], Guangming Daily, May 28, 2016, http://
17. The remark by Liu Cixin is cited in Jiayang Fan, “The War of the Worlds,” New Yorker, June 24, 2019, p. 34; the internment is described in Liu Cixin, “Post-Deterrence Era, Year 2 Australia,” in Death’s End (New York, 2016), http://
18. Seva Gunitsky, Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2017).
19. Perhaps along the lines of Ignazio Silone’s The School for Dictators (New York, 1938), a satirical instruction manual for budding fascist dictators. The book is written in the form of a fictional trialogue that features Mr. W., the future dictatorial ruler of the United States; Professor Pickup, his secret advisor; and Thomas the Cynic, whom the two Americans meet during their European travels. Thomas undertakes to instruct them about the workings of the fascist mind and how best to apply the techniques of fascist rule in America.
20. A generation ago these were Franz Neumann’s objections to the term “despotism” in “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (London, 1957), p. 235.
21. “Cash Found in Shoeboxes at Halkbank Ex-Manager’s Home Not Bank’s Money: Turkish PM,” Hürriyet Daily News, February 11, 2014, http://
22. George Soros, as quoted in Michael Steinberger, “George Soros: Bet Big on Liberal Democracy,” New York Times, July 17, 2018.
23. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and The Discourses, ed. Max Lerner (New York, 1950), chapter XIV, pp. 53–56.
24. Leszek Kolakowski, “In Stalin’s Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair,” Politique Aujourd’hui, July–August 1971, typescript.
25. Montesquieu, “Voyage de Gratz à la Haye: Hollande” and “Notes sur l’Angleterre,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Daniel Oster (Paris, 1964), pp. 326–331 and 331–334.
26. Runciman, How Democracy Ends, pp. 168–178.
27. Samuel P. Huntington and Clement H. Moore, eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems (New York, 1970), p. 509.
28. John Keane, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (London, 2017).
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, oder Wie mann mit den Hammer philosophiert (Berlin, 2016 [1889]), p. 32.
30. The inexact and (crypto-) teleological character of the phrase are on display in Alina Rocha Menocal, Verena Fritz with Lise Rakner, “Hybrid Regimes and the Challenges of Deepening and Sustaining Democracy in Developing Countries,” South African Journal of International Affairs 15, no. 1 (June 2008): 29–40.
31. These labels can be sampled in Guillermo A. O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” in Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization (Notre Dame, IN, 1999); Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2007); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992); Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York, 2012), p. 5; and David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 430–451.
32. Franz Neumann, “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, IL, 1957), pp. 233–256.
33. The Republic of Plato, ed. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, 1888), books 1 and 8.
34. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris, 1979 [1748]), book 5, chapter 13, p. 185, and book 2, chapter 5, p. 141.
35. Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1873 [1721]), letters 148, 146, 102, and vol. 2, letters 59 and 37. Compare Montesquieu’s remark in Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (New York, 1965 [1748]). Under conditions of despotism, he wrote, “there is always real dissension. The worker, the soldier, the lawyer, the magistrate, the noble are joined only inasmuch as some oppress the others without resistance. And, if we see any union there, it is not citizens who are united but dead bodies buried one next to the other” (chapter 9, p. 94).
36. The word “totalitarianism” is often overused and underdefined when describing the new despotisms, as in Madawi al-Rasheed, “Why the U.S. Can’t Control MBS: Reining in the Rogue Prince,” Foreign Affairs, November 5, 2018: “Saudi Arabia has effectively transformed into a totalitarian regime in which all of the power of the state is concentrated in one person’s hands.”
37. Michael Bratton, Power Politics in Zimbabwe (Boulder, CO, 2014). Among the most astute literary treatments of Mugabe-style dictatorships is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (London, 2007), a fearless satire in which the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria is dominated by a kleptocratic ruler. Dressed in dark pinstriped suits bearing the words “Might Is Right,” the ruler loves every “eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose” moment on television. He is “the sole voice of the people” and is convinced that his reign “would end only after the world has ended.”
38. Peta Thornycroft, “ ‘Hitler’ Mugabe Launches Revenge Terror Attacks,” Daily Telegraph, March 26, 2003; background developments are well analyzed in Stuart Doran, Kingdom, Power, Glory: Mugabe, Zanu and the Quest for Supremacy 1960–1987 (Gauteng, 2017).
39. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1970), p. 338. In the face of much contrary evidence, Karl A. Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT, 1957) similarly argued that irrigation societies of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere were highly centralized, state-sponsored despotisms.
40. Simeon Kerr, “Tales of Broken Men and ‘Ritz Detox’ Emerge from Gilded Cage,” Financial Times Weekend, February 17 / 18, 2018, p. 4.
41. Henry Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (New York, 2015).
42. Jonathan Joseph, Varieties of Resilience: Studies in Governmentality (Cambridge, 2018).
43. David Sherfinski, “McCain: ‘Russia Is a Gas Station Masquerading as a Country,’ ” Washington Times, March 16, 2014.
44. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (London, 1975 [1946], pp. 277–296.
45. Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia (New Haven, CT, 2014), 116; “Erdoğan: A New Turkish Era?,” Inside Story, August 12, 2014, https://
46. Paul Theroux, “The Golden Man: Sapamurat Niyazov’s Reign of Insanity,” New Yorker, May 28, 2007, pp. 56–65.
1. See Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the First (London, 1791), p. 21: “When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice and in fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the King, divides and sub-divides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation.”
2. Montesquieu, The Persian Letters (Indianapolis, IN, 1976), letter 37.
3. John Stuart Mill, “That the Ideally Best Form of Government Is Representative Government,” in Considerations on Representative Government, chapter 3, in Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto, 1977), p. 403.
4. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars 1:17. A brief account of sultanism is found in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA, 1978), pp. 231–232.
5. Alexei Mukhin, Pharaoh (Alexandria, VA, 2018), especially chapter 3. Insofar as top-dog despots are constantly surrounded by clusters of well-organized courtier associates and potential rivals, their inner circles are not understandable in the honeyed terms outlined in the classic work Il libro del cortegiano (1528) by the Renaissance writer Baldassare Castiglione, for whom the ideal courtier is “quick-witted and charming, prudent and scholarly” and committed to the task of making the “prince realize the honor and advantage accrue to him and his family from justice, liberality, magnanimity, gentleness and all other virtues befitting a ruler.”
6. Paul Lendvai, Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman (Oxford, 2018), p. 167. See also Bálint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest, 2016), pp. 90–91, and, more generally, Alena V. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY, 2006).
7. Franz Neumann, “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essay in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, IL, 1957), p. 245; see also his Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2nd ed. (New York, 1944), p. 430 and (quoting Hitler) p. 439: “The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who … feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and an encouraging effect on most people.”
8. Marc Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (New York, 2009), p. 198.
9. Rano Turaeva, “Tanish-bilish,” in The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, vol. 1, ed. Alena Ledenova (London, 2018), pp. 71–73.
10. Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2013).
11. The Gulistan of Sadi; or, The Rose Garden of Shekh Muslihu’d-din Sadi of Shiraz, translated by Edward Backhouse Eastwick (Delhi, 2018 [1852]), chapter 1, story 1; cf. Ramita Navai, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran (New York, 2014).
12. Dávid Jancsics, “ ‘A Friend Gave Me a Phone Number’—Brokerage in Low-Level Corruption,” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43, no. 1 (2014): 68–87. The scale of protection rackets is often vast, as in Russia, where according to some estimates 70–80 percent of business firms pay on average 10–20 percent of their profits for protection service. See Mark Galeotti, “The Russian ‘Mafiya’: Consolidation and Globalisation,” in Global Crime Today: The Changing Face of Organised Crime, ed. Mark Galeotti (New York, 2005), p. 57; and Dina Siegel, “Vory v Zakone: Russian Organized Crime,” in Traditional Organized Crime in the Modern World: Responses to Socioeconomic Change, ed. Dina Siegel and Henk van der Bunt (New York, 2012), pp. 27–49.
13. Bálint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest, 2016), p. 75; cf. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), p. 40. The term “poligarch” is first used in Tamás Frei, 2015—A káosz éve és a Magyar elit háborúja (Budapest, 2013).
14. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1971), p. 40.
15. Miklós Haraszti, “Orbán Will Now Create a System Where There Is No More Need to Win an Election,” The Slovak Spectator, April 11, 2018, https://
16. GAN Integrity, Macedonia Corruption Report, January 2018, https://
17. Phorn Bopha, “Hun Sen Encourages Cambodians to Emulate Chinese-Style Wealth,” Cambodia Daily, December 30, 2012. The broader practical consequences of this rhetoric are probed in Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia (New Haven, CT, 2014).
18. Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia.
19. Marc Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (New York, 2009), pp. 100–117.
20. Ignacy Krasicki, “The Drunk,” in Polish Fables: Bilingual Edition, trans. Gerard T. Kapolka (New York, 1997), p. 65: “After living on the bottle day and night / The sick drunk smashed his glasses in his fright / He cursed mead, called wine, beer a thug / Then he got well … and drank straight from the jug.”
21. Joachim Ahrens, Herman W. Hoen, and Martin C. Spechler, “State Capitalism in Eurasia: A Dual-Economy Approach to Central Asia,” in Politics and Legitimacy in Post-Soviet Eurasia, ed. Martin Brusis, Joachim Ahrens, and Martin Schulze Wessel (Houndmills, UK, 2016), pp. 47–71.
22. Cui Jia, “Verdict Called Reassuring to Businesses,” China Daily, April 11, 2019.
23. Andrei Vernikov, “The Impact of State-Controlled Banks on the Russian Banking Sector,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 53, no. 2 (2012): 250–266.
24. Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 47–53; Minxin Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Cambridge, MA, 2016).
25. See James S. Henry, The Price of Offshore Revisited (London, 2012).
26. See the UBC and PWC report, New Visionaries and the Chinese Century: Billionaires Insights (2018), https://
27. Details are drawn from the Shanghai-based Hurun Report and the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, as reported in Michael Forsythe, “Billionaire Lawmakers Ensure the Rich Are Represented in China’s Legislature,” New York Times, March 2, 2015. See also my When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (London, 2017).
28. Daniel Kimmage, “Russia: Selective Capitalism and Kleptocracy,” in Freedom House, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia, Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians (New York, 2009), pp. 49–64.
29. P. Lilley, Dirty Dealing: The Untold Truth about Global Money Laundering (London, 2000), p. 27; Serguey Braguinsky, “Postcommunist Oligarchs in Russia. Quantitative Analysis,” Journal of Law and Economics 52, no. 2 (2009): 307–349.
30. Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York, 2000), pp. 5, 320; see also Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York, 2000), and David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York, 2011). The spread of criminal violence during this period is well analyzed in Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (New York, 2002).
31. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York, 2014); Katherine Hirschfeld, Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy and Political Collapse (New York, 2015); Larry Diamond, “Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart,” Foreign Affairs, July / August 2019; and Richard Sakwa’s important critique, “Is Russia Really a Kleptocracy?,” Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 2015.
32. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and The Discourses, ed. Max Lerner (New York, 1950), chapter xvii, p. 62, and chapter xxi, p. 81.
33. Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (London, 1984). In what follows, compare the classic descriptions of the vassalage system by F. L. Ganshof, “Benefice and Vassalage in the Age of Charlemagne,” Cambridge Historical Journal 6, no. 2 (1939): 147–175, and Charles Edwin Odegaard, Vassi and Fidelis in the Carolingian Empire (New York, 1972).
34. Sean L. Yom, “Understanding the Resilience of Monarchy during the Arab Spring—Analysis,” Eurasia Review, April 6, 2012.
35. National Bureau of Statistics of China, “Main Items of General Public Budget Expenditure of the Central and Local Governments (2017),” http://
36. “Fifth Generation Star Li Keqiang Discusses Domestic Challenges, Trade Relations with Ambassador,” WikiLeaks, March 15, 2007, https://
37. Stein Ringen, The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century (Hong Kong, 2016), p. 164. Cf. Bruce Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival (New York: 2016); Douglas Besharov and Karen Baehler, eds., Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition (Oxford, 2013); Zheng Yongnian, “Between the State and the Market: The Political Logic of Social Policy Reform in China,” in Social Development and Social Policy: International Experiences and China’s Reform, ed. Qi Dongtao and Yang Lijun (Singapore, 2016).
38. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed. Ernest Barker (London, 1968), IV, xi, 1295b–1296b.
39. Jürgen Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (December 1995): 783–806.
40. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy (London, 2014), pp. 403–408, 440–445. See my debate with Fukuyama in “Can Democracy Survive a Shrinking Middle Class?,” The Conversation, September 4, 2013, https://
41. Karen Stenner, “Three Kinds of ‘Conservatism,’ ” Psychological Inquiry 20 (2009): 157; compare her remarks in Tom Jacobs, “Authoritarianism: The Terrifying Trait That Trump Triggers,” Pacific Standard, March 27, 2018.
42. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973 [1951]), p. 338.
43. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Quelle espėce de despotisme les nations démocratiques ont à craindre” [What kind of despotism democratic nations have to fear], in De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. François Furet (Paris, 1981), part 4, chapter 6, pp. 383–388; and Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Gustave de Beaumont, in Oeuvres completes, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris, 1967), book 8, part 1, p. 421.
44. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York, 1990 [1951]), p. 66. The mistaken presumption that modern despotism would have ruinous economic consequences is spelled out by Montesquieu, who was sure that in despotic states economic initiative would be crushed so that “nothing is repaired, nothing improved … all is deserted” (Spirit of the Laws, vol. 14, p. 61).
1. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (New York, 1965 [1734]), p. 210.
2. Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York, 1963), p. 21.
3. See John Keane, “Understanding the Chinese Communist Party: A Conversation with Yu Keping,” OpenDemocracy, April 15, 2014, https://
4. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York, 1950), chapter 9, p. 39.
5. John M. Letiche and Basil Dmytryshyn, eds., Russian Statecraft: The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich (Oxford, 1985), pp. 188, 205.
6. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 8–10 and 62–103; see also Sebastian Heilmann, “From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China’s Distinctive Policy Process,” China Journal 59 (2008): 1–30.
7. Cited in Evan Osnos, “Born Red,” New Yorker, June 4, 2015.
8. Quoted in the dispatch released by WikiLeaks, “Budapest Daily June 26 [2007] D) Budapest 992,” https://
9. Xenophon, Hiero, or The Tyrant: A Discourse on Despotic Rule, trans. H. G. Dakyns (Project Gutenberg, 2013), https://
10. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016).
11. See Marina Walker Guevara et al., “Leaked Records Reveal Offshore Holdings of China’s Elite,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, January 21, 2014, http://
12. Václav Havel, Leaving (London, 2008), p. 70.
13. From the untitled sonnet known as “Natur und Kunst” (1802?), in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Selected Poetry, ed. David Luke (London, 2005), pp. 125–126.
14. Angus McIntyre, ed., Aging and Political Leadership (South Melbourne, 1988), p. 299n10.
15. Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme (London, 1987), p. 409.
16. Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand, ed. Duc de Broglie (London, 1891), p. 119.
17. Hua Yu, China in Ten Words (London, 2013), p. 3.
18. Ain Bandial, “Your Gilded Chariot Awaits: Brunei Sultan Celebrates 50 Years in Power,” Reuters, October 5, 2017, https://
19. Yunshan Liu, “Five Dimensions in Understanding the CPC,” China Insight, July 7, 2014; Xuequan Mu, “Facts & Figures: CPC’s ‘Mass Line’ Campaign Wraps up with Achievements,” Xinhuanet, October 7, 2014, http://
20. Huaguang Huang and Jianzhang Luan, The Roadmap of the 18th CPC National Congress and the Chinese Dream (Beijing, 2013), p. 2.
21. John Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence (Cambridge, 2013), p. 207.
22. Yu Keping, “Democracy or Populism: The Politics of Public Opinion in China,” in Human Rights and Good Governance, ed. Zhang Wei (Leiden, 2016), p. 303; John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA, 1996), p. 118.
23. The whole idea of nurturing governmentality among the subjects of power is discussed by Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (London, 1982), p. 790.
24. Gustave Le Bon, “The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds,” in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Dunwoody, GA, 1897), p. 39.
25. Carlos Fuentes, The Eagle’s Throne (New York, 2006).
26. T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), p. 971.
27. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London, 1953), chapter 3.
28. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. James Strachey (London, 1955), pp. 121, 65–68; Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, ed. James Strachey (London, 1964), p. 109.
29. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge, 2018), p. 7.
30. Heinrich Popitz, Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence (New York, 2017), pp. 14–15. Popitz refers to this type of subordination as “authoritative power”: “recognizing the superiority of others as standard-setters, and striving to be ourselves recognized, to receive from those standard-setters signs to the effect that one has proven himself” (p. 15).
31. Diedrich Westermann, Geschichte Afrikas: Staatenbildung südlich der Sahara (Cologne, 1952).
32. Tacitus, The Histories (New York 1975 [100–110 BCE]), book 1, section 36.
33. During Xi’s first visit to Trinidad and Tobago, it was his “very beautiful” and “very warm” glamorous wife, Peng Liyuan, who turned the trip into a media sensation. Throughout the visit, “the Chinese first lady,” reported China Daily, “impressed the Caribbean country not just with her music, but also her kindness and language capability.” Zhao Yanrong, “First Lady Turns on the Charm, Impresses Hosts,” China Daily, June 4, 2013; Matt Sheehan, “Michelle Obama’s Visit to China Sparks ‘Fashion Showdown’ with China’s First Lady,” Huffington Post, March 22, 2014, https://
34. Tim Arango, “Oprah, Rupert Murdoch, Harvard: Saudi Prince’s U.S. Tour,” New York Times, April 6, 2018.
35. See the Tajikistan Young Leaders Program Final Report (Arlington, VA, 2015).
36. “Happiness,” UAE Government, https://
37. Amy Khor, “Feedback Unit’s 21st Anniversary Dinner Speech,” Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore, October 12, 2006; Singapore Ministry of Community Development and Sports, Building Bridges: The Story of Feedback Unit (Singapore, 2004); OSC (Our Singapore Conversation) Committee, Reflections of Our Singapore Conversation: What Future Do We Want? How Do We Get There? (Singapore, 2013); and Garry Rodan, Participation without Democracy: Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY, 2018), chapter 5.
38. Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa é il fascismo. Discorsi e polemiche (Florence, 1925), p. 98; similar contemporary observations about “the coming of the masses” are made by José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York, 1932).
39. Vladimir Nabokov, “Tyrants Destroyed,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1997 [1938]), p. 455.
40. Cited in Daniel Bell, “Notes on Authoritarian and Democratic Leadership,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (New York, 1965), p. 402. Compare the remark of Gáspár Miklós Tamás: “This is not like old fascism, with its marches, dreams of conquest and global triumph. This is a very uneventful glide toward the precipice, without resistance. We are past the point of danger. It has already happened” (quoted in the Al Jazeera video documentary by Theopi Skarlatos, Prejudice and Pride in Hungary, November 21, 2018, https://
41. As reported by Robert Ley and quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973 [1951]), p. 339.
42. The Gulf Today (Sharjah, UAE), May 10, 2014, p. 2.
43. John Quincy Adams, “Inaugural Address” (March 4, 1825), in The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States, Inaugural, Annual, and Special, from 1789 to 1846, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Williams (New York, 1846), p. 577.
44. Kerry Brown, Ballot Box China—Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State (London, 2011); Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, “The Struggle over Village Elections,” in The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, ed. Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 129–144; Baogang He, Rural Democracy in China: The Role of Village Elections (New York, 2007); Youtian Liu, 村民自治：中国基层民主建设的实践与探索 [Villager self-government: Practice and exploration of grassroots democracy building in China] (Beijing, 2010).
45. “避免 ‘钉子户’ 北京首由居民投票表决拆迁” [Avoid “nail households”: Beijing residents voted to decide demolition], Sohu.com, April 6, 2007, http://
46. The term is used in “习近平在庆祝人民政协成立65周年大会上作重要讲话” [Xi Jinping’s keynote speech to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference], September 22, 2014, http://
47. The following details are drawn from Keane, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter, pp. 103–104.
48. “阿里巴巴选举“公益合伙人” [Alibaba selected public interest committee], Xinhuanet, November 5, 2015, http://
49. The principles and practices of representative democracy are examined in my Breve Historia del Futuro de las Elecciones (Mexico City, 2018), and Sonia Alonso, John Keane, and Wolfgang Merkel, eds., The Future of Representative Democracy (Cambridge, 2011).
50. See the study (covering the period from 1982 to 2005) by Monica Martinez-Bravo et al., “Political Reform in China: Elections, Public Goods and Income Distribution,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012, http://
51. Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (New York, 1998), p. 20; Edmund Malesky and Paul Schuler, “The Single-Party Dictator’s Dilemma: Information in Elections without Opposition,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (November 2011): 491–530.
52. See the Inter-Parliamentary Union figures published at http://
53. Yahya Kamalipour, Media, Power and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran (Lanham, MD, 2010); Tao Dongfeng, “乌坎事件与中国特色的维权” [Wukan incident and rights defense with Chinese characteristics], 21ccom.net, November 1, 2012, http://
1. The contours of the revolution of communicative abundance are examined in John Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence (Cambridge, 2013); see also my “The Unfinished Robots Revolution: Ten Tips for Humans,” in Digitizing Democracy, ed. Aljosha Karim Schapals, Axel Bruns, and Brian McNair (New York, 2019), pp. 214–224.
2. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Dublin, 1767), pt. VI, sec. VI, p. 410.
3. See the background details in Christopher M. Davidson, “The United Arab Emirates: Economy First, Politics Second,” in Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf, ed. Joshua Teitelbaum (New York, 2009), pp. 223–248.
4. A point captured in the lengthy report by Johann Hari, “The Dark Side of Dubai,” Independent (London), April 7, 2009: “When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. ‘It’s the Arab way!’ an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning [pulling a grotesque face].”
5. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York, 1950), ch. 18; Machiavelli, Life of Castruccio Castracani (London, 2003 [1520]), p. 20. The dazzling late medieval “spectacles of state” promulgated by European rulers intent on shrouding their power in courtly magnificence and fantasy representations of themselves as political lords blessed by the Lord Jesus Christ are well analyzed in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’ and the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” Art Bulletin 26 (1944): 207–231; and Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford, 1998). The matter of state rituals as forms of collective “metaphysical theater” that materially shape the sense of reality of subjects is insightfully analyzed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ, 1980).
6. Among the most influential examples is the work by the Nobel Prize-nominated Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power: The Great Political Crises of History (New York, 1942).
7. Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973 [1951]), p. 469.
8. Ma Jian, China Dream (London, 2018).
9. Javad Karamī-Rād Mīlānī, Iqtisād-e siyāsī intikhābāt (Tehran, 2017); Shireen Hunter, Iran Divided: The Historical Roots of Iranian Debates on Identity, Culture and Governance in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD, 2014); Mahmoud Pargoo, “Paradoxes of Secularisation and Islamisation in Post-Revolutionary Iran” (doctoral dissertation, Australian Catholic University, Sydney, September 2018).
10. “Turkmenistan: Election Spectacle Hides Disturbing Economic Decline,” Eurasianet, February 8, 2017, http://
11. The despotic fantasy of abolishing all forms of language is spelled out in the classic “dictator novel” by Jorge Zalamea, El gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto (Buenos Aires, 1952), where strong-arm rule reduces citizens to grunting and squeaking beasts stripped of any intelligible language. The inverse fantasy of replacing language with an artificial language that grants rulers total control of their subjects is the theme of Václav Havel’s satire The Memorandum (New York, 2012 [1965]).
12. Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii (London, 2013).
13. From the 2006 interview with Viktor Orbán cited in Bálint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest, 2016), 231, where he emphasizes that his governing party, Fidesz, “is not an organization based on one single coherent system of principles or an ideology—such an organization is incapable of expanding beyond a certain point.” Lee Hsien Loong’s comment is drawn from his interview with Fortune magazine, April 3, 2000; the obituary of Lee Kuan Yew is the source of the remark by Carlton Tan, “Lee Kuan Yew Leaves a Legacy of Authoritarian Pragmatism,” Guardian, March 23, 2015.
14. Michael Walzer, “Totalitarian Tyranny,” in Totalitarian Democracy and After, ed. Yehoshua Arieli and Nathan Rotenstreich (London, 2002), p. 191.
15. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1964).
16. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972), pp. 1–47.
17. Haig Patapan and Yi Wang, “The Hidden Ruler: Wang Huning and the Making of Contemporary China,” Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 109 (2018): 47–60.
18. See Vladislav Surkov, Texts 1997–2010 (Moscow, 2010), pp. 36ff., and Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin,” London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (October 20, 2011): 3–6.
19. Surkov, Texts 1997–2010, pp. 30–31, 49, 71, 101, 111, 27 (translation amended). See also his lengthy discussion of the weaknesses of “Western democracy” and the coming “glorious century” of Putinism in “Putin’s Long State,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 2, 2019.
20. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Report on the Human Rights Situation in the European Union (Moscow, 2013), pp. 8, 87; Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York, 2018), p. 91.
21. Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (London, 2015), p. 79.
22. Karen Elliott House, On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future (New York, 2013), p. 32.
23. Among the most insightful analyses of how self-censorship and willful conformism operate under these conditions are Cherian George, Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore (Singapore, 2012) and Singapore, Incomplete: Reflections on a First World Nation’s Arrested Political Development (Singapore, 2017), ch. 20.
24. Audrey L. Altstadt, Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (New York, 2017).
25. David Bandurski and Martin Hala, Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases in Chinese Watchdog Journalism (Hong Kong, 2010); more recent cases are analyzed in my “Phantom Democracy: A Puzzle at the Heart of Chinese Politics,” South China Morning Post, September 28, 2018.
26. Yongming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford, CA, 2006), pp. 135–138.
27. Cong Cao, Richard P. Suttmeier, and Dennis Fred Simon, “Success in State Directed Innovation? Perspectives on China’s Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology,” in The New Asian Innovation Dynamics: China and India in Perspective, ed. Govindan Parayil and Anthony P. D’Costa (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 247–264; see also Scott Kennedy, Richard P. Suttmeier, and Jun Su, “Standards, Stakeholders, and Innovation: China’s Evolving Role in the Global Knowledge Economy,” National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, WA, 2008, http://
28. M. A. Qiang, “薛蛮子案警示网络名人：做人不能靠微博—甘肃频道—人民网” [The case of Xue Manzi sounds alarm for internet celebrities: self-discipline expressions on Weibo], People.cn, April 21, 2014, http://
29. The analogy is used by Fang Binxing, former president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and a key developer of the core technology behind the Great Firewall, during an interview with Global Times, February 18, 2011; see “Great Firewall Father Speaks out,” Sina.com, 2011, http://
30. Further details are available in my When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (London, 2017).
31. See, for example “Provisional Regulations for the Development and Management of Instant Messaging Tools and Public Information Services,” China Copyright and Media, July 8, 2014, https://
32. Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked (New York, 2013), pp. 36–37, 133–139; and her Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship (New York, 2006), p. 12.
33. Nart Villeneuve, “Breaching Trust: An Analysis of Surveillance and Security Practices on China’s TOM-Skype Platform,” Information Warfare Monitor and ONI Asia, January 10, 2008; Jedidiah R. Crandall et al., “Chat Program Censorship and Surveillance in China: Tracking TOM-Skype and Sina UC,” First Monday 18, no. 7 (June 30, 2013).
34. Tencent actively monitors WeChat’s content, censoring blacklisted words, rumors, and speculations. Sina Corporation uses Weibo Credit, an unusual points system whose scale begins at 80; for each violation users are fined between 2 and 10 points. When they reach zero, their accounts are deleted. Prominent bloggers—the so-called Big V, verified Weibo account holders—have “assigned special editors.” For estimates about the number of censors, see Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation,” Science 345, no. 6199 (August 22, 2014): 1–10.
35. The phrase fàn zuì, or “getting rice drunk,” is used to indicate a dinner gathering to discuss politics; the phrase is homonymous with “commit a crime.” The mythical grass-mud horse, which began as an online video, soon featured in catchy songs, fake nature documentaries, cartoons, and everyday speech. It was originally created as an in-joke way of poking fun at government censorship of so-called vulgar content. Sounding nearly the same in Chinese as “f—k your mother” (cào nǐ mā), it featured in a smash-hit online video depicting the grass-mud horse defending its habitat (successfully) against a “river crab” (hé xiè), a homonym for “harmony,” a favorite propaganda catchword of the regime. In verbal form, something can be said to have been “river-crabbed”—that is, censored or “harmonized.” A “crab” also refers in Chinese to someone who is a bully. Since the Communist Party, the supposed guarantor of harmony, is often described officially as “the mother of the people,” the phrase “mud-grass horse” or “f—k your mother” thus implies the need to “f—k the Party.” It was not long before “grass-mud horse” also came to mean a web-savvy opponent of regime censorship.
36. See Jian Xu, Media Events in Web 2.0 China: Interventions of Online Activism (Brighton, UK, 2016).
37. “Freedom of Speech Does Not Protect Rumors,” Global Times, December 4, 2012; see also Helen Gao, “Rumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media Is Changing the Nature of Truth in China,” The Atlantic, April 16, 2012.
38. Yao Li, Playing by the Informal Rules—Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge, 2019).
39. See CCTV News post at http://
40. Dila Beisembayeva, Evangelia Papoutsaki, and Elena Kolesova, “Social Media and Online Activism in Kazakhstan: A New Challenge for Authoritarianism?,” in The Asian Conference on Media and Mass Communication, Official Conference Proceedings (Osaka, 2013), pp. 1–15; Robert Mendick, “Tony Blair Gives Kazakhstan’s Autocratic President Tips on How to Defend a Massacre,” The Telegraph (London), August 24, 2014.
41. See my earlier account in “Phantom Democracy.”
42. Shi Rong and Guo Jiu Hui, “Chinese Official Suspended for Asking ‘People or Party?,’ ” Xinhua News Agency, June 22, 2009; my When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter; and my “A Canopy of Deadening Silence: The Beijing Media Assault on Hong Kong Citizens,” The Conversation, October 15, 2014, http://
43. Steven Mufson, “This Documentary Went Viral in China. Then It Was Censored. It Won’t Be Forgotten,” Washington Post, March 16, 2015.
44. Harold Innis Adams, The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951); the point is further developed in Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence, pp. 1–76, 113.
45. Evgeny Morozov contrasts the “digital activist” with the “slacktivist,” who is seen as the “more dangerous digital sibling, which all too often leads to civic promiscuity—usually the result of a mad shopping binge in the online identity supermarket.” See Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York, 2012), pp. 70–71, 190–191.
46. The concept of a distributed network is first outlined in Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications (Santa Monica, CA, 1964); see also Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 20–39, and the analysis of distributed networks and power in W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2013), p. 148.
47. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, 2010), p. 152.
48. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, FL, 1970), p. 44.
49. “Public Opinion via Internet,” China Daily, December 16, 2010.
50. Guohong Zhao, “提高执政党在新传播环境下的社会管理能力” [Enhance the Party’s social management capability in new communication environment], Study Times, March 14, 2011.
51. “蔚蓝地图（污染地图2.0版）” [Blue Map (pollution map 2.0 version)], March 19, 2015, http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3NjM4MjcxNQ==&mid=204781789&idx=1&sn=60ac3993ec39e4e3cbdf0b3cef7c1d58&scene=18&scene=5#rd.
1. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris, 1979 [1748]), book 2, chapter 5, p. 141.
2. David Bandurski, “Propaganda Leaders Scurry off to Carry out the ‘Spirit’ of Hu Jintao’s ‘Important’ Media Speech,” China Media Project, June 25, 2008, http://
3. Nazanin Shahrokni, “The Politics of Polling: Polling and the Constitution of Counter-publics during ‘Reform’ in Iran,” Current Sociology 60, no. 2 (March 2012): 202–221.
4. John Keane, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (London, 2017), 30–40. See also Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 385–386, and Wenfang Tang, Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (Oxford, 2016), pp. 15–19.
5. John Keane, “Eine Partei Soll Smart Werden: Ein Gespräch mit Yu Keping über Die Zukunft der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas,” WZB-Mitteilungen 144 (June 2014): 13–15.
6. Quotation sources and further details are provided in John Keane, “Tibet: Or, How to Ruin Democracy,” The Conversation, March 30, 2013, https://
7. “Views of Chinese President—Global Indicators Database,” Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project, August 2015, http://
8. Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–57 (New York, 2013), pp. 100–103, 292–305; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London, 2010).
9. Levada Center, “O tsentre” [About the center], https://
10. All information about C-POR’S surveys can be found in its official website, http://
11. “广州停车场涨价方案引争议 专业停车场或迎建设潮_扬子晚报网” [The proposal to increase parking fee in Guangzhou caused debate. More parking venues will be built], Yangtze Evening News, March 14, 2014, http://
12. “市民多不赞成提高停车费，质疑治堵效果” [Most citizens don’t support the parking fee increase and challenge the effect of the proposal], Canton Public Opinion Research Center, March 12, 2014, http://
13. Li Gongming, “停车费有望降价,“涨价治堵论”还坚挺否?” [Parking fee is likely to drop. Can the proposal to manage traffic jam through increasing parking fee stand?], New Express Daily, July 5, 2015, http://
14. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York, 1925).
15. Compare the oft-cited formulation of David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Hume: Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994), p. 16: “Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”
16. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements, etc., ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Cambridge, 1928 [1650]), part I, chapter 19, section 11, p. 81. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) turned this understanding against Hobbes, to say that “despotical power” is “an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life whenever he pleases” (in The Works of John Locke [London, 1823], Essay Two, section 15, p. 181).
17. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico: Or, The Elements of Law, Moral and Politic (London, 1655), part 2, chapter 3, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1840), pp. 149–150; Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals (London, 1786 [1755]); see also Elias Canetti, “The Despot’s Hostility to Survivors, Rulers and Their Successors,” in Crowds and Power (Harmondsworth, UK, 1984), pp. 283–287.
18. Franz Neumann, “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (London, 1957), p. 245.
19. John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder, CO, 2000); Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police 1945–1990 (New York, 2014).
20. Herodotus, The Histories, 5.92–5.93. According to the tale, a messenger sent by a far-distant ruler to the court of Thrasybulus, seventh-century BC tyrant of Miletus, seeks advice on how best to govern. Strolling through nearby fields, carefully watched by his guards, Thrasybulus falls silent, then suddenly answers by picking up a scythe and wading into a crop of ripening wheat to lop the tallest and best-formed ears of wheat; Aristotle narrates a different version of the same story in Politics, 5, 1311a. Compare Niccolò Machiavelli, Life of Castruccio Castracani (London, 2003 [1520]), pp. 13–14, 37.
21. Cherian George, “Consolidating Authoritarian Rule: Calibrated Coercion in Singapore,” Pacific Review 20, no. 2 (2007): 127–145.
22. Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Despotisme,” Encyclopédie, vol. 4 (Paris, 1754), p. 887: “In the despotic states … it happens that whoever ascends the throne first strangles his brothers, as in Turkey; or renders them blind, as in Persia; or turns them mad, as in the case of the Mogul: or, if these precautions are not taken, as in Morocco, each vacancy of the throne is followed by a frightful civil war” (my translation).
23. An ancient saying reportedly inspired by the surprise misfortune of the first king of Samos, Ancaeus. Defying a prophecy that he wouldn’t live long enough to taste the wine produced from his own vineyards, Ancaeus staged a magnificent celebration of its first vintage. While raising the first goblet of the newly pressed wine to his lips, Ancaeus was suddenly interrupted. A courtier whispered in his ear that a wild boar had just begun to rampage through his vineyards. Startled, he rushed there to chase away the animal, only to be gored to death.
24. Lucian, “Phalaris,” in Phalaris, Hippias or The Bath and Other Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1913).
25. Cited in Anne Quinney, “Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis,” South Central Review 24, no. 3 (2007): 46–47; Eugėne Ionesco, Rhinoceros and Other Plays (New York, 1960).
26. From the WikiLeaks cable, SECRET SECTION 01 OF 03 BAKU 000054 SIPDIS, January 27, 2010, 13:10, published at https://
27. Ian Traynor, “Hungary PM: Bring Back Death Penalty and Build Work Camps for Immigrants,” Guardian, April 29, 2015.
28. Amnesty International UK, “Waleed Abu al-Khair, Imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for Defending Human Rights,” January 12, 2018, https://
29. “Islam-Fearing Tajikistan Says Hijab Is for Prostitutes,” Eurasianet, April 1, 2015, http://
30. Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2009).
31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973 [1951]), p. 445.
32. See Mark Button and Peter Stiernstedt, “Comparing Private Security Regulation in the European Union,” Policing and Society 28, no. 4 (2016): 398–414. See also European Parliament, Directorate-General for External Policies, The Role of Private Security Companies (PSCs) in CSDP Missions and Operations (Brussels, 2011): “This report demonstrates that potential negative effects range from decreased democratic accountability and governmental control to the perceptions of contractor impunity and insecurity among the civilian populations of host states. There is no catch-all solution to these problems, and for many governments the advantages of hiring private security contractors, such as the ability to fill urgent capability and personnel gaps, cost-efficiency and specialist expertise, outweigh the disadvantages” (p. 5).
33. Mehran Kamrava, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (Ithaca, NY, 2015), pp. 135–139.
34. Consider the written constitution of the People’s Republic of China. According to its second chapter, which covers the fundamental rights and duties of citizens, every citizen is equal before the law (Article 33). All citizens who have reached the age of eighteen enjoy the right to vote and to stand for election (Article 34). Every citizen is blessed with the freedoms of communication, civil association, and public assembly (Article 35). The generous entitlement to “enjoy freedom of religious belief” is granted, sensibly, on the condition that citizens don’t engage in activities that “disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state” (Article 36). Citizens enjoy habeas corpus and personal dignity, and “insult, libel, false charge or frame-up” directed against them is strictly prohibited (Articles 37–38). Their rights to privacy are inviolable (Article 39), and all citizens of the People’s Republic of China have the right to “criticize and make suggestions to any state organ or functionary” (Article 41).
35. See, for example, Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000–1800 (Washington, DC, 1995), and Richard Potz, “Islam and Islamic Law in European Legal History Islam and Islamic Law,” European History Online, November 21, 2011, http://
36. Yu Jiang, “近代中国法学语词的形成与发展” [Formation and development of modern Chinese legal language and terms], in 中西法律传统 [Chinese and western legal tradition], vol. 1 (Beijing, 2001).
37. The following section draws upon Martin Krygier, “The Rule of Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, ed. Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó (Oxford, 2012), 233–249, and Martin Krygier, “The Rule of Law: Legality, Teleology, Sociology,” in Relocating the Rule of Law, ed. Gianluigi Palombella and Neil Walker (Oxford, 2009), pp. 45–69.
38. Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Despotisme,” in Encyclopédie, vol. 4 (Paris, 1754), p. 888.
39. Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March toward Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2002), p. 7; cf. John Gillespie, “Understanding Legality in Vietnam,” in Vietnam’s New Order, ed. Stephanie Balme and Mark Sidel (New York, 2007).
40. An Baijie, “Xi Jinping Vows ‘Power within Cage of Regulations,’ ” China Daily, January 23, 2013.
41. David L. Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford, 2013); Xi Jinping, “Working Together for a New Progress of Security and Development in Asia,” speech in Dushanbe, June 15, 2019, https://
42. Stephen Olson and Clyde Prestowitz, The Evolving Role of China in International Institutions (Washington, DC, 2011), p. 11, http://
43. Li Xiaojun, “Learning and Socialization in International Institutions: China’s Experience with the WTO Dispute Settlement System,” in China Joins Global Governance, ed. Mingjiang Li (Lanham, MD, 2012), pp. 75–94; Xiaojun Li, “Understanding China’s Behavioral Change in the WTO Dispute Settlement System,” Asian Survey 52, no. 6 (December 2012): 1111–1137.
44. “Firmly Safeguard Rule of Law in HK: People’s Daily,” Xinhua News, October 4, 2014, http://
45. Along these lines, see the interesting introductory comments by Yan Fu on Chinese understandings of “law” in Montesquieu, 法 意 [The spirit of the laws], trans. Yan Fu (Beijing, 1981), p. 2; Jothie Rajah, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (New York, 2012); Karen Turner-Gottschang, James V. Feinerman, and R. Kent Guy, eds., The Limits of the Rule of Law in China (Seattle, WA, 2015); Xiaobo Lu, Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party (Stanford, CA, 2000); Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa, eds., Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (New York, 2008); and Kim Lane Scheppele, “Autocratic Legalism,” University of Chicago Law Review 85, no. 545 (2018): 545–583.
46. Kathryn Hendley, Everyday Law in Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2017).
47. Dan Washburn, The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream (London, 2014).
48. The famous “dual state” thesis, first outlined in Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford, 2017 [1941]), refers to a polity marked by a “line of division” between “a “normative state” that generally respects its own laws, and a “prerogative state” that violates the very same laws” (p. xiii).
49. See the contrasting interpretations by Rebecca Liao, “Why Bo Xilai’s Trial Is a Victory for the Rule of Law in China,” The Atlantic, August 7, 2013, and Donald Clarke, “The Bo Xilai Trial and China’s ‘Rule of Law’: Same Old, Same Old,” The Atlantic, August 21, 2013.
50. The original link to Xi’s speech is no longer available, but it can be retrieved from the Internet Archive: “习近平重提 ‘刀把子’ 论有什么深意?” [Why did Xi bring up again the “knife handle”?), People.cn, March 27, 2015, https://
1. Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 133–142; R. Koebner, “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 293–296; Patricia Springborg, “The Contractual State: Reflections on Orientalism and Despotism,” History of Political Thought 8, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 395–433; Alain Grosrichard, Structure du sérail: La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l’Occident classique (Paris, 1979).
2. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, vol. 3 (London, 1772), pp. vii–xxxvii.
3. The following quotations are drawn from Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Législation orientale (Amsterdam, 1778), pp. 1–13.
4. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ, 1978) has shown that modern despotism in the world of Islam was typically the poisonous fruit of concerted efforts by European colonizers to destroy local civil society institutions, customs, and codes of law and to install and support mocked-up kings, shahs, and one-party rulers. Mikhail Rostovtzeff’s classic Caravan Cities (Oxford, 1932) describes the long history of contractual legal codes that served in the same region to protect the property and rights of traders well before the European invasions and conquests.
5. Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (London, 1804), pp. 111–112. The positive defense of despotic power by name is usually credited to the French political writer Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre, still well known today for his visionary proposals for international peace. Castel was sure that a strong, undivided monarchic state could benevolently protect its subjects from the mischief caused by petty tyrants, such that “when power is united to reason, it cannot be too great or too despotic for the greatest utility of society” (“Pour perfectioner le Gouvernement des Etats,” in Ouvrajes de politique, vol. 3 [Rotterdam, 1733], p. 197).
6. Giuseppe Gorani, Il vero dispotismo (London, 1770); François Quesnay, “Foreword,” Le Despotisme de la Chine (Paris, 1767), in Lewis A. Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (San Antonio, TX, 1946), pp. 141, 264. The ways of thinking and practical contributions of the Physiocrats are well captured by Georges Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France (Paris, 1910).
7. The eighteenth-century intellectual fascination with the vision of undivided state power as “an almighty pedagogue” is emphasized by Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Berlin, 1978 [1928]), pp. 97–129.
8. The attack on “les triste effets de la puissance arbitraire et despotique de la cour de France” was led by the anonymously published series of “mémoires” or dissertations, Les soupirs de la France esclave, qui aspire après la liberté [The sighs of an enslaved France who yearns after liberty] (Amsterdam, 1689), part 3, September 15, p. 29. Often attributed to the French Calvinist pastor Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713), its attack on selfish and reckless uses of power caused a great stir despite its banning and burning by the royal censors.
9. Frederick of Prussia, Refutation of Machiavelli’s Prince: or, Anti-Machiavel, ed. Paul Sonnino (Athens, OH, 1981), pp. 32–33: “Just as kings can do good when they want to do it, they can do evil whenever they please.… In every country there are honest and dishonest people just as in every family there are handsome persons along with one-eyed, hunchbacks, blind, and cripples.… [T]here are and always will be monsters among princes, unworthy of the character with which they are invested.”
10. Denis Diderot, Mémoires pour Catherine II, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris, 1966), pp. 117–118. The follow-up remark is found in the best-selling anticolonial tract by Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the West and East Indies, vol. 8 (London, 1783), p. 32.
11. Jean-Louis Carra, L’orateur des Etats-Généraux, pour 1789 (Paris, 1789), p. 12.
12. Vicesimus Knox, The Spirit of Despotism (London, 1795), pp. 3, 27. As the forces of Jacobinism seized the upper hand during the early phase of the French Revolution, Knox (unlike poor Jean-Louis Carra) saved his skin by recalling the work and thereafter refused publication until an anonymous edition appeared in 1821.
13. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (London, 1791), p. 132; and see my Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, 1995).
14. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (London, 2003), pp. 94–95: “The despot can promote his will over the entire social body only through a permanent state of violence.… The despot is the permanent outlaw, the individual without social ties. The despot is the man alone. The despot is someone who … performs the greatest crime, the crime par excellence, of a total breach of the social pact by which the very body of society can exist and maintain itself.… The despot is the individual who promotes his violence, his whims, and his irrationality as the general law or raison d’Etat.… The first monster is the king. The king … is the general model from which, through successive historical shifts and transformations, the countless little monsters who people nineteenth-century psychiatryand legal psychiatry are historically derived.… All human monsters are descendants of Louis XVI.”
15. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (Quincy), November 13, 1815, and Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (Monticello), September 12, 1821, Founders Online, National Archives. The promiscuity of the language of despotism was evident in the well-known plea of Abigail Adams to her husband to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” because all men “would be tyrants if they could” (March 31, 1776). John Adams replied, as men still do, that in practice men “have only the Name of Masters,” so empowering women further would bring the “Despotism of the Peticoat” (April 14, 1776). Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://
16. James Mill, The History of British India, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London, 1820), pp. 166–167; John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 19, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto, 1977), p. 567; Mill, “On Liberty,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 18, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto, 1977), p. 224.
17. Webster’s Complete Dictionary of the English Language, revised and improved by Chauncey A. Goodrich and Noah Porter (London, 1886), p. 363.
18. See Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu: Quid secundatus politicae scientiae instituendae contulerit, ed. W. Watts Willer (Oxford, 1997 [1892]), 29e, 31e, 39e–40e, 41e.
19. The few examples worth noting include the attack by Lord Hewart, lord chief justice of England, on the Westminster Parliament’s surrender of its precious legislative powers to the “administrative lawlessness” of a bloated civil service bureaucracy in The New Despotism (London, 1929); the Tocqueville-style defense of the “old American ‘horse and buggy’ road of democracy with the Constitution as its foundation” against the worship of state power by the “Prophets of the New Deal” in Raoul E. Desvernine, Democratic Despotism (New York, 1936), pp. 231–243; the antifascist reflections of Charles E. Merriam, The New Democracy and the New Despotism (New York, 1939); Harold D. Lasswell, “Democracy, Despotism and Style [1949],” in On Political Sociology (Chicago, 1977), pp. 251–256 (Lasswell was the consultant for the short documentary Despotism [Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, 1946], https://
20. See my detailed diagnosis of the term authoritarianism in When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy in China (London, 2017).
21. These key points are examined at length in my Power and Humility: The Future of Monitory Democracy (Cambridge, 2018), especially part 1.
22. See Carl Joachim Friedrich, Authority (Cambridge, MA, 1958); Chen Fengjun, “On the Conception and Contributing Factor of Authoritarianism,” Southeast Asian Studies 4 (2000): 68–73; and Huang Wansheng, “A Dialogue on the Critiques of the New Authoritarianism,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 23, no. 2 (1990): 77–93.
23. Denis Diderot, “Autorité Politique,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., vol. 1, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris, 1751), p. 898.
24. Harold D. Lasswell, “Style in Political Communications,” in On Political Sociology (Chicago, 1977), p. 251.
25. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (1761), in Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Amsterdam, 1794), pp. 11–12; Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (London, 1900), 73: “There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.”
26. The following quotations are my translations, drawn from Étienne de La Boétie Le discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. Pierre Léonard (Paris, 1976).
27. Denis Diderot, “Refutation of Helvétius,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York, 1966), pp. 297–298.
28. George B. Cheever, The Hierarchical Despotism, Lectures on the Mixture of Civil and Ecclesiastical Power in the Governments of the Middle Ages etc. (New York, 1844).
29. On Fénelon and Montesquieu, see Louis Althusser, Montesquieu-Rousseau-Marx: Politics and History (London, 1972), pp. 82–83. For the early attacks on despotism by Thomas Gordon, see The Works of Tacitus … To Which Are Prefixed Political Discourses upon That Author (London, 1728–1731) and (with John Trenchard) Independent Whig: Or, A Defence of Primitive Christianity (London, 1721), and Cato’s Letters (London, 1724).
30. Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the West and East Indies, vol. 8 (London, 1783), p. 32.
31. Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert, “Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands,” in Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (Berlin, 1753), especially pp. 384–386, 398.
32. Edmund Burke, “A Vindication of Natural Society” (1756), in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (London, 1899), pp. 80–82.
33. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” p. 401.
34. The following quotations are from Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2, preface by François Furet (Paris, 1981), pp. 385, 379. All translations are my own.
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York, 1906), pp. 440 and (quoting Friedrich Engels) 446: “The slavery in which the bourgeoisie has bound the proletariat, comes nowhere more plainly into daylight than in the factory system. In it all freedom comes to an end both at law and in fact. The workman must be in the factory at half past five. If he comes a few minutes late, he is punished.… He must eat, drink and sleep at word of command.… The despotic bell calls him from his bed, calls him from breakfast and dinner. And how does he fare in the mill? There the master is the absolute law-giver. He makes what regulations he pleases; he alters and makes additions to his code at pleasure … [T]he courts say to the workman: Since you have entered into this contract voluntarily, you must now carry it out.… These workmen are condemned to live, from their ninth year till their death, under this mental and bodily torture.”
2. John Keane, “The European Graveyard,” in The Life and Death of Democracy (London, 2009), pp. 455–581.
3. Plato, “The Republic,” in The Dialogues of Plato, ed. Benjamin Jowett (New York, 1897), book VIII, section 562, p. 392; on the use by Greek commentators and critics alike of the now obsolete verb demokrateo (δημοκρατέω) and its relation to other words like aristokratia (αριστοκρατία, “aristocracy”), ploutokratia (πλουτοκρατία, “the rule of the rich”), and monokratoria (μονοκρατορία, “monocracy” or “the rule of a single person”), see my The Life and Death of Democracy, pp. 58–60.
4. Aili Mari Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Boulder, CO, 2010), pp. 193–194. The dynamics of corruption are bitingly satirised in Pepetela [Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos], The Return of the Water Spirit (Oxford, 2002).
5. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge, 2010), p. 5. Their survey of thirty-five cases of “competitive authoritarianism” in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and postcommunist Eurasia concludes that during the period from 1990 through 2008, “where linkage to the West was high, competitive authoritarian regimes democratized.”
6. Carole Cadwalladr, “Brexit, the Ministers, the Professor and the Spy: How Russia Pulls Strings in UK,” Guardian, November 5, 2017.
7. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York, 2018); Alina Polyakova and Spencer P. Boyer, The Future of Political Warfare: Russia, the West, and the Coming Age of Global Digital Competition (Washington, DC, 2018); and Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 2019).
8. Oliver Stuenkel, Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order (Cambridge, 2016); and John Keane, “The New Chinese Empire,” Focus (Johannesburg) 85 (June 2019): 8–15.
9. Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010.
10. Cited in Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, “How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments,” New York Times, December 15, 2018.
11. Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, Mémoires, souvenirs, et anecdotes, par le comte de Ségur, vol. 1, in Bibliothèque des mémoires: Relatif à l’histoire de France; Pendant le 18e siècle, vol. 19, ed. F. Barrière (Paris, 1859), p. 345.
12. Many of these trends are diagnosed in my Power and Humility: The Future of Monitory Democracy (Cambridge, 2018). See also Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York, 2016); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014); and Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione, The Antiegalitarian Mutation: The Failure of Institutional Politics in Liberal Democracies (New York, 2016).
13. John Keane, “Why Google Is a Political Matter: A Conversation with Julian Assange,” The Monthly, June 2015, https://
14. Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (New York, 2004), p. 5; Sean Hannity, “Interview with Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo,” US Department of State, Washington, DC, November 2, 2018, https://
15. Michael J. Barry, “The Sword,” in Benham’s Book of Quotations (London, 1948), p. 18a.
16. The points are discussed at length in my Reflections on Violence (London, 1996), Violence and Democracy (Cambridge, 2004), and Power and Humility, pp. 377–436.
17. See my “Does Democracy Have a Violent Heart?,” in Power and Humility, pp. 379–409; and the remark by Bertrand Russell that “war is the chief promoter of despotism,” in his Power: A New Social Analysis (London, 1938), p. 309.
18. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1966 [1767]), pp. 278–279.
19. Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge, 2018).
20. “United States Cannot Crush Us, Says Huawei Founder Ren Zhengfei,” Straits Times (Singapore), February 19, 2019; Xi Jinping, Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, report delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, October 18, 2017, p. 23, http://
21. Denis Diderot, “Extracts from the Histoire des Deux Indes,” in Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 1992), p. 174. My The Life and Death of Democracy can fruitfully be read as an extended commentary on this remark, as a lengthy effort to redefine democracy as the most effective political weapon for dealing with the follies and catastrophes that surely flow from the hubris produced by concentrations of arbitrary power.
22. See my “Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State 1750–1850,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London, 1988), pp. 35–71; and Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago, 1975), pp. 37–39. The remark about empowerment through group association is made in correspondence by Gustave de Beaumont to Tocqueville, cited in George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938), p. 101.
23. Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and the Fragility of Networked Protest (Princeton, NJ, 2017); Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (London, 2011); Simon Tormey, The End of Representative Politics (Cambridge, 2015); Michael Walzer, Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics (New York, 2019). The strategic importance of laughter is analyzed in Li Mingtao, “Why They Say Autocratic Regimes Are Laughed to Death,” China Digital Times, March 25, 2016, https://
24. Details of possible new democratic institutions and innovative strategies are discussed at length in my Power and Humility.
25. Andreas Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism (Oxford, 2013).
