Two Cheers For Cosmocracy. "Global Civil Society?" by John Keane. [review]

Abstract

With the world apparently going to hell in a handbasket, the flood of contributions to ideas of global governance shows no sign of abating. John Keane is an Adelaide-born heavy-hitter in the area of studies of civil society and democracy, and also a political biographer — most recently of Vaclav Havel. He is thus ideally placed to write a book that is both accessible to the general, well-informed reader, while sacrificing little in the way of academic smarts. He goes a long way towards succeeding, but that is in part because the political questions to which the answer is ‘global civil society’ by their very nature exclude certain dimensions of human beings whose character would complicate the picture.