John Keane

In a recent interview, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was asked whether his country was heading in what his interlocutor, the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, called ‘an illiberal direction’. Bristling, Jaishankar denied the charge. India is undergoing something quite different, he argued. It is experiencing a ‘very deep democratization’. This process might be hard for outsiders to understand, but it was positive, not problematic. After decades of rule by an English-speaking, Western-educated élite, the country was at last being governed by politicians who spoke and thought and behaved like ordinary Indians.

John Keane is Australia’s leading scholar of democracy, with work that demonstrates an impressive command of global sources. Keane’s most widely cited book, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), included new research on the origins of public assemblies in India many centuries before the familiar democracy of Greek city-states. Keane located the origins of democracy in non-European traditions, in part by tracing the linguistic origins of the concept.

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is the major event on the Indigenous visual arts calendar. Its significance rests with the quality art exhibited under the mantle of the award and the crowd it attracts to Darwin every August. Artists from disparate communities mingle to cement relationships through shared kinship, songlines, and history. Excited coordinators from community cooperatives mix with urbane curators and gallery owners – projects are conceived. Collectors jostle to reserve the best works.

How does one review a serious academic study of 950 pages that covers two thousand years of political history? In this case I shall be upfront and declare that I am only reviewing part of Keane’s thesis, and will leave it to historians to discuss the remainder of his book. If I concentrate on the last 300 pages, this is because they contain more than enough material for even the keenest reader, let alone a harassed reviewer.

With the world apparently going to hell in a handbasket, the flood of contributions to ideas of global governance shows no sign of abating. There is something dizzying about immersing oneself in such far-reaching and ultimately – necessarily – optimistic works about the possibility of a just global civil order at a time when the most basic liberal democratic rights and freedoms are being traded away willy-nilly at the national and local level. From national security laws to nightclub curfews, nothing seems easier to knock over than liberty, and nothing more difficult to resist than cultures of fear and repression.

Nevertheless, there is no reason not to project into a future that may offer scope for a reversal of this process. 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.