Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
One day they will be like us. That was once the West’s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. However, many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. One day, he warns, we may be more like them.
Authoritarian regimes are rising, but while the human rights abuses are ongoing, there’s a new charm to the despots’ ways. They cloak themselves in democracy-coloured fabric, a new iteration of the old “bread and circuses”, allowing the rising middle classes to pretend that citizens are free.
Professor John Keane, one of Australia’s top thinkers and writers about democracy and its limitations and pretences, casts his rebellious eye over what we used to think of as a simple binary. The free world versus… what, exactly? Professor Keane draws on the themes of his most recent book, The New Despotism, to illustrate how governments have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy.
This event is presented as part of Just A Thought, an exclusive In-Conversation series presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre with Tory Shepherd
www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au
One day they will be like us. That was once the West’s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. However, many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. One day, he warns, we may be more like them.
Authoritarian regimes are rising, but while the human rights abuses are ongoing, there’s a new charm to the despots’ ways. They cloak themselves in democracy-coloured fabric, a new iteration of the old “bread and circuses”, allowing the rising middle classes to pretend that citizens are free.
Professor John Keane, one of Australia’s top thinkers and writers about democracy and its limitations and pretences, casts his rebellious eye over what we used to think of as a simple binary. The free world versus… what, exactly? Professor Keane draws on the themes of his most recent book, The New Despotism, to illustrate how governments have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy.
This event is presented as part of Just A Thought, an exclusive In-Conversation series presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre with Tory Shepherd
www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au
