Why am I passionate about this?

A good part of my life has been devoted to trying to think and write creatively about politics, history, media, and democracy. Under the pseudonym Erica Blair, my first writings were about the meaning and significance of civil society. In early 1989, in London, I founded the worldā€™s first Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD); more recently, I designed and launched the experimental Democracy Lighthouse platform. My books have been published in more than three dozen languages, and Iā€™ve also contributed interviews and articles to global platforms such as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Letras Libres, and the Times Literary Supplement.


I wrote...

Tom Paine

By John Keane,

Book cover of Tom Paine

What is my book about?

A citizen extraordinary and daredevil writer who penned the three biggest-selling books of the 18th century, Tom Paine still strikesā€¦

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Jacques the Fatalist

John Keane Why did I love this book?

Brimming with paradoxes and ironies, this 18th-century novel about language and power is more than an ingenious attack on the bland literary fashions of a closed-minded ancien rƩgime of aristocratic power and privilege.

I love its playful celebration of heterodoxy and its witty defense of the clever thoughts of an upstart servant who demands to be treated with respect by daring to call into question his masterā€™s illusions about the meaning of life. 

By Denis Diderot, Michael Henry (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Jacques the Fatalist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in Jacques the Fatalist he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is truly free in a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability. Characters emerge and disappear as the pair travel across the country, and tales begin and are submerged by greater stories, to reveal a panoramic view of eighteenth-century society. But while Jacques seems to choose his own path, he remains convinced of one philosophical belief: that everyā€¦


Book cover of On Certainty

John Keane Why did I love this book?

An exhilarating set of 676 aphorisms composed by the Austrian-British anti-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during the final months of his life, On Certainty questions the human will to cock-sure knowledge and mastery of the world. Itā€™s an appeal for greater humility about what we claim to know, a warning against literal-mindedness and self-indulgent talk of "facts" and "objective reality." Facts are artifacts, and what counts as truth varies through time and space, he dared to say.

Wittgenstein went on to imagine a world where instead of saying ā€˜I know,ā€™ we chose more humbly to say "I believe I know." This suggestion has an important flipside: gloomy convictions that weā€™re living in a doomed age headed for hell are the conjoined twin of optimistic know-all certainty. Pessimism is optimism turned upside down.

By Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E.M. Anscombe (editor), G.H. von Wright (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked On Certainty as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defense of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.


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Book cover of Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China

Bernardine's Shanghai Salon by Susan Blumberg-Kason,

Meet the Jewish salon host in 1930s Shanghai who brought together Chinese and expats around the arts as civil war erupted and World War II loomed on the horizon.

Bernardine Szold Fritz arrived in Shanghai in 1929 to marry her fourth husband. Only thirty-three years old, she found herself inā€¦

Book cover of The Origins of Totalitarianism

John Keane Why did I love this book?

Commonly interpreted as the finest account of the ā€˜gigantic criminalityā€™ of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes, Arendtā€™s book has for me a more immediately visceral significance. It has profound things to say about what she called a "terribly cruel" contradiction lurking within the modern democratic commitment to equality.

She pointed out that although democracy demands that we recognize others as our equals, certain groups, especially for reasons of their past sufferings, are prone to misuse and abuse their democratic freedoms. They do so by violently asserting their rights to live as a "sovereign people" at the expense of others whom they treat as "superfluous."

Would Arendt have been surprised by the way a "democratic" state born of the ashes of genocide is nowadays behaving? Would she have condoned its military efforts to destroy "in whole or in part" (Genocide Convention Article 2c) a "superfluous" people known as Palestinians? Almost surely not.  

By Hannah Arendt,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Origins of Totalitarianism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianismā€”an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history.

The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our timeā€”Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russiaā€”which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discussesā€¦


Book cover of The Need for Roots

John Keane Why did I love this book?

At once Jewish, French, and Christian, an ex-factory worker and field laborer, and political thinker whose short life was tragically ended by a hunger strike against Nazism, Simone Weil should today be remembered as the first thoughtful defender of our need for social and ecological roots.

Published posthumously, this extraordinary book is a withering protest against deracination: the forcible uprooting of peoplesā€™ lives by unbridled capitalism, state socialism, nationalism, and war. Anticipating the recent celebration of the ideals of civil society, Weil stood against violence and every form of institutional standardization, bossing, and bullying. Felt obligations toward others, freedom from arbitrary power, and self-government based on citizensā€™ grounded consent are, for her, the mark of a good society.

By Simone Weil,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Need for Roots as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hailed by Andre Gide as the patron saint of all outsiders, Simone Weil's short life was ample testimony to her beliefs. In 1942 she fled France along with her family, going firstly to America. She then moved back to London in order to work with de Gaulle. Published posthumously The Need for Roots was a direct result of this collaboration. Its purpose was to help rebuild France after the war. In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basicā€¦


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Book cover of I Meant to Tell You

I Meant to Tell You by Fran Hawthorne,

When Mirandaā€™s fiancĆ©, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorneyā€™s office, the couple joke that Mirandaā€™s parentsā€™ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russā€™s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russā€™s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested forā€¦

Book cover of The Power of the Powerless

John Keane Why did I love this book?

One of those rare pieces of political writing that outlive their moment of birth to become classics, Havelā€™s grippingly written essay invites us to rethink the meaning of power. The radical idea is that the powerful are never as powerful as they, or we, might imagine.

Since within any institution or political order, the lines of organized power pass like low-current electricity through all its subjects, the downtrodden always have within themselves the power to short-circuit the system and to remedy their own powerlessness by refusing the power of rulers bent on running and ruining their everyday lives. 

By VƔclav Havel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Power of the Powerless as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Vaclav Havel's remarkable and rousing essay on the tyranny of apathy, with a new introduction by Timothy Snyder

Cowed by life under Communist Party rule, a greengrocer hangs a placard in their shop window: Workers of the world, unite! Is it a sign of the grocer's unerring ideology? Or a symbol of the lies we perform to protect ourselves?

Written in 1978, Vaclav Havel's meditation on political dissent - the rituals of its suppression, and the sparks that re-ignite it - would prove the guiding manifesto for uniting Solidarity movements across the Soviet Union. A portrait of activism in theā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

Tom Paine

By John Keane,

Book cover of Tom Paine

What is my book about?

A citizen extraordinary and daredevil writer who penned the three biggest-selling books of the 18th century, Tom Paine still strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant past.

My award-winning biography shows why, among friends and enemies alike, he earned an international public reputation as a fierce critic of poverty, slavery, and war, as a dogged enemy of political corruption, religious bigotry, snobbery, and groveling, and as a pioneering champion of republican democracy and the civil and political rights of citizens of all countries. 

Book cover of Jacques the Fatalist
Book cover of On Certainty
Book cover of The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Contrary to popular belief, the Atrahasis Epic is not merely a flood myth. In some ways it can be called a creation myth. However, it does not concern itself with the creation of the universe or even of the earth. Rather, the created work in question is one of cultureā€¦

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