A review of Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, by Ernest Gellner.
About the Author
Marc F. Plattner, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. He also serves as cochair of the International Advisory Board of the Institute for Political Studies at the Portuguese Catholic University.
Influence operations by the People’s Republic of China and its “united front” organs were exposed years ago, but civil society and Chinese-Australians were first in understanding how to counter them.
Taking advantage of broad global respect for regionalism, authoritarian regimes are using their own regional organizations to bolster fellow autocracies. These groupings offer a mechanism for lending legitimacy, redistributing resources, and insulating…
