The publication of nine of Murray Bookchin's previously unpublished essays from 1990 to 2002 in The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy is indeed a timely one. Bookchin has written extensively on anarchism, left-wing history and direct democracy since the 1960s, and his ideas are currently experiencing a renaissance. As political activists, scholars and students are trying to understand the outbursts of political action and direct democratic experimentation in Zucotti Park (Occupy Wall Street), Syntagma Square (the Greek Aganaktismenoi movement), Puerto del Sol (the Spanish Indignados movement) and elsewhere, attention has been drawn to Bookchin's work on assembly democracy. In addition, as prominent scholars such as David Graeber and David Harvey engage in the discussion on the Kurdish movement and their attempts to establish mechanisms of direct democracy and confederalism amidst the war against ISIS, these scholars acknowledge Bookchin's lasting influence on the Kurdish PKK and Abdullah Ocalan (Graeber, 2014; Harvey, 2015). Furthermore, in the recent revival of anarchist perspectives on society and politics, Bookchin is often mentioned as a leading contemporary anarchist, who has succeeded in reinvigorating the anarchist project for the twentieth century. He has done so by incorporating the problems of ecology, capitalist production and urban planning and development into classic anarchist themes of self-management and face-to-face communities (see for instance May, 1994, pp. 51-63). While reading the nine essays in The Next Revolution, it becomes clear why Bookchin's influence on various different fields is increasing. Bookchin is an imaginative thinker, who leaves few themes untouched. In one essay-'The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society'-Bookchin discusses the grievances of contemporary capitalism with 'its imperative, which no entrepreneur or corporation can ignore without facing destruction: growth, more growth and still more growth' (p. 33). Such a grow-or-die capitalism is the real root, in Bookchin's evaluation, of the present ecological crisis, and as such, it cannot be tackled by moral responsibility and individual dutieswhat Bookchin calls New Age privatism.

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power (providing citizens’ assemblies with clear agenda-setting prerogatives beyond non-binding consultation); expertise (allowing assembly participants to influence which stakeholders and experts to solicit inputs from); and participation (engaging wider parts of the citizenry in the deliberative process).

The article investigates Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt’s theory of the constituent power. By comparing Schmitt and Arendt’s notions of democracy, the people and the public sphere, the article seeks to establish an alternative to deliberative democracy’s conceptualisation of the relation between democracy and the public sphere. By pointing to the differences between the debating and legitimating public sphere inherent in deliberative democracy on the one hand and the lawgiving and constituting public sphere in the works of Schmitt and Arendt on the other, the article investigates Schmitt’s notion of plebiscitary democracy and Arendt’s idea of a federal republic of councils. These political modes of organizations attempt to overcome the hierarchical relation between representatives and represented and seek to envision the people as able, when gathered together in public, to give laws themselves, and not only play the role as electors or debaters.

This chapter engages with the Greek French political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis and his interpretation of the workers’ councils’ movement. The chapter argues that Castoriadis developed two different theories of council democracy; an early theory developed while he was the figure head of the radical French group Socialisme ou Barberie, and a late theory developed in tandem with his overarching theory of autonomy, the imaginary, and the instituting power. While Castoriadis has often been criticised, for example by Jürgen Habermas, for not theorising the institutional preconditions for democratic autonomy and for deploying a groundless and normless account of political action as instituting ex nihilo, the chapter argues that Castoriadis’ late theory of council democracy provides a vantage point through which Castoriadis’ concepts of ‘instituting power’ and ‘autonomy’ can grounded in institutional structures, i.e., the council system.

The large amount of theoretical debates over the notion of biopolitics originally emerges from Michel Fou- cault’s discussions of sovereignty, disciplinary power and biopolitics. Here, biopolitics is conceptualised as a qualitatively di erent and modern regime of power developed in contrast to the model of sovereignty. e ultimate theorist of sovereignty in the canon of Western political thought is omas Hobbes, and in Leviathan two important transitions for the sovereign model takes place: the human being transcends his animal-like condition and becomes a subject, a transition from the image of homo homini lupus to the image of the political subject, and the relation between human beings changes from the of war of all against all to the politics of the state, thus the possibility of politics emerges. Interestingly, as the concept of biopolitics is developed against the backdrop of this theory of sovereignty, both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben delivers detailed interpretations of Hobbes’ state of nature. By analysing these interpretations, the article tries to understand the emergence of a distinctively biopolitical conception of man and the political in contrast to the conceptions in the paradigm of sovereignty.