Discusses long-term patterns of thought surrounding the social role of technology and its implications for democracy.

The introductory chapter, ‘Revolutionary Pasts’ , begins with an overview of twentieth-century schemes aimed at remaking the world order, and specifically, the project of Communist Internationalism. I situate my work within recent scholarship on twentieth-century internationalisms and transnational approaches within South Asian historiography. In doing so, I explore the ways in which revolutionary pasts suggest new methodological and conceptual approaches in transnational history writing. The second section is a detailed meditation on the archives through which the Left speaks. At stake is a broader methodological question of how revolutionary pasts can be traced through the archival grain. These methodological questions in turn invite a reassessment of how the Left has been written about. They also suggest new approaches in excavating its intellectual, social, and political history. Lastly, I provide an overview of the following chapters and how they are threaded together through the central arguments of the book.

The concluding chapter pulls together key elements of a Green vision for global politics. It summarises the basis o a Green alternative in each of the areas covered in the book: security, economy, the state, global governance, development and sustainability. Recognising diversity of views and multiple theories of change, it suggests critical areas where this vision can be taken forward around the renewal of democracy and subsidiarity, by recommoning and economic democracy, by building new alliances and pursuing just transitions. The politics of the twenty-first century are and will be the politics of sustainability. The question for all of us is: whose politics and on whose terms?

This chapter focuses on the period 1680–1720, noting how religious confrontations exacerbated tensions between different visions of legitimate power and civic society across many parts of Europe. This instability is reflected both in the experimental work produced by some writers and in the need for subversive texts to be disseminated illegally to evade censors. Textual analysis of the Bible itself led to profound controversies to which the only rational response seemed to be the implementation of some form of religious toleration, but no government could do so effectively. This chapter looks at the very different arguments and styles deployed by a range of writers from Hobbes and Spinoza to less well–known underground polemicists in the early years of the eighteenth century. A rich vein of fictional writing, too, confirms that this was a period of huge significance in terms of questioning established authority in all fields of knowledge, creating new networks of writers with ideas that might be considered ‘dangerous’, and laying solid foundations for a recognisable public opinion. Print was creating an effective ‘republic of readers’.