As governments actively collect and analyse more information about their populations than ever before, citizens struggle to defend their privacy and determine which state secrets are legitimate and which are not. Jurisdictional complexity, the inability of representatives to gain access to relevant information, citizens' relative lack of expertise, and the partisanship that exists between different government agencies make oversight difficult. Secrets and Democracy considers afresh the role that secrets play within liberal democracies and the impact this has on the public's 'right to know, ' the individual's 'right to privacy, ' and the government's penchant for secrecy and data collection. Now, perhaps more than ever, secrecy (and the disclosure of secrets) is in the public eye thanks to the phenomenon of WikiLeaks. However, this book places WikiLeaks in the context of centuries-old discussion of the necessity of secrecy, as well as contemporary debate concerning the relative merits of privacy, openness, transparency, and accountabilit

"Liberty after Liberalism" frees the concept of the active citizen from both the territorial confines of the nation-state and the limits imposed by republican, city-state models. Lawrence Quill advances a theory of global republicanism, one that is able to respond directly to the changing realities of political life. By adopting a "publicly ironic" approach to politics, Quill revives the idea of public freedom within a global context thereby providing an important supplement to contemporary theories of cosmopolitan democracy.

Secrets and Democracy develops a new approach to understanding the centrality of secrecy to political life. From the ancient world to the modern, this book considers the growing importance of secrets, the dilemmas this poses to conceptions of democracy and the challenges that collecting secrets poses to publicity and privacy in the network society.