Chapter 1. Thinking Contemporary Forms of Government after the Broken Tradition -- Part I: Between Past and Present -- Chapter 2. An Unholy Trinity – Populism, Illiberalism, Authoritarianism -- Chapter 3. Bonapartism: Obsolescence of the “Forms of Government” -- Chapter 4. Illiberal Democracy as Revolutionary Action: The Case of the 2020–2022 Janša Government in Slovenia -- Chapter 5. Neither Ruling nor Being Ruled -- Chapter 6. The Politics of Crisis and Contemporary Forms of Government -- Chapter 7. Bureaucracy as a Pervasive Phenomenon of Contemporary Governments -- Chapter 8. Understanding Political Change with Montesquieu -- Part II: New Beginnings -- Chapter 9. Revitalizing Democracy: Citizen Assemblies, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom -- Chapter 10. Federalism and Deconstruction in Hannah Arendt -- Chapter 11. In the Face of Global Upheavals –Re-sharpening the Dimensions of Plurality in Arendt’s Republican Thinking -- Chapter 12. Taking Care of the Eternal: Politics between Two Homes -- Chapter 13. Courage against Domination in Republican Democracy.

This book seeks to develop an understanding of the changes in contemporary forms of government and explores the nature and structure of the various corrupt, undemocratic, oppressive, and abusive governments that continue to emerge around the globe. While proceeding from Hannah Arendt’s well-known thesis of the “break in (political) tradition” that occurred with the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, it addresses some main conceptual frameworks and a number of key trends in existing forms of government and their relations to historical forms. The primary intended audience includes educators, scholars, and researchers with an interest in contemporary democracy and anti-democratic movements, government, questions of power, political theory / philosophy, and conceptual history, as well as and students enrolled in various disciplines of the social sciences. Moreover, it will be of interest to Arendt scholars and those researching the contemporary challenges to democracy and constitutional rule worldwide. Chapters 1, 4, 6 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.