This book is a highly original and provocative contribution todemocratic theory. Zolo argues that the increasing complexity ofmodern societies represents a fundamental challenge to the basicassumptions of the Western democratic tradition and calls for areformulation of some of the key questions of political theory.Zolo maintains that, as modern societies become more complex andmore involved in the `information revolution', they are subjectedto new and unprecedented forms of evolutionary stress - asmanifested, for instance, in the growing autonomy and power ofpolitical parties, and in new kinds of political communicationwhich create and sustain the fiction of consensus. These forms ofstress have become so serious that they threaten to undermine someof the values traditionally associated with democracy, such as therationality and autonomy of the individual, and the visibility andaccountability of power.