One of the most eagerly anticipated books of the last decade, the monumental study The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, draws on modern anthropology and archaeology to radically transform how history has been told over the last three centuries, dismantling certain assumptions about social evolution – from the invention of agriculture and the city, to the origins of inequality and democracy – to summon new possibilities for human emancipation. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about a book that has found itself embroiled in a heated intellectual discussion.

In the series of drawings he selected for Electra, North American artist Dean Monogenis imagines the world before a new flood, conceiving this Portfolio as an artwork in itself – as a painting or a sculpture. In his work, space is a time that becomes space. Imagination is construction, utopia is reality, and the past is the future.

Gender issues have indeed revolutionised the conventional way of thinking about sexual difference. However, it is now clear that we must challenge its limitations, point out its failed possibilities, and critique its representations and conventions.

Barbara Stiegler, a Nietzsche scholar and author of a book on neoliberalism, writes, together with historian Christophe Pébarthe, also from the University of Bordeaux–Montaigne, on the issues and challenges that 20th-century neoliberalism, as a new political phenomenon, poses to democracy in relation to 19th-century liberalism. The course of this reflection leads to the historical – Greek – sources of democracy.

What relationship can there be between ethics and politics in the era that has seen the global triumph of the market and the effusions of the worldwide web, along with ecological collapse and the hyperbolic dream of the post-human? With the catastrophe created by the collision between the techno-economy and the biosphere already starting to unfold, the form of existence that survives in an immunised and closed world, with nothing outside, turns inward, prey to an overwhelming fear of anything external, dominated by an unprecedented exophobia, and unable to see beyond itself. These days it is easier to imagine becoming immortal than to envisage the end of capitalism.

Tracing the history of democracy and its interruptions from the beginning of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, the sociologist and historian Manuel Villaverde Cabral, researcher emeritus of the University of Lisbon, shows how Max Weber’s theoretical pessimism is still relevant in this political time which has seen a fragmentation of parties – the organisations on which ‘bourgeois democracy’ are founded – and the emergence of new populisms.

Taking as his starting point the common observation that representational democracies have collapsed, Yves Citton, professor of Literature and Media at Paris 8 University, co-director of the magazine Multitudes and author, among many other books and articles, of Médiaarchie and Pour une écologie de l 'attention, reflects on a system of power which is structured by the logic of media and from which, for instance, conspiracism is born.

It is worth looking at the past as closely as we look to the future. In his 1991 book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington (the American political scientist whose theories on changes in the world order and the clash of civilisations caused heated controversies) said that the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April, 1974 began the third wave of democratisation that hit the Soviet Union and the whole of Eastern Europe, and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and which continued in Latin America and Africa.

This is an original, previously unpublished story, written for Electra. With published novels, short stories and non-fiction books, the author, Navtej Sarna, is a recognised Indian writer. His recent historical novel Crimson Spring has been acclaimed by critics. He is a regular columnist on literary and political matters. A prestigious diplomat, he has represented India in several countries, having been ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

The series of articles that compose the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra deal with the topic of excess. Since the criterion behind these thematic sections, treated according to a regime of essayistic discourse, is to highlight and navigate some territories that have gained prominence within the contemporary panorama, excess, in its ceaseless and wild manifestations in every domain of social, cultural and political life, is the quintessential contemporary topic, the rule under which we live.