The Reading Room
On Imagined Communities
Why are people willing to die for a nation, a thing they cannot see, made up overwhelmingly of strangers they will never meet? Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, published in 1983,...
On Imagined Communities
Why are people willing to die for a nation, a thing they cannot see, made up overwhelmingly of strangers they will never meet? Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, published in 1983,...
On The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama set out to answer the largest possible question in political science: where does political order come from? The Origins of Political Order, published in 2011, the first of...
On The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama set out to answer the largest possible question in political science: where does political order come from? The Origins of Political Order, published in 2011, the first of...
On How Democracies Die
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are scholars of how democracies break down, and How Democracies Die, published in 2018, distills their comparative study into an argument both clarifying and alarming.
On How Democracies Die
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are scholars of how democracies break down, and How Democracies Die, published in 2018, distills their comparative study into an argument both clarifying and alarming.
On Twilight of Democracy
Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, published in 2020, asks a question that is at once political and intensely personal: why do people who once believed in liberal democracy turn against...
On Twilight of Democracy
Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, published in 2020, asks a question that is at once political and intensely personal: why do people who once believed in liberal democracy turn against...
On Development as Freedom
Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize, used Development as Freedom, published in 1999, to overturn the way the world had been thinking about development, and...
On Development as Freedom
Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize, used Development as Freedom, published in 1999, to overturn the way the world had been thinking about development, and...