If you read
On Tyranny
Read these
On Freedom
The affirmative sequel to On Tyranny: not what to resist, but what to build. Snyder argues that freedom is not merely the absence of interference but...
Twilight of Democracy
Why intellectuals and elites, the people who should know better, turn toward authoritarianism. Applebaum writes partly from personal knowledge, having watched friends across Europe and America...
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
How authoritarian leaders rise, rule, and fall, traced across a century and many countries by a historian of fascism. Ben-Ghiat anatomizes the strongman's toolkit, the propaganda,...
How Democracies Die
The comparative study of democratic backsliding, and the moment it described has not passed. Levitsky and Ziblatt show that democracies now more often erode from within,...
The Origins of Totalitarianism
How free societies fail, written by someone who escaped the failure and then spent her life explaining it. Arendt traces the path from isolation and loneliness...
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
An essay published in 1964 that explains nearly every decade since. Hofstadter named the recurring American temper of conspiracy and apocalypse, the conviction that hidden enemies...
How Civil Wars Start
The political scientist's data-driven warning. Drawing on decades of comparative research and her service on a government task force that predicted instability abroad, Walter lays out...
Field Notes on the Republic
The Reading Room in motion. A fresh essay every morning on the republic, its arguments, and its history, the same long view as the shelf, written...