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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,...
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...
Autocracy, Inc.
Today's autocrats do not work alone. Applebaum documents how dictatorships that share no ideology nonetheless cooperate across borders, trading surveillance tools, laundering money, and amplifying one...
On Tyranny
Twenty lessons from the twentieth century, pocket-sized and urgent, the most-carried civic book of the era. Snyder distilled the hard-won knowledge of how free societies fall...
Democracy in America
The Frenchman who saw American civic life more clearly than the Americans did. Tocqueville noticed the thing natives took for granted: that the country ran on...
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...
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...