A shelf
Understanding This Moment
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...
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...
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,...
Tyranny of the Minority
The institutional sequel to How Democracies Die. Levitsky and Ziblatt turn from the behavior of leaders to the rules of the game, and argue that features...
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...
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 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...
Democracy Awakening
The historian's long view of how American democracy has been challenged and reclaimed, written for the readers who start their mornings with her newsletter. Richardson sets...
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...
The Constitution of Knowledge
A defense of the institutions that turn disagreement into shared truth, the press, the academy, the courts, the professions, and an account of the forces now...