The Road to Unfreedom

By Timothy Snyder,

Book cover of The Road to Unfreedom

Book description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America.

“A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker

With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Road to Unfreedom as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Snyder explains how each powerful cultural system maintains itself with pervasive stories of why it is inevitable. Values, traditions, technologies and philosophies all support the feeling that it is the only possible beneficial outcome of past events and 'human nature'. In its prime, what Snyder calls the 'politics of inevitability' prevail - the sense that the laws of progress are known, and that there is no alternative. But a failure to renew itself, to deliver utopia, or to protect its people from environmental degradation can undermine the system. Then a new politics arise, in which practitioners exploit fear, manufacture crisis…

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