Why am I passionate about this?
I'm an experimental social psychologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I grew up in Hungary, and after an adventurous escape I ended up in Sydney. I received my DPhil and DSc degrees from the University of Oxford, and I spent various periods working at Oxford, Stanford, Heidelberg, and Giessen. For my work I received the Order of Australia, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. As somebody who experienced totalitarian communism firsthand, I am very interested in the reasons for the recent spread of totalitarian, tribal ideologies, potentially undermining Western liberalism, undoubtedly the most successful civilization in human history.
Joseph's book list on why populism threatens liberal democratic societies
Why did Joseph love this book?
This is one of the best books I have read that helps to understand the reasons behind the fascinating and unpredictable rise of Western liberal civilization.
Humans lived in abysmal conditions for tens of thousands of years, poor, wretched, exposed to violence, war, illness, and untimely death for most of our evolutionary history. The emergence of Western liberal civilization is truly an amazing break with our miserable past. How did this happen?
The authors argue that there is a very precarious path to be followed between totalitarian and imposed order, and chaotic individualism, and Western civilization happened to find almost by chance that delicate balance as a result of a combination of historical, ideological, and other circumstances.
5 authors picked The Narrow Corridor as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post
From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.
In Why Nations Fail, Daron…