What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

From Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and coauthor of the runaway bestseller Why Nations Fail, an ambitious and expansive take on the biggest story in global politics over the last hundred years: the rise and fall of liberal democracy

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was supposed to herald the "end of history.” The post-World War II era had seen a battle between liberal democracy (a political philosophy centered on individual freedoms, protection of the most vulnerable, and commitment to self-government) and more autocratic, largely communist regimes—and liberal democracy had won. Soon, it seemed, we would all be living in functional democracies, with sustained economic growth benefiting all segments of society, and war would be a relic of the past. A generation later, one can only ask: What happened?

Liberalism, Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in this powerful and persuasive new book, was a philosophy built to challenge power—yet it still has not adjusted to being in power. Acemoglu, using the wide interdisciplinary lens that has won him acclaim, traces the history of liberal political thought from the Roman Republic to the Renaissance to the present day. He shows the extraordinary progress, unparalleled in human history, that this system of government has created—and explains why it has gone off the rails in recent years.

Looking at rapid advances in technology, shifts in regulatory environments, global political history, and economics, Acemoglu lucidly lays out the successes and failures of the most important political system human beings have conceived of—and what we must do now to rescue it.