On Tyranny
The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025
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4.7 • 31 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
**NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER **
THE BOOK TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHY DEMOCRACY IS FAILING IN 2025
‘The most coherent manifesto on confronting Trump’ New Statesman
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth.
European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.
Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny.
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer
‘Clarifying and unnerving… a memorable work that is grounded in history yet imbued with the fierce urgency of what now.’ Washington Post
'Please read this book. So smart, so timely.' George Saunders
Customer Reviews
Never more relevant
On the eve of the second Trump Presidency, this concise book provides the road map we need to understand the journey we are on, and some practical strategies to survive it.
Orwell was right
Here, Prof Snyder, an authority on both Stalin and Hitler, lists 20 principles for avoiding or preventing tyranny, and illustrates them with examples from the history of the 20th century. The prose is clear and succinct, the arguments compelling. The closing paragraph is worth quoting in full:
“If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, they need to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”