Empire of Democracy
The Remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971-2017
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
'A dense narrative and a wealth of examples' Literary Review
'Reid-Henry narrates this story with elegance and gusto' Washington Post
'[Reid-Henry] conveys an important message: Individual political action must become accountable to society's interests' Kirkus
'Reid-Henry's scholarship is impressive, gathering a wide range of historical anecdotes and referencing a diverse set of thinkers' Publishers Weekly
The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day: Empire of Democracy is the story for those asking how we got to where we are.
In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and Western history with it, was profoundly re-imagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth-century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the C old War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times.
The present crisis of liberalism enjoins us to revisit these as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, democracy is turning on its axis once again. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Reid-Henry (The Cuban Cure) attempts, with mixed success, to corral and synthesize the last half-century of Western democratic states in this sprawling history, which begins with the Paris protests in the summer of 1968 and stretches to the 2016 votes triggering the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union and electing Donald Trump as U.S. president. Reid-Henry's scholarship is impressive, gathering a wide range of historical anecdotes and referencing a diverse set of thinkers (citing Betty Friedan, Daniel Boorstin, and John Kenneth Galbraith on a single page), but this erudite and formidable project ultimately falters under the immense weight of its massive ambitions. The overwhelming volume of varied historical and cultural events ranging from the emergence of the gay rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the freeing of Nelson Mandela, and the Clinton impeachment to the release of the movie The Blair Witch Project require jumping from event to event with dizzying speed. Moments of succinct, elegant analysis, such as his insightful summation of the 1980s conservative movements ("the Thatcher-Reagan brand of neoliberalism actively required the state and its levers of control. Its task was not to reduce state power but to transform it.") can be lost among verbose passages. The immense scope and intermittently dense prose make this a daunting task for all but the most committed of readers.
