• The best books on Liberal Democracy - The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World by Larry Diamond
  • The best books on Liberal Democracy - Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency by Larry Diamond
  • The best books on Liberal Democracy - How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Daniel Ziblatt & Steven Levitsky
  • The best books on Liberal Democracy - Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition by Robert Dahl
  • The best books on Liberal Democracy - Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

The best books on Liberal Democracy, recommended by Francis Fukuyama

Even some of the world’s most authoritarian rulers continue to pay lip service to democracy and people’s right to vote for their leaders, but the days when many social scientists believed that all countries at a certain level of prosperity would eventually turn to liberal democracy are over, says Francis Fukuyama, now a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute. Here, he recommends books to better understand liberal democracy, and what those of us lucky enough to live in one can do to protect our form of government.

  • The best books on Language and Post-Truth - Language, Thought, and Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf
  • The best books on Language and Post-Truth - The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality by Karl Popper
  • The best books on Language and Post-Truth - The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
  • The best books on Language and Post-Truth - Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
  • The best books on Language and Post-Truth - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef

The best books on Language and Post-Truth, recommended by Nick Enfield

The word ‘post-truth’ may only have entered the Oxford English Dictionary in the last decade, but the phenomenon it describes is much older and deeper, connected not so much to the latest internet trend as the fundamentals of human cognition and communication. Here, linguistic anthropologist Nick Enfield, a professor at the University of Sydney and a member of its fighting truth decay research node, introduces the best books to get thinking about the complex relationship between language and reality.

  • The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies - Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck
  • The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies - The Government of Chance: Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present by Yves Sintomer
  • The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies - The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy by Brett Hennig
  • The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies - Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century by Hélène Landemore
  • The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies - De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies edited by Min Reuchamps, Julien Vrydagh and Yanina Welp

The best books on Citizens’ Assemblies, recommended by Hugh Pope

Around the world, democracies are struggling with angry populations who are fed up with politicians who don’t seem to represent them effectively. Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Hugh Pope—a veteran reporter on the Middle East who also spent 15 years working for International Crisis Group—introduces us to the growing movement for ‘citizens’ assemblies’, where ordinary people get together to decide what’s best for the community. He argues that these assemblies have already been used effectively on important issues that are difficult for politicians to tackle and reveals how the French president, Emmanuel Macron, came to find out about them.

  • The Best Books on the Politics of Information - Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
  • The Best Books on the Politics of Information - The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It by Charles Lindblom
  • The Best Books on the Politics of Information - The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
  • The Best Books on the Politics of Information - Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by E. Glen Weyl & Eric A. Posner
  • The Best Books on the Politics of Information - Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

The Best Books on the Politics of Information, recommended by Henry Farrell

Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a beautifully written novel.

  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper
  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service
  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - Mao: The Man Who Made China by Philip Short
  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - The Hitler of History by John Lukacs
  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 by Ramachandra Guha
  • The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders - A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev

The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders, recommended by Michael Mandelbaum

The first half of the 20th century was an era when individuals could have a huge impact on the course of history—whether for good or bad, argues political scientist Michael Mandelbaum. He recommends the best biographies to read about the eight world leaders who feature in his latest book, The Titans of the Twentieth Century, from Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) to Mao Zedong (1893-1976).