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 Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise
and fall based not on culture geography or chance but on the power of their institutions. In
their new book they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it drawing a wealth
of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly
the natural order of things. In most places and at most times the strong have dominated the
weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have
been too weak to protect individuals from these threats or states have been too strong for
people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and
precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political
liberty is a durable construct arrived at by a process of enlightenment. This static view is a
fantasy the authors argue. In reality the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only
via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the
American Civil Rights Movement Europe's early and recent history the Zapotec civilization
circa 500 BCE and Lagos's efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability
to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese
imperial history colonialism in the Pacific India's caste system Saudi Arabia's suffocating
cage of norms and the Paper Leviathan of many Latin American and African nations to show how
countries can drift away from it and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to
achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more
than ever and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The
danger on the horizon is not just the loss of our political freedom however grim that is in
itself it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on
liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.
