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.
