Francis Fukuyama

The Old Regime and the RevolutionBook Alexis de Tocqueville

Well, The Old Regime and the Revolution is a pretty good book too, for somewhat different reasons.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗

Recoding AmericaBook Jennifer Pahlka

One is Jennifer Pala's uh recoding America. I think she is the most insightful in a way critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. she understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how you know it could actually be reformed to do things better.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-francis-fukuyama.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-11·youtube.com ↗

Why Nothing WorksBook Marc J. Dunkelman

Uh the second one is Mark Dunkelman's why nothing works where he puts everything [snorts] in a bigger historical context a swing between uh Jeffersonianism where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the uh is the engine of change. and he argues that we've been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian uh perspective.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-francis-fukuyama.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-11·youtube.com ↗

The God TestBook Robert Wright

Uh the God Test. Um I think it actually, you know, he's been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed uh Jeffrey Hinton way back then. uh he's got the best explanation of how LLMs work for a lay person that I know of.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-francis-fukuyama.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-11·youtube.com ↗

The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the WorldBook Larry Diamond

If it's okay with you, I put two of Larry's books on the list. I think they do need to be read in conjunction with one another because they're written perhaps ten years apart. The Spirit of Democracy still reflected the optimism of what Samuel Huntington labeled 'the third wave of democratization'.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗

Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American ComplacencyBook Larry Diamond

Larry wrote the second book, Ill Winds, before that happened, but I think that it would simply confirm the kinds of anti-democratic trends that he saw arising in the United States.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our FutureBook Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

This book was published early on in the Trump administration, and it was a very useful warning. Maybe it was mainly useful to political scientists like me, because we used to have this idea of a 'consolidated democracy.' Basically, democratization is a one-way ratchet and once you became a democracy, you didn't fall back. What Levitsky and Ziblatt have done in this book is to show that that's not true, that you actually can have consolidated democracies that do decay and revert to authoritarian government.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗

Polyarchy: Participation and OppositionBook Robert Dahl

I was trying to think of a single book that would be a good both as a description and a primer on democracy. Frankly, I couldn't find one, but this book is quite famous because Robert Dahl was one of the greatest students of democracy. In Polyarchy, he indicated that a democracy is a lot more than just elections and voting and the formal institutions that we associate with it and that democracy really is about pluralism.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗

Democracy in AmericaBook Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America is important for the following reason: Tocqueville, in a way, was the first sociologist, though that field didn't exist in the 1830s, when he wrote the book. In it, he looks at the formal institutions of American democracy—Congress, and the presidency, and so forth—but what everybody really takes away from it is that those institutions ride on top of the morals and mores and habits of the underlying society.

Five Books interview on liberal democracy

2021-07-26·fivebooks.com ↗