Francis Fukuyama
American political scientist at Stanford; author of The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order.
Recoding America by 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.
on a podcast · 11 Sep 2026 · Report
The God Test by 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.
on a podcast · 11 Sep 2026 · Report
Why Nothing Works by 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.
on a podcast · 11 Sep 2026 · Report
Democracy in America by 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.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by 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.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency by 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.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition by 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.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville
Well, The Old Regime and the Revolution is a pretty good book too, for somewhat different reasons.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World by 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'.
on fivebooks.com · 26 Jul 2021 · Report
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