Where Power Stops (eBook)

Full of intriguing new lines of thought

Runciman is a good writer and brave pioneer. . . . The picture he sketches is agreeably bold

well-written

An excellent book: it is well-written, evenly paced, accessible, non-academic in tone but very much so in rigour and thoughtfulness. It is sceptical but not pessimistic, and warnful but not alarmist ... It is heartily recommended for anyone who seeks to understand our current malaise and interested in this question of how democracy got to where it is today, and where it may go - if anywhere - next.

Bracingly intelligent...a wonderful read

This rich and refreshing book will be of intense interest to anyone puzzled by the near paralysis that seems to afflict democratic government in a number of countries

As a corrective to the doom-and-gloomsters, this book makes some telling points, and he is a clear and forceful writer

What we get here is good history. The events at the seven junctures are presented in a way that is learned, concise and informative

Those who cannot remember history, George Santayana observed, are condemned to repeat it. Except he's wrong, according to David Runciman. In his admirable analysis, How Democracy Ends, he says the trouble is that we remember the least helpful bits of history, perpetually harking back to the 1930s to explain the aspects of modern politics we like least: Trump especially. Really we'd be better off comparing and contrasting ourselves with ancient Athens, the world's purest democracy.

Refreshingly, rather than a knicker-twisting diatribe about Trump and Brexit, Runciman offers a thoughtful analysis about what popular democracy means, and its alternatives.

Clear-headed, compact and timely

[An] ingenious account . . . Runciman concludes that democracy will probably survive, having made a delightfully stimulating, if counterintuitive case, that the unnerving tendency of democracies to stumble into crises is matched by their knack for getting out of them

Refreshingly free of received and rehearsed wisdoms, Runciman doesn't tiptoe around sacred cows and invites us to take part in that most adult way of thinking: to examine contradictory ideas in tandem and ponder what the dissonance amounts to. . . . [H]e argues lucidly, persuasively, even exhilaratingly at times. The nightly news will never appear exactly the same again