From Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and coauthor ofWhy Nations Fail, an ambitious and expansive inquiry into the biggest story in global politics over the last hundred years: the rise and fall of liberal democracy."A very important work and a must-read." —Thomas Piketty, #1New York Timesbestselling author ofCapital in the Twenty-First CenturyThe dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 raised hopes that we were one step closer to the triumph of liberalism. Soon, many predicted, we would all be living in functional liberal democracies. Sustained economic growth would benefit all segments of society and war would be a relic of the past. A generation later, one can only ask: What happened?Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in this powerful book that liberal democracy flourished when it pursued its core promises of shared prosperity, democratic governance, and the free pursuit of knowledge. But liberalism, a philosophy built to challenge power, never fully adjusted to be
