The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty Audiobook (Free)

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 a few states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others–and clarifies how it could continue steadily to thrive despite new threats.

Liberty is hardly the ‘normal’ order of things. Generally in most locations and at most times, the strong have dominated the weakened and human independence continues to be quashed by force or by traditions and norms. Either expresses have got about The Narrow Corridor: Areas, Societies, as well as the Fate of Liberty been too weak to protect people from these threats or states have already been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only once a sensitive and precarious stability is struck between state and society.

There’s a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, a reliable state, arrived at by an activity of ‘enlightenment.’ This static view is a illusion, the authors argue; rather, the corridor to liberty can be narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society. The energy of state institutions and the elites that control them hasn’t gone uncontested in a free society. Actually, the capability to competition them is the description of liberty. State institutions have to evolve regularly as the nature of issues and needs of society transformation, and therefore society’s ability to maintain condition and rulers responsible must intensify in tandem with the capabilities from the condition. This struggle between state and society turns into self-reinforcing, inducing both to develop a richer selection of capacities just to keep moving ahead along the corridor. However this struggle also underscores the delicate character of liberty. It is built on a fragile balance between condition and society, between economic, politics, and cultural elites and residents, between organizations and norms. One side of the balance gets too solid, and as provides often happened in history, liberty starts to wane. Liberty depends on the vigilant mobilization of society. But it also needs state institutions to regularly reinvent themselves in order to fulfill new economic and social issues that can shut down the corridor to liberty.

Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We are in need of liberty more than ever, yet the corridor to liberty is now narrower and more treacherous. The risk on the horizon is not ‘just’ the loss of our politics freedom, nevertheless grim that’s in itself; it is also the disintegration from the prosperity and protection that critically rely on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty may be the road to ruin.

Includes a Reward PDF of the Maps and Numbers in the Book