The Light that Failed
A Reckoning
FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, PROSPECT and EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2019
*Winner of the 2020 Lionel Gelber Prize*
A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals
Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance?
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West.
In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with…