On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
ISBN: 9781847924889
Publication Date: 27 February 2017

A controversial, timely intervention in world affairs from one of the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.

In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.

History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny.

Now is a good time to do so.

About the Author

'When Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin was published in 2010, it quickly established its author as one of the leading historians of his generation, a scholar who combined formidable linguistic skills - he reads or speaks 11 languages - with an elegant literary style, white-hot moral passion and a willingness to start arguments about some of the most fraught questions of the recent past.' New York Times

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: Bloodlands won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature awa...