"In this book, David Runciman emerges as the most original guide we have to democracy's global prospects in the twenty-first century." --Melissa Lane, Princeton University " The Confidence Trap's engrossing analytical history illuminates democracy's deepening achievements and recurring crises during the charged past century. By incisively interpreting these moments of unsettled apprehension and by tracking patterns of coping and surviving, this rich, important book helps us understand, and perhaps even navigate, present anxieties about the capacity of democracies to grapple with the big issues of economics, geopolitics, and the environment." --Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time "Rivetingly written for a wide audience, this is David Runciman's best and most original book to date--bold, clear, astonishingly well informed, and consistently excellent. His ecumenical curiosity is as engaging as it is disarming, pulling you into a history that is effortless to read and leaves you thinking about its insights long after you put it down." --Ian Shapiro, author of The Real World of Democratic Theory "Imaginative and entirely original. I've not read anything remotely like it." --Alan Ryan, author of On Politics "[Y]ou have to read this well-written book.

" -- Fareed Zakaria, Fareed Zakaria GPS "Book of the Week" "[Runciman's] rich and refreshing book will be of intense interest to anyone puzzled by the near paralysis that seems to afflict democratic government." --John Gray, New York Review of Books "[A] historically sensitive and subtle response to the democratic crisis." --Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, The Nation "As a corrective to the doom-and-gloomsters, this book makes some telling points, and he is a clear and forceful writer. What Runciman's focus on American democracy helps to do is to remind us that there is an international dimension to this subject that is closely connected to American self-perceptions." --Mark Mazower, Financial Times "[Runciman] has a canny sense of how political power operates at its highest levels and in his exposition of political theory he is unfailingly clear and direct. Runciman's prose is conversational . it is no surprise that he is a fluent lecturer." --Daniel Cohen, Los Angeles Review of Books "[A]bounds with fresh insights, arresting paradoxes, and new ways of posing old problems.

" --Andrew Gamble, Times Literary Supplement.