Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty

The Narrow Corridor is a powerful new big-picture framework that explains how some countries develop towards and provide liberty while others fall to despotism, anarchy, or asphyxiating norms. It explains how liberty can thrive despite new threats by striking a delicate and incessant balance between state and society.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 576 pages
Publication date: 10 September 2020
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2019
One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2019
Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize

As enjoyable as it is thought-provoking, Jared Diamond

By the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, based on decades of research, this powerful new big-picture framework explains how some countries develop towards and provide liberty while others fall to despotism, anarchy, or asphyxiating norms - and explains how liberty can thrive despite new threats.

Liberty is hardly the natural order of things; usually states have been either too weak to protect individuals or too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. There is also a happy Western myth that where liberty exists, it's a steady state, arrived at by enlightenment. But liberty emerges only when a delicate and incessant balance is struck between state and society - between elites and citizens. This struggle becomes self-reinforcing, inducing both state and society to develop a richer array of capacities, thus affecting the peacefulness of societies, the success of economies, and how people experience their daily lives.

Explaining this new framework through compelling stories from around the world, in history, and from today - and through a single diagram on which the development of any state can be plotted - this masterpiece helps us understand the past and present, and analyze the future.

In this highly original and gratifying fresco, Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson take us on a journey through civilizations, time, and locations. Their narrow corridor depicts the constant and often unstable struggle of society to keep the Leviathan in check and of the Leviathan to weaken the cage of norms. A remarkable achievement that only they could pull off.

Weight: 422g
Dimension: 130 x 197 x 40 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780241314333