The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present - Revised Edition

by David Runciman, David Runciman (Preface by)

Overview

Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous

Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008.

A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama.

In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691178134
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2017
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Runciman is professor of politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity Hall. His books include The Politics of Good Intentions and Political Hypocrisy (both Princeton). He writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: Tocqueville: Democracy and Crisis 1

Chapter 1 1918: False Dawn 35

Chapter 2 1933: Fear Itself 76

Chapter 3 1947: Trying Again 111

Chapter 4 1962: On the Brink 145

Chapter 5 1974: Crisis of Confidence 184

Chapter 6 1989: The End of History 225

Chapter 7 2008: Back to the Future 263

Epilogue The Confidence Trap 293

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 327

Acknowledgments 337

Notes 339

Bibliography 357

Index 381

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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

Editorial Reviews

"Runciman is skilled at bringing important political questions 'out of the clouds' and presenting them in a manner that is clear, engaging, and approachable. . . . This is an extraordinarily well-written and engaging book that asks important questions about structural strengths and weaknesses of democratic governance."

Choice

"His rich and refreshing book will be of intense interest to anyone puzzled by the near paralysis that seems to afflict democratic government in a number of countries, not least the United States. Runciman's account of the workings of the confidence trap—the belief that democracy will always survive—will serve as an antidote to the moods of alarm and triumph by which writers on democracy are regularly seized."—-John Gray, New York Review of Books

"Runciman's book abounds with fresh insights, arresting paradoxes, and new ways of posing old problems. It is part intellectual history, an absorbing study of the modern debate on democracy through the contrasting perspectives of key public intellectuals, such as Walter Lippmann, George F. Kennan, Francis Fukuyama and Friedrich Hayek, and part analysis of the problem of political leadership in democracies, explored through the decisions taken by leaders, particularly US presidents, and the constraints under which they operate."—-Andrew Gamble, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

★ 09/16/2013
Winston Churchill famously stated that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms,” and Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University (The Politics of Good Intentions), illustrates his agreement in this ingenious account of how free nations faced seven international crises from 1918 to 2008. Observers extolled the democracy’s victory in WWI but despaired when the Treaty of Versailles seemed to refute the Allies’ claim to moral leadership. By 1933, the depression and rise of fascism and communism convinced many that democracy was in a fatal crisis. Almost miraculously it triumphed again in WWII, but so did communism, and thinkers like Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, and Joseph Schumpeter worried, for varying reasons, that free nations could not compete. The astonishing collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 seemed to foretell a world indefinitely safe for democracy, a sentiment that evaporated in the face of terrorism, competition from prospering but undemocratic China and Russia, and financial meltdown in the West. Runciman concludes that democracy will probably survive, having made a delightfully stimulating, if counterintuitive case, that the unnerving tendency of democracies to stumble into crises is matched by their knack for getting out of them. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/01/2013
Democracy is like a game of chicken, writes Runciman (political theory, Cambridge Univ.; Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond): "When things get really bad, we will adapt. Until they get really bad, we need not adapt, because democracies are ultimately adaptable." This is the "confidence trap" of his book's title: the propensity of democracies to put off action, as authoritarian regimes might not, leading to drift that brings on the next round of crises and to moments of truth or finality that never arrive. Woodrow Wilson, at the center of one of the crises around which the author builds his argument, "tried to pin democracy down, and it got away from him" following World War I, while the more finely attuned Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing the financial breakdown of the 1930s, "established a certain creative ambiguity as his modus operandi." Runciman offers seven essays in all, assessing democracy's responses to the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the financial collapse of 2008, and other tests. VERDICT Runciman's writing, often brilliantly aphoristic, is full of insights, opinions, and phrasings that will challenge and delight scholars and general readers both.—Robert Nardini, Niagara Falls, NY

Library Journal