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

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 de...