Political structures: totalitarianism & dictatorship

Showing all 7 results

  • Big caesars and little caesars

    £12.99

    Big caesars and little caesars

    Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of strong men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times it’s become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why caesars seize power and why they fall. There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup. In reality, every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was wrong. This Caesarism is not an absurd throwback, it is an ever-present danger.

    £12.99
  • How tyrants fall

    £22.00

    How tyrants fall

    Strongmen are rising. Democracies are faltering. How does tyranny end? Tyrants project invincibility, but all of them fall. This is because they face critical weaknesses that can form a fatal trap. Whether it’s their inner circle turning against them or resentment of elites in the military, the masses alienated by cronyism or revolutionaries plotting in exile, tyrants always have more enemies than friends. And when they fall tyrants don’t quietly retire – they face exile, prison or death. But understanding dictators isn’t enough. ‘How Tyrants Fall’ is the gripping, deeply researched blueprint for how to bring them down.

    £22.00
  • How tyrants fall

    £10.99

    How tyrants fall

    Strongmen are rising. Democracies are faltering. How does tyranny end? Tyrants project invincibility, but all of them fall. This is because they face critical weaknesses that can form a fatal trap. Whether it’s their inner circle turning against them or resentment of elites in the military, the masses alienated by cronyism or revolutionaries plotting in exile, tyrants always have more enemies than friends. And when they fall tyrants don’t quietly retire – they face exile, prison or death. But understanding dictators isn’t enough. ‘How Tyrants Fall’ is the gripping, deeply researched blueprint for how to bring them down.

    £10.99
  • Julia

    £9.99

    Julia

    It’s 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen – cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She’s very good at staying alive. But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department – a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith, she comes to realise that she’s losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

    £9.99
  • Patriot

    £25.00

    Patriot

    Alexei Navalny began writing ‘Patriot’ shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted – and will come. In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

    £25.00
  • The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

    £16.99

    The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

    ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ is Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s own eleven years in labour camps and exile.

    £16.99
  • The Nazi mind

    £25.00

    The Nazi mind

    How could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly – often enthusiastically – oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In this book, Laurence Rees combines history and the latest research in psychology to help answer some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world. Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of ‘twelve warnings’ – whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders who, for example, take control of the media, propound conspiracy theories, and talk about ‘them’ against ‘us’.

    £25.00