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The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World
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61
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
34/100Scholars
96/100Author:
Gideon Rachman
Publisher:
Other Press
Date:
April 19, 2022
From Putin, Trump, and Bolsonaro to ErdoÄan, Orbán, and Xi, an intimate look at the rise of strongman leaders around the world.
What The Reviewers Say
Even rarer than this is a book whose significance is enhanced by unpredictable events. But this is unquestionably the case with Gideon Rachman’s latest work, The Age of the Strongman, which goes some distance in explaining the bigger picture behind all this. Rachman is chief foreign policy commentator at the Financial Times. As such, not only has he studied many of the strongmen in this book, he knows most of them as well. This is one of the main reasons why the book hasn’t lost any relevance despite being finished before the Russian invasion.
... a comprehensive survey, written with pace, clarity, and a superb, page-turning narrative fluency, of the gradual collapse of that fragile post-Cold War consensus into a new age of authoritarian dictatorship, mainly characterised by the historically familiar spectacle of ageing male leaders pumping up up a rhetoric of war, threat, national destiny and 'traditional values' to the point where actual armed conflict becomes difficult to avoid.
... could not be more geopolitically relevant.
Rachman has been writing about autocratic rule for many years and his chapters sometimes read like expanded columns. But they always prompt deeper thought about how the West should be dealing with the challenge.
