Considerable ink has been spilled in the past two years over the state of democracy. In the last year alone, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die; more recently, Cambridge political theorist David Runciman studied How Democracy Ends. Despite the similar titles, the books are fundamentally different: Levitsky and Ziblatt identify canaries in the coalmines of twentieth-century democratic collapse, while Runciman's book is more an exercise in political imagination than a study in comparative politics.
Runciman recently discussed these differences with Boston Review editor-in-chief Joshua Cohen. Democracy, Runciman says, could either fail while remaining intact or evolve into something different—and possibly even better. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
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