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Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them

Brains & Noble

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Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing. Item number: 4613

Last updated on Jun 13, 2026 05:10 PM

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Category Brains & Noble > History|Politics

Condition new

SKU BN-75674

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Democracy: we all want a say in how we’re governed, but it’s impossible to have any true ‘will of the people’. Equality: we want to be treated equally, but equal rights and equal outcomes undermine each other. Solidarity: we want a safety net when times are tough, but often we care about solidarity only when we need it ourselves. Security: we want protecting from harm, but not if it undermines our freedoms. Prosperity: we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul.

You’ve probably noticed a pattern here, which is that our self-interest undermines our ability to deliver on our collective goals. And these traps reinforce one another, so a polarized democracy can worsen inequality; a threadbare social safety net can worsen crime; runaway climate change will threaten global peace.

Drawing on examples from Ancient Greece through Brexit and using his own counterintuitive and pathbreaking research – on why democracy thrives under high inequality, and how increased political and social equality can lead to greater class inequality – Ansell vividly illustrates how we can escape the political traps of our imperfect world. He shows that politics won’t end, but that it doesn’t have to fail.