The Narrow Corridor
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who wrote Why Nations Fail, take on the question of how societies stay both free and orderly. Their answer is that liberty lives in a narrow corridor, a hard-to-hold balance between a state powerful enough to keep the peace and a society strong enough to keep the state in check. Tip too far toward an unchecked state and you get despotism; too far the other way and you get chaos. They range across thousands of years and many countries to show how nations enter, hold, or fall out of the corridor. Satya Nadella discussed the book during his on-stage interview at Davos.
What you might want to know about The Narrow Corridor
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The authors of Why Nations Fail argue that liberty survives only in a narrow corridor where a strong state and a strong society keep each other in check.
Yes. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson wrote both books. The Narrow Corridor extends their work to the question of how societies keep liberty.
The Narrow Corridor was written by Daron Acemoglu, published in 2019 by Penguin Press.
The Narrow Corridor is 576 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Narrow Corridor takes most readers 9 to 12 hours to finish.
The Narrow Corridor is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.