Books
Book review: Why Politics Fails offers a rare chance to avoid traps of our own making
Oxford professor Ben Ansell’s fascinating, thought-provoking book forces us to look at how human self-interest scuppers our collective wellbeing
I had thought a lot about Ben Ansell’s title Why Politics Fails before I even opened the first page. Surely, I wondered, it ought to be “how” or even “when”? It seems like such a massive admission on Ansell’s part, that the starting point is one of collapse or even disaster.
But as this fascinating and thought-provoking book quickly explains, failure doesn’t automatically mean the end is in sight. Ansell’s theory is that it’s not ...
