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What it argues
On Tyranny is Timothy Snyder's brief handbook drawn from the history of twentieth-century authoritarianism. Published in early 2017, it offers twenty short lessons — each a paragraph to a few pages — extracted from the collapses of European democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, with the argument that the patterns are recognizable again. Snyder writes as a historian of Eastern Europe, and his references are to events his students and readers in the United States typically do not know: the overnight normalization of fascism in Germany and Austria, the speed with which institutions that seemed solid were hollowed out, the complicity of professional classes who thought their expertise would protect them.
The lessons range from the structural — support institutions, do not obey in advance — to the personal and behavioral: make eye contact, maintain a private life, read books, establish and protect private spaces beyond the reach of digital surveillance. Several of the most pointed lessons are about how authoritarianism works through collaboration rather than force. Snyder's argument is that the regimes of the 1930s did not impose themselves purely through terror; they succeeded partly because enough people went along before they had to.
What it gets right
- 1.
Institutions do not protect themselves. People must choose to defend them, and that choice is easier to make before a crisis than during one.
- 2.
Do not obey in advance. Most power is gained not through force but through voluntary anticipatory compliance. Authoritarians succeed partly because people normalize their behavior before they are required to.
- 3.
Defend professional ethics. Lawyers who kept their positions under Hitler by applying the new rules were not protecting their clients — they were enabling the regime.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of more than ten books on Eastern European history and political thought, including Bloodlands, The Road to Unfreedom, and Black Earth. Snyder reads more than a dozen languages and has conducted research in archives across Eastern Europe. He is widely regarded as one of the leading historians of modern European state violence and totalitarianism.
