Yeah I haven’t read any of his stuff, just mentioning that he works on totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Not having read The Road to Unfreedom, it looks like he identifies trends in several geographies which could be useful for the questions you’re looking at.
I’ve now listened to On Tyranny and watched a 1-hour lecture from Snyder called “The Road to Unfreedom” (so presumably similar content to the book).
It seemed to me that most of what Snyder said was either stuff I already knew, stuff that seemed kind-of obvious or platitude-like, or stuff I was skeptical of
This might be partly due to the book On Tyranny being under 2 hours and the talk being just 1 hour, such that Snyder opted to just give a quick overview of the “basics” of certain things
So I do think this might be fairly useful per minute for someone who knew quite little about things like Hitler and the Soviet Union
But I wouldn’t strongly recommend these books, and would probably recommend against them for people who already know a decent amount about these topics
Though I should again note that I haven’t actually read The Road to Unfreedom; maybe the book version is better than both the talk and the other book
Yeah I haven’t read any of his stuff, just mentioning that he works on totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Not having read The Road to Unfreedom, it looks like he identifies trends in several geographies which could be useful for the questions you’re looking at.
In case this info is useful to future readers:
I’ve now listened to On Tyranny and watched a 1-hour lecture from Snyder called “The Road to Unfreedom” (so presumably similar content to the book).
It seemed to me that most of what Snyder said was either stuff I already knew, stuff that seemed kind-of obvious or platitude-like, or stuff I was skeptical of
This might be partly due to the book On Tyranny being under 2 hours and the talk being just 1 hour, such that Snyder opted to just give a quick overview of the “basics” of certain things
So I do think this might be fairly useful per minute for someone who knew quite little about things like Hitler and the Soviet Union
But I wouldn’t strongly recommend these books, and would probably recommend against them for people who already know a decent amount about these topics
Though I should again note that I haven’t actually read The Road to Unfreedom; maybe the book version is better than both the talk and the other book