Shows how democracy today faces threats that we ignore at our own risk. Tracing democracy's history and development, this title revisits the assumptions on which it is founded. What exactly is democracy? Why should we value it? What are its flaws? And could we do any better?

Philip Coggan was a Financial Times journalist for over twenty years, and is now the Buttonwood columnist for the Economist. In 2009 he was named Senior Financial Journalist in the Harold Wincott awards and was voted Best Communicator at the Business Journalist of the Year Awards. He is the author of The Money Machine, and Paper Promises, winner of the Spears Business Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.