General Knowledge - Books and Authors - Discussion

American journalist and author Fareed Rafiq Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India on January 20, 1964. He received his B.A. degree from Yale University and his Ph.D. in Political Science in 1993 from Harvard University. Zakaria was the managing editor of Foreign Affairs before becoming the editor of Newsweek International in 2000. He writes a weekly foreign affairs column in the publication and also has a weekly show on CNN called Fareed Zakaria GPS, which premiered in 2008.

About the book :

A modern classic that uses historical analysis to shed light on the present, The Future of Freedom is, as the Chicago Tribune put it, "essential reading for anyone worried about the promotion and preservation of liberty." Democracy has reshaped politics, economics, and culture around the world. This provocative book asks, can you have too much of a good thing? Today we judge the value of every idea, institution, and individual by one test: is it popular? Or, more practically, do the majority of those polled like it? This transformation has affected not just politics but also business, law, culture, and even religion. Every institution and profession in society must democratize or die.

Democracy has gone from being a form of government to a way of life. Like any broad transformation, however, the trends that democracy unleashes are not uniformly benign. Democracy has its dark sides, yet to question it has been to provoke instant criticism that you are "out of sync" with the times. No more. With an easy command of history, philosophy, and current affairs, Zakaria reinterprets our past and outlines our future. Woodrow Wilson said the challenge of the twentieth century was to make the world safe for democracy. This penetrating book challenges us to make democracy safe for the world.