This is a fascinating but exasperating contribution to the large and rapidly growing literature on “threats to democracy and/or liberalism.” It is fascinating because it presents a profusion of ideas and theories, some of which are bold and original and seem well worth pursuing. It also offers a thoughtful account of how different political persuasions exhibit different attitudes toward history. Yet it is exasperating for three reasons. First, speculative theories are too often presented as established facts. Next, in sharp contrast to the sophistication and penetration of the author’s treatment of the philosophy of history, his use of historical examples sometimes reveals ignorance of historical scholarship and is marred by rhetorical excess. Third, the interesting ideas and plausible insights are freely intermixed with proposals that appear, to this reviewer, wildly implausible. The result is a mixed bag. Much of this book is well worth reading with care. The risk is that readers will be put off by the less convincing parts.

The book’s topic is “neo-illiberalism”: the regression or possible regression of formerly liberal democracies into “absolutist democracies”—that is, majoritarianism unencumbered by either tradition or law. Absolutist democracies, as opposed to liberal regimes (whether democratic or technocratic), are willing and able to suppress rightless minorities and change the rules to fit momentary interests or passions. The book’s model, as in much of the recent populism literature, is Orbán’s Hungary. Neo-illiberalism’s scope is narrow because, by definition, it requires a prior history of well-established liberal institutions. Tucker claims that before the advent of liberalism, as identified with British constitutional monarchy, all democracies were absolutist. Latin American states, Russia, the Philippines, and Turkey were never liberal. European left populism is “not illiberal” (p. 27). Therefore, the focus is right-wing governments and political parties in twenty-first-century Europe, Israel, India, and the United States.

The thesis of the book is that neo-illiberalism arises when an economic recession activates atavistic fears of existential risk. The response is assumed to be innate in humans due to our evolutionary heritage. Those fears suppress the kinds of reasoning, associated with the Enlightenment, that make liberalism possible. Once reason is abandoned, passions alone motivate people’s behavior, despite their interests. This provides an opening for opportunistic demagogues who revert to the practices of premodern absolutist democracies: they play on the emotionalism of volatile mobs by scapegoating vulnerable minorities and promising quick fixes through dubious economic policies.

Neo-illiberalism is potentiated by a vicious cycle of social immobility that is, in turn, jump-started by fear. Elites, terrified by the prospect of losing their position at the top, seek to exclude the middle classes from the domains of elite privilege. They work to close off opportunities for education (by raising tuition and monopolizing admission to good schools and universities). Geographic mobility is limited by restrictive housing codes and artificially inflated property values. Nepotism and cronyism restrict places at the top of the social-economic order to incumbents and their descendants. Elites do not worry about the lowest classes, who do not threaten their monopoly; indeed, they may support entitlements for the poor and for immigrants. However, the closing down of social mobility at the top feeds illiberal populism among the middle, and especially lower-middle, classes. Frustrated by their lack of upward mobility, they kick down, lashing out at the most vulnerable—the poor, ethnic minorities, and immigrants—who are seen as existential threats and as unjustly coddled by the now-despised elite and their technocratic minions. Demagogic populist leaders ally themselves with the lower-middle classes against the vulnerable without interfering with the privileges of the elite, from whose ranks they sprang and whose interests they ultimately share.

The core ideas—that illiberalism is stimulated in formerly liberal countries by the lack of social mobility, and it is exacerbated by a vicious cycle of fearful elite and non-elite behavior—make intuitive sense. Rather than being simply asserted as fact, they could provide a testable hypothesis for serious social-scientific research. The notion that economic recession is the trigger that sets the cycle in motion fits the populist movements that emerged (or intensified) after 2008, but much more work would be needed to demonstrate causation. I do not know how to test the notion that a recession like the one following 2008 activates atavistic, irrational existential terrors, such that “passions” completely drive out reason and overwhelm the capacity to calculate interests. That may fall into the (capacious) category of “unfalsifiable social theory.”

Tucker is the author and editor of several respected works on the philosophy of history and historiography. The first part of the chapter on “historical evitability” is the strongest section in the book. He offers and elucidates a helpful table (p. 117) that relates totalitarian, liberal, progressive, and populist approaches to politics with specific ideologies and philosophies of history. Then, following a less convincing argument for the relationship between recession and atavistic fears, he concludes the chapter with a strong case against claims that the emergence of illiberal regimes is inevitable, emphasizing contingencies in the test cases of Hungary, Brexit, and the 2016 US presidential election. Historiography is also central to his original and convincing argument that the relationship between illiberalism and nationalism has been overemphasized: the classical nationalist movements of the nineteenth century were deeply engaged with a highly intellectual, if not always scholarly, project aimed at researching and writing national histories (and mytho-histories). There is nothing directly comparable in contemporary illiberalism.

Given Tucker’s historiographic insight, it is disconcerting to find him repeating and amplifying a long-discredited account of ancient Greek and Roman systems of self-government. For Tucker (as for Madison in The Federalist), these systems were invariably characterized by the savage behavior of lawless, violent, passionate, irrational, fickle mobs, led on by vicious demagogues. Although still popular today with a few liberal theorists, that old story was largely falsified in the mid-nineteenth century by George Grote. It has been demolished and its historiographic sources exposed by the last 50 years of scholarship by historians of antiquity. There are many salient differences between ancient and modern forms of popular rule, but resorting to cartoonish depictions of premodern politics for rhetorical effect is counterproductive. Moreover, it flies in the face of Tucker’s cheery portrayal of Hellenistic and Roman imperial urban civilization as the best available model for the cultural syncretism that he imagines may characterize the globalized liberal world of the future. As historical scholarship has amply demonstrated, the Hellenistic and Roman world was built on the foundation of self-governing city-states. The formal rules and norms that created and sustained those cities were fundamentally democratic (and remained so well into the Roman era). Ancient democracy was very different from the brutish, violent absolutism evoked by Tucker. It also escapes me why illiberal populism, which is, in the United States, a strongly (although never uniquely) rural phenomenon, can be expected to melt away with the further growth of the “globalized big cities that are the bastions of the new liberalism” (p. 201).

Tucker’s book concludes with a potpourri of proposed technocratic solutions. These range from providing a universal basic income (to allay existential terrors), to top-down regulation and restructuring of higher education (while somehow maintaining robust market competition), to prohibiting national plebiscites, to regulating internet providers and social media—and, finally, opening borders so that middle-class American retirees can resettle in beachside communities in, for example, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Thailand. There, protected from local criminals by American police, “they may relax. The passions would subside” (p. 189). Beach time for overexcited retirees surely ranks as the most whimsically original, if not the most plausible, fix for the discontents of contemporary liberalism.