#history

First Brexit, then Trump. 2016 was not a good year for modern Western democracies. In 2018, the consequences of these votes seem worse than many pessimists anticipated. So what might Plato, a notoriously harsh critic of democracy, have said about all of this?

In 1939, Stefan Zweig prepared a lecture on history for the PEN Congress in Stockholm, but the event got cancelled. Published shortly after Zweig’s and his wife Charlotte Altmann’s suicide in 1942, Zweig’s essay is evidence of an attempt to spread optimism in bleak times. An excerpt.