Recommended Reading: Adam Przeworski's Diary

https://adamprzeworski.substack.com/

Adam Przeworsky has been writing and publishing a daily diary since the second inauguration of Donald Trump. He began this project as a way to make sense of the political crisis unfolding in the United States. The diary was inspired by journals kept by individuals who lived through the rise of Nazi Germany. Przeworsky was struck by how difficult it was for those writers to understand where the events of their time were headed. What later became obvious often felt chaotic and incomprehensible in the moment. His diary seeks to capture that same uncertainty—an effort to reflect on events while their meaning remains unclear.

Przeworsky’s perspective is grounded in both personal experience and a lifetime of scholarly work. He was born and raised in postwar Poland under an authoritarian regime, which shaped his early views on power, resistance, and democratic fragility. After emigrating to the West, he emerged as one of the most influential political scientists of the last half-century. He is best known for offering a clear, minimalist definition of democracy: "a system in which parties lose elections." Much of his work examines how political actors make strategic decisions under conditions of uncertainty, especially when their tenure in office is not guaranteed. His contributions have significantly shaped contemporary understanding of democratic endurance and breakdown.

What makes the diary especially compelling is not only Przeworsky’s expertise but also his intellectual humility. He openly acknowledges that his own predictive models failed to foresee the kind of democratic erosion now visible in the United States. His earlier research suggested that countries with high levels of income and long histories of peaceful transfers of power were exceptionally unlikely to collapse into authoritarianism. And yet, he now witnesses democratic backsliding in the world's oldest and richest democracy. Rather than disengage, he uses the diary as a space to think publicly—consulting scholars across disciplines, revisiting assumptions, and confronting the limits of his own frameworks.

For readers, the diary is a rare opportunity to follow a leading democratic theorist as he thinks through a political crisis in real time. It combines deep theoretical knowledge with personal doubt and moral urgency. Przeworsky does not offer certainty, but rather a model of intellectual engagement—an invitation to reflect, question, and act.