Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics.

This is an extra episode to let you know about my new book.

It's called How Democracy Ends.

It comes out this Thursday, and it is the book of the lecture that we put out earlier this year.

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I've got Helen Thompson and Chris Bickerton here with me and for once they're going to ask me

some questions. But before that, we're just going to play a little clip of that lecture. I gave it

at Churchill College in Cambridge, just the introduction, because it explains why I wrote the book

and why I think it matters. So I think it's a real question. How does democracy end? But that's not

my main motivation for writing the book or what I'm going to

talk to you about this evening. I think we have the wrong framework for answering that question.

I think it's understandable that our framework is drawn from the history of modern democracy.

And by the history of modern democracy, I think this thing that we call democracy is not that old. I don't think it goes back to the founding of the American democracy. And by the history of modern democracy, I think this thing that we call democracy

is not that old. I don't think it goes back to the founding of the American Republic. You can't

found a democracy on slavery. I don't think in the British case it goes back to the 19th century.

I think it's about 100 years old. I'm talking about universal franchise, mass political party, electoral democracy

of the kind that we've had in this country since really the end of the First World War,

...