Changes

I cannot comment on the usefulness of Sharp's title as a genuine manual for bringing down a dictatorship. I am not part of such a struggle, and have never been, although I did know people who were thus engaged and I witnessed first hand a transition of my native country (Poland) from a totalitarian government to an approximately democratic one. Thus, mine is a reading rather than using of ''From Dictatorship to Democracy''.

The notions of democracy and dictatorship are not straightforward and ostensibly democratic systems might suffer from serious curtailment of liberties. This issue is somewhat passed over by Sharp, and apart from presenting a count of ''free'', ''partially free'' and ''not free'' countries he devotes very little space to discussing the features of democracies and dictatorships. This is perhaps where the age of the book shows most: although it appears as a book on the wave of interest most likely created by the Arab Spring uprisings, the text we are presented with is around twenty years old and the totalitarian streak that became so apparent since then in even the most democratic governments gets no mention. The few examples relate to the Eastern European changes. The whole text is permeated with an implicit assumption that the 'free' countries will support the efforts to overthrow totalitarian systems in the 'unfree' ones and although the issue of outside help is discussed honestly (with numerous disadvantages as well advantages covered), the possibility of outside hindrance is somewhat glossed over, including the undoubted fact that democratic states might have an interest – and take an active part – in maintaining dictatorships elsewhere.