‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State’ by Jill Lepore Is an Alarming History of How AI Ate Democracy

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By TRH Book Desk

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s latest traces our accelerating drift from liberal democracy toward what she calls the “Artificial State” — a history that critics agree is vivid and urgent, even as some question whether it offers enough of a way out.

New Delhi, September 11, 2026 — Jill Lepore’s “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” arrives as one of the most anticipated works of nonfiction of the season — a sweeping historical argument, from the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, that technology-driven governance is actively supplanting liberal democracy, and may ultimately threaten something more fundamental than politics.

BookPage describes Lepore’s project as an examination of “our headlong race toward a technology-driven form of governance,” built around a framework she calls the Artificial State — what Lepore herself defines, per the review, as a “fantasy about humans, machines, and the earth,” and “less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from” political community itself.

BookBrowse traces the book’s intellectual lineage directly to Hannah Arendt, noting Lepore was inspired specifically by Arendt’s 1958 work “The Human Condition” and by the public emergence of ChatGPT in 2022 — pairing a mid-century philosophical warning about the mechanization of modern life with the actual arrival of large-scale AI systems a half-century later.

Bookreporter traces a related but distinct Arendt connection, citing Lepore’s engagement with “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt’s 1951 argument that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the fundamentals of human existence.

Bookreporter describes it as tracing “our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data,” in an account that spans political campaigns “awash in an avalanche of fake bots,” media corporations that increasingly dictate public discourse, and what the review characterizes as the rapid unravelling of the liberal nation-state itself.

From History to Science Fiction

Where the book distinguishes itself structurally, according to BookPage, is in its second half, where Lepore shifts from historical and political analysis into literary criticism — turning to science fiction as, in Lepore’s own words quoted by the review, a genre “crucial both to understanding the rise of the Artificial State and to anticipating its fall.” That section examines writers including Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams for how their work imagined a future shaped by artificial intelligence and humanity’s relationship to other species and the natural world.

Notably, BookPage points out that Lepore’s deepest fear isn’t the genre-standard nightmare of superintelligent machines dominating humanity — she is, per the review, “less fearful of superintelligent robots dominating humans than she is of the destruction of our planet,” which she argues is likely to occur long before AI could reach anything resembling that level of capability.

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A Book That Refuses to Be a Eulogy

Despite its grim subject matter, multiple reviews emphasize that Lepore resists writing a simple lament. BookBrowse calls the book “deliberately alarming” but insists that, “despite its abundance of dire facts,” it functions “not as a funeral dirge” but as “an inspiring wake-up call,” written in what the review calls Lepore’s “typically elegiac prose.”

Central to that framing is Lepore’s insistence, echoed across multiple reviews, that none of this was inevitable — Goodreads’ review summary quotes Lepore describing the Artificial State as a “government without consent, even government without humans,” while stressing that, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery before it, the system she describes “can be dismantled,” provided society is willing to do the work of “identifying the parts, tracing the sources” and “telling a new history.”

BookPage notes Lepore ends the book with hope that the Artificial State can be dismantled specifically through “the established tools of liberal democracy, like free and fair elections” — though that same review pushes back on how convincing that resolution actually is, calling it “a tantalizing prospect” while wondering, after the bulk of the book’s evidence, “whether a benumbed” public retains the civic capacity Lepore’s proposed remedy would require.

Where Critics Push Back

Not every review has been fully persuaded by the book’s structure. Book Marks’ aggregation of critical response includes a more mixed assessment from Carl Benedikt Frey, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, who called the book “urgent and wide-ranging” while arguing it “replaces the handpicked case study with selective narrative history” — a critique suggesting Lepore’s storytelling instincts, however vivid, sometimes substitute for more systematic evidence.

That same aggregated review noted Lepore is “undoubtedly more interested in tracing the intellectual history of machine rule than in explaining its institutional underpinnings,” resulting in what the reviewer called “an often vivid and at times unsettling account” that nonetheless leaves some of the harder structural questions about how the Artificial State actually functions institutionally underexplored.

Other reviews aggregated by Book Marks raised a related, more tonal concern: that Lepore’s “wistful treatment of what it’s replacing can verge on sentimental,” with passages reading “like an elegy for a vanishing world” — even as those same reviews credit her insistence that reversal remains possible.

Praise From Fellow Writers

The book has also drawn enthusiastic blurbs from prominent literary and science figures. Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Under a White Sky,” called it “at once dazzling in its range and totally on target,” framing its central stakes as a question of who determines the future — “the tech billionaires or the rest of us.”

Author Philip Pullman offered similarly strong praise, calling it “the best account I’ve ever seen of how the owners and controllers of data technology have changed and are changing us,” and describing the finished work as “richly informed” and “a timely and terrifying warning.”

“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” appears to succeed most clearly as exactly what its title promises: a historian’s account of how we arrived at this moment, told with the narrative flair that has made Lepore’s earlier books, including “These Truths,” widely read well beyond academic audiences.

Where reviewers diverge is on how fully the book delivers on its second half of its title — the “fall.” Readers looking for a vivid, intellectually rich diagnosis of how technology has reshaped democratic life are likely to find the book exactly as “dazzling” as its blurbs suggest; readers looking for a rigorous institutional roadmap for reversing that process may come away, as at least one review suggests, wanting more than the book’s concluding appeal to elections and civic renewal ultimately provides.