Democracy Tamed

Download or read book Democracy Tamed written by Gianna Englert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberal democracies are under constant threat in the twenty-first century, and there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their "new democracy" to combat universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.