The forward march of democracy halted?
| Author | Brooke, Christopher |
Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe
Jan-Werner Muller
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011
There may be some readers of this journal who think like this: that 1945-73 was a 'golden age of social democracy' in Western Europe, which experienced a flowering of democratic politics in the wake of the fascist catastrophe; that some time during the 1970s the 'forward march of labour' was 'halted', in this country, at least, and there has been a 'crisis of social democracy' bound up with the ascendancy of Thatcherism pretty much ever since. Indeed, the very title of this journal--Renewal--is a nod to something like this narrative. People who think things like this may also be the kind who think that ideas have always played a greater role in the life of the left than they have on the right, and that this is particularly true when we compare the extremes of the political spectrum, communism and fascism; and, further, that with the striking exceptions of these particular political religions, twentieth-century politics in Europe has been a largely secular affair. And while I very much doubt that Jan-Werner Muller had such a hypothetical reader of Renewal in mind as he was working on his excellent new history of political ideas in twentieth-century Europe, he might as well have been writing for precisely such a person, as he repeatedly seeks to challenge views like these--not because Contesting Democracy is any kind of contribution to a distinctively right-wing historiography, but because with a look back at the twentieth century from our own vantage point early in the twenty-first, this kind of bog-standard social democratic or secularist story seems to miss out quite so much of what is clearly very important, and fails to make sense of so much of what actually happened.
The thinker who above all anchors Muller's explorations of twentieth-century political ideas is the German sociologist Max Weber, who died in 1920 and who worried about the future of free individuality in a necessarily bureaucratised society; of responsible political action in a disenchanted world lacking shared collective meanings; and of stable liberal regimes in a rapidly democratising continent. The older liberalism was discredited--it had been shown to be hopelessly naive in the run-up to the crisis of 1914 (which did for the British Liberal Party), and its cherished principle of national self-determination after the War seemed to demand an 'unmixing of...
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