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Liberal Capitalist Democracy: The God that Failed

2546.000

Did capitalism lead inevitably to democracy? Can liberalism overcome the ascendant authoritarian right? For liberal democracy to survive, it must learn history’s lessons.

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AuthorKrishnan Nayar
ISBN9781787389496
Published LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2023
PublisherC Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
BindingHardback
Original Price£35
Pages496
Ships By3-4 days

Description

A spectre is haunting Europe and America: the spectre of anti-democratic, right-wing nationalism. This has finally exposed as ill-based the astonishingly widely shared belief that unleashing capitalism will, sooner or later, lead societies to democratic politics. It’s nothing more than the big liberal myth.

Krishnan Nayar explores the history of six major pioneers of modernity—Britain, America, France, Germany, Russia and Japan— from the seventeenth century’s Cromwellian revolution to Donald Trump’s election, via the Age of Darwinian Capitalism: the pre–Second World War, pre-consumerist, pre–welfare state capitalism of severe economic instability and a penurious working class. Nayar shows that, in this period, capitalist industrialisation was far more likely to lead to modernised right-wing autocracy than democracy, which got a chance thanks simply to fortunate circumstances in a few countries.

Capitalism only underpinned democracy in the post-war period due to transient factors: post-1945 Western welfare systems owed their existence and character almost entirely to the challenge posed by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The return of large-scale, extremist right-wing politics should not, therefore, come as a surprise. As autocratic China grows in strength, and Russia returns to expansionism, can democracy be rescued from a capitalism of dire instability and inequality?

Additional information

Author

ISBN

Published Language

Publication Year

Publisher

Binding

Original Price

Pages

496

Ships By

3-4 days