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Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe Hardcover – September 20, 2011

by Jan-Werner Müller (Author)

4.5 25 ratings

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This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired.

Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

September 20, 2011
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

0300113218
ISBN-13

978-0300113211
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About the Author

Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton University. His previous books include A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought and Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity, both published by Yale University Press.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; 0 edition (September 20, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300113218
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300113211
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.46 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,819,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,430 in European Politics Books
- #20,098 in History & Theory of Politics
- #23,468 in Literary Criticism & Theory

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4.5 25 ratings

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4.5 out of 5

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Frederick G. Issa

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2017

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Great book at a great price received timely

One person found this helpful

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T K

Different ideologies: different brands of democracy!

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2016

Why was the twentieth century the Age of Ideology? How did totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism gain support? These are the questions that Muller seeks to provide answers in the book. According to him, ‘The First World War put into question every single institutional arrangement and every single political idea (or even just moral intuition) on which the Age of Security had rested.’ (P. 16) On the other hand, the War unleashed mass participation in politics in ways that existing political institutions were unable to cope with. Political decay resulted in Huntington’s sense. Thus, fascism and communism were political experiments on which ‘Europeans were partly forced to experiment because both tradition and dynastic legitimacy had ceased to provide principles for public order, but new ones had hardly become entrenched. A liberal restoration proved impossible – there were too many new people in politics, too many new claims being made….’ (P. 50)

All in all, the book is very well-researched and author’s ideas clearly and cogently presented. After all, as Muller tries to show us, political ideas in the twentieth century Europe are all about the contested meaning of democracy.

2 people found this helpful

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GB

Riveting read

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2014

I had only meant to glance at this book in a brief break from work, but was pulled in for a non-stop reading session. JWM is a gifted writer and has a truly rare capacity to cut through historical trends and get at the really pivotal distinctions and concepts for understanding them. The endorsements on the back give a sense of how well-respected the author is as a historian, but more importantly, the expectations they set up are actually met and beyond. He claims inside that it took him over 20 years to write the book ... and it seems to have been worth every day of delay. Greatly appreciated. A rare corrective to the tendency of all work by academics to be hyper specialized. As one endorsement on the back says: it is the most topically comprehensive study of political ideas ... that is very true.

5 people found this helpful

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T. Carlsson

Solid beginning, gaping holes at the end

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2015

This is a well-written book, but it doesn't deserve all the accolades heaped upon it in the editorial reviews above. A writer claiming pan-European analysis has to find the right generalizations to portray ideas which influenced the entire continent. The author succeeds in doing so only in the first three chapters of the book (leading up to 1945). In the post-1945 chapters he fails to find a focused perspective and mysteriously leaves the democratic state itself out of the picture.

The best part of the book is the analysis of political systems before and after the first world war. I also liked the portrayal of fascist ideology as a specifically anti-democratic movement. The author focuses on four or five representative thinkers in each chapter and mixes political thought with history instructively. I haven't read many other studies of fascism yet, but this one serves well as a brief introduction.

But what happened in European political thought after 1945? I became none the wiser on that subject from reading this book. The author discusses Stalin's communism and the Hungarian and Czech uprisings in reasonably interesting fashion, but he struggles to say anything about developments on the western side of the Iron Curtain. His main contention seems to be that "Christian democracy was the most important ideological innovation of the post-war period, and one of the most significant of the European twentieth century as a whole" (p. 130). I detect a strong German myopia in this absurd statement. I'm a European resident with many political interests but I had never heard of "Christian democracy" before reading this book. I had to use Wikipedia to discover what this "most important innovation" even means.

But even so, Christian democracy could have provided one vantage point for pan-European analysis if properly elaborated. But strangely enough the author lets go of this concept immediately after introducing it. Instead of discussing the roots of European democracy he focuses almost exclusively on left-wing thought and anti-state protest movements. He wastes a whole chapter on the student revolt of 1968, a movement whose political thought was rudimentary and inconsequential at best. He even makes room for the repulsive idiocy of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. But what about the various hues of well-functioning liberal democracy in Europe from the 1950s onward? Were no political ideas needed to make them work? And what about the European Union, to which the author devotes one (!) page? Is there really no political thought worth mentioning behind that project either?

The title "Contesting democracy" might seem to justify an exclusively anti-democratic emphasis throughout the book, but it doesn't make much sense to merely discuss opposing ideas without explaining what they opposed. In summary, the author is in his element when analysing the events that led to the World Wars and the political thought the wars spawned, especially fascist and communist ideology. He's unwilling to describe the positive development of democratic politics in Europe after the wars and this reduces the value of the latter half of this book to almost nil.

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Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe Hardcover – September 20, 2011

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