History of Democracy: Europe 1620-present

4 credits · Undergraduate

What causes some democracies to succeed, others to fail? Using modern Europe as a laboratory we survey numerous societies over 400 years of history, to seek answers, from the unlikely beginnings in consensual practices of monarchies and Christian churches; to the rise of parliamentarism, the revolutionary theories of liberalism, and the rise of mass politics and modern ideologies of nationalism and socialism, fascism and populism. Why have hopeful democratic experiments, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe, given way to the most vile forms of dictatorship known to history? Why does democracy never seem consolidated, but always under attack from unpredictable but "popular" forces of left and right?