Liberal Capitalist Democracy

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. Its nothing more than the big liberal myth.Krishnan Nayar explores the history of six major pioneers of modernityBritain, America, France, Germany, Russia and Japan from the seventeenth centurys Cromwellian revolution to Donald Trumps election, via the Age of Darwinian Capitalism: the preSecond World War, pre-consumerist, prewelfare 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?