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Pendulum democracy refers to the model of democracy in which political power alternates between two competing political parties or protagonists. Power follows the movement of the pendulum, and the pendulum follows the movement of the electorate every so many years. The winner of the last election ‘takes all’. The best‐known manifestation of pendulum democracy is the so‐called Westminster model, but its logic – a combination of indirect and majoritarian democracy – goes deeper and travels further, not only to the British Commonwealth and the Anglo‐American world but also to countries in Latin America and ‘Latin Europe’. In pendulum democracy, leadership is written with a capital L. Ideal‐typically, citizens operate as voter‐spectators in an ‘audience democracy’. The strengths of pendulum democracy are associated with electoral sensitivity, clarity, and decisiveness, which may however backslide into over‐commitment, oversimplification, and alternating one‐sidedness.

This chapter examines the influence of war, women, and the silent majority in electoral politics. The first section discusses the significance of radio and cinema as alternatives to the press, meetings, and populism. The second section explores the heyday of election meetings with the aid of technological innovations such as amplification, instantaneous relay, and more reliable modes of transport. The third section looks at the transformation of the campaign after 1918. The fourth section deals with the anonymity of mass politics by breaking down the electorate into distinct groups. The last section discusses concerns about the character and temper of the new mass democracy in playing a decisive role in transforming the culture of public politics.

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.

I devote chapter 5 to the problem of manipulation, which—in contrast to the competence problem, used as a weapon by democratic skeptics— captivates critics who style themselves advocates for mass democracy. Reading the work of political philosopher Robert Goodin in conjunction with contemporary empirical studies of presidential polling and issue framing, I argue that manipulation as it is commonly understood poses little threat to democracy. Sure, politicians lie, and propaganda does its best to drown out fact. Goodin argues that such strategic speech is neither so long-lasting in its effects nor so monopolized by the powerful that it cannot be countered. He anticipates contemporary empirical scholarship by redirecting attention away from the epistemic quality of individuals’ beliefs and onto the systematic conditions that affect the formation of public opinion and political judgment. Goodin’s work suggests that a sorted political context, which minimizes people’s exposure and openness to competitive political discourse, does more damage to democracy than manipulation.

Baldwin is a central figure in the emergence of modern Conservative and British politics. Despite denying being an orator, Baldwin’s public utterances are often cited as critical in developing and articulating a ‘tone’ appropriate to the new post-1918 mass democracy and responsible in part for transforming the Conservatives into a mass party. Baldwin was acutely conscious of the power of words and saw oratory as vital in both educating the new democracy and his own party. He therefore took great care to develop a ‘rhetorical strategy’, whose central rhetorical device was the sophisticated use of commonplaces (topoi, knowledge or sentiments shared by an audience as part of a community) to structure his appeal and fix it in the mind of the new electorate through the innovative exploitation of the new technologies of mass communication. This chapter focuses on Baldwin’s rhetoric in the 1920s, a time when the Conservative Party was coming to terms with the post-1918 electorate and the nature of the ‘new’ democracy which, Baldwin argued, required a ‘new’ conservatism.

This chapter discusses America's “permanent revolution,” which envisioned a land of ultimate emancipation for every individual and “for all human spirit” on Earth. The “permanent revolution” had a compelling premise in another revolution, that of “rising expectations.” This was how U.S. economic advisor Harlan Cleveland described the quantitative and qualitative effects of modernization, mass consumption, and mass democracy that the United States had experienced since the end of World War I, and was now supposed to transmit to Europe. The message stressed the universal logic of the connection between prosperity, democracy, and, in general, a sense of self-fulfillment. Europe's postwar hardship required emphasis on the “quantitative” aspects first.

This chapter tries to look at the future, having in mind how influential thinking about social policy developed along three winding roads since the beginning of the industrial revolution in several European countries. It tackles a once influential take on how the future might play out, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. By the end of history, Fukuyama meant ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. The chapter acknowledges that the new worlds of welfare capitalism of the twenty-first century are still influenced by a range of ideologies and by the evolving functional needs of societies. It will not be possible to restore the welfare settlements of the twentieth century. Nor is it desirable to do so because social policy needs to respond to social change. Europe's three worlds of welfare capitalism took their impetus from the industrial revolution, its accompanying division of labour and technologies, and the emergence of mass democracy. The twenty-first century presents a vista of ongoing technological and social change as well as new risks that somehow need to be addressed by states, markets, and communities. Just as twentieth-century totalitarianism and the Second World War provided the impetus for liberal, Christian democratic and social democratic welfare states, so might the threat of environmental collapse or events such as the 2020 global pandemic inspire a new generation of welfare systems.

<Online Only>This chapter examines authoritarian liberalism as a more general phenomenon ‘beyond Weimar’. It looks outside Weimar Germany and takes a longer historical perspective, revealing deeper tensions in liberalism itself, specifically its inability to respond to the issue of socio-economic inequality in a mass democracy. The major Weimar constitutional theorists—Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hermann Heller—had no answer to the social question as a matter of constitutional self-defence. The chapter then discusses the political economy of the various crises across Europe—in Italy, France, and Austria—revealing a similar quandary. As Karl Polanyi argued, in these contexts, the turn to authoritarian liberalism fatally weakened political democracy and left it disarmed when faced with the fascist countermovement. Later in the interwar period, proposals for neo-liberalism would be introduced, symbolized by the organization of the Walter Lippman Colloquium in 1938.</Online Only>

The chapter asks whether Bourdieu prolonged the dilemma of the activist intellectual which Merleau-Ponty had articulated and which derived from the Western tradition indicatively absorbed and reproduced by Schutz and Gurwitsch. It suggests three possible responses to Bourdieu’s work. It prefers a particular response but concludes that the merit of the book is that it provides information to enable readers themselves to assess the value of the Bourdieu paradigm in their socio-cultural contexts.