000			01810 a2200169 4500
005			20251201142249.0
020			_a9781787389496
082			_a321.8 NAY
100			_aNayar, Krishnan
245			_aLiberal Capitalist Democracy: The God That Failed
260			_bHurst & Company _c2023 _aLondon
300			_a430
520			_aA specter is haunting Europe and America: the specter 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 industrialization was far more likely to lead to modernized 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?
650			_aPolitics and Government
650			_aDemocracy
942			_cBK _2ddc
999			_c51983 _d51983