ABSTRACT

During the early 1940s, leading American scholars, among them Harold Lasswell and David Riesman, began to ruminate about the price that would be exacted for democracy if wartime emergencies were to become permanent. During the early Cold War, these anxieties became more prominent. Fierce democrats like Robert Dahl and C. Wright Mills considered how total warfare and the growth of enduring challenges to security threatened to erode the traditional distinction between commonplace political moments and unusual times of crisis. Their apprehensions bore directly on the standing of the legislature, the site of political representation, the hinge linking the population of citizens to the modern state, and thus the core of any liberal democracy.