ABSTRACT
The publication of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens’s Capitalist Development and Democracy in 1992 was an intellectual milestone, for this book represents some of the finest thinking ever conducted concerning the reasons for the development of democracy in the Western world. In this excerpt from their book, the authors outline their basic argument about the origins of democracy and state the conclusions that they reached after a detailed survey of the recent political histories of societies in Western Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
