ABSTRACT
Democracy is as much a social and cultural project as a political one: it cannot be built in the air, in the minds of intellectuals and politicians, but needs to be rooted in society itself. Barrington Moore may well have observed ‘No bourgeois, no democracy’, but the existence of a substantial middle class is no guarantee of democracy, as Germany discovered in the inter-war years. However, to date there has been no liberal democracy without a capitalist social structure. Natural population growth has been falling for at least half a century, reflecting the pattern common to most developed industrial societies where planned parenting and affluence has seen a dramatic decrease in the size of families. The starkest symptom of the social crisis was the declining life expectancy of Soviet men, ranked 54th out of 56 countries that supplied data in 1989.
