ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the basic propositions of this book, in particular that democracy, briefly defined, has been the dominant political idea of the century between the early 1920s and the early 2020s. However, as this chapter notes, the underlying structures that have made democracy possible and desirable have increasingly diminished. What was said to be its apogee in the early 1990s, in which liberal democracy had won the war of political ideas, reflected an unwarranted hubris. With changing conditions, democracy – particularly in its liberal, tolerant form – has been in decline.
