ABSTRACT
This conclusion draws on the analysis of Max Weber’s, Carl Schmitt’s and Hans Kelsen’s views on modern democracy, carried out in this volume’s main chapters, to assess the origins, insights and limits of the three chief theoretical models that mainstream political science developed to interpret democracy in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that contemporary elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and sometimes complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar-era German-speaking scholarly and political controversies on the nature and legitimacy of modern democracy. In the final section, the conclusion dwells on Claude Lefort’s conception of modern democracy’s radical indeterminacy to outline a more fertile way than can be gleaned from the analysed German thinkers of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist dimensions of democracy. While the preceding chapters are pre-eminently targeted to an audience of political theorists in general, and specialists in the thought of Weber, Schmitt and Kelsen in particular, this conclusion should also be of interest to all political scientists who are concerned with the intellectual antecedents of their discipline and the entanglement of present-day debates with older scholarly and ideological legacies.
