Rappard’s 1938 Harris lectures diagnose democracy just as Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, and the League’s impotence had broken the nineteenth-century belief in democratic inevitability. His thesis is not that democracy is finished, but that its ideals are being tested by industrial complexity, mass administration, and war, while dictatorship has not yet proved that it can outlast success or the dictator.
The phenomenon so aptly defined by the Greek formula of “the crisis of democracy” has indeed taken civilized mankind completely unawares.
He first refuses the literal definition of democracy as rule by all or even direct majority rule: government is always conducted by minorities. Its historical substance is instead the modern revolt against restraint and privilege. America, France, Britain, and Switzerland differ, but their democratic inheritance joins consent to equal rights.
modern democratic revolutions have always chosen for their watchwords “liberty and equality.”
The lectures move from origins to crisis. Rappard treats Athens and Christianity as antecedents, but locates modern democracy mainly in British constitutional liberty, French revolutionary rights, and Swiss federal practice. His key distinction is between democracies grown through institutions and habits, and postwar constitutions copied into societies where democracy had not taken root. Dictatorship, he argues, conquered fragile or pseudo-democratic regimes, not mature democracies.
The World War is the hinge. It exalted democracy as a crusade for self-determination, especially in Wilsonian language, yet damaged democratic practice by concentrating executive power, censoring opinion, regulating economies, postponing elections, and teaching habits of command.
the World War not only played havoc with democracy from 1914 to 1918 but seriously jeopardized its subsequent development.
Rappard’s accounts of Russia, Italy, and Germany make the great dictatorships children of the war in different ways. Bolshevism turns the promised “dictatorship of the proletariat” into Leninist and then Stalinist personal rule. Fascism grows from disappointed Italian victory, parliamentary weakness, and social disorder. Nazism grows from defeat, Versailles, inflation, middle-class ruin, and Hitler’s contempt for parliamentarism, liberalism, socialism, Jews, and peace. Dictatorship attracts because it promises order, employment, mobilization, prestige, and unity.
Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.
That aphorism is Rappard’s deepest conceptual move. Democracy lives by discussion, compromise, rights, and public criticism; war or permanent preparation for war makes these virtues look like inefficiencies. The crisis is therefore political, economic, and international at once: when security becomes the first end of government, authoritarian methods gain plausibility.
The surviving democracies are not idealized. France shows parliamentary fragmentation, weak ministries, fiscal disorder, and legislative irresponsibility. Britain remains stronger, yet critics from the right doubt mass competence, while socialist critics such as Laski doubt whether parliament can realize economic equality. Switzerland is stable and participatory, but emergency clauses, anti-communist restrictions, and administrative compromise show democracy distrusting its own procedures. The crisis exists inside democracy, not only at its borders.
The final lecture weighs the dictators’ “trumps”: armed force, propaganda, hero-worship, administrative success, and foreign-policy audacity. Yet these depend on continued success, leader vitality, coercion, and suppression of criticism. Democracy’s advantages are quieter: legality, consent, opposition, civic dignity, and peaceful correction.
dictatorship must justify its existence by its accomplishments.
Rappard’s remedy is austere. Democracy must preserve peace and reduce the burdens placed on the state by planning, debt, and totalizing administration. He does not call for old laissez-faire; industrial society requires regulation against monopoly and insecurity. But a state asked to manage everything becomes too technical, centralized, and coercive for popular control.
the defense of democracy demands a return to greater economic freedom
He also wants stronger executives, checked by free opposition, press, association, and independent courts. Institutional reform matters, but the final responsibility lies in civic character. Its continuing relevance lies in treating emergency rule, administrative overload, and militarized politics as internal dangers to free government. Rappard closes as a liberal realist: democracy can survive only if democratic peoples practice disciplined liberty and choose leaders who govern without becoming masters.
The future of democracy, therefore, lies primarily with the democratic peoples themselves.
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