The Liberal Democratic Ideal

Liberal democracy emerged as a largely accidental combination of a new economic theory with a particular set of political arrangements; accidental in the sense of being neither foregone, nor originally intended. As the doctrines of economic liberalism were refined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was nothing inevitable about the associated victory of parliamentary democracy. ‘Indeed it is unlikely that more than a very few people had any but the haziest notions as to what the words could mean or what kind of society might lie over the horizon’. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.