I feel out of place here: I do not believe that historians should be much given to theory or to the propounding of lessons. Moreover, a specialist in German history may not be the best person to talk of democracy though perhaps pronounced failure and recent success in that country do allow for some general remarks on a vast subject.

In 1913, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the most respected compendium of its kind, had a one-column entry under “democracy,” dealing principally with democracy in ancient times. In 1929, the Oxford philosopher A. D. Lindsay began his splendid book The Essentials of Democracy thus: “We are at the present time passing through a certain disillusionment about democracy” – a British understatement on the eve of the disastrous defeats of democracy (Lindsay 1951: 7).

I would suggest it was the Great War that saw the elevation of democracy into a universal ideal. Representative governments and liberal constitutions had existed before and indeed had been ideals in much of Europe in the nineteenth century. And democratic doctrine and practices had existed before, though it is doubtful that prewar Britain could have been called a democracy. But during the war there developed an Anglo-American assumption that democracy was not just the only legitimate form of government but alone held out the promise of peace, freedom, and human dignity. Rhetoric burdened reality, and as Lindsay pointed out: ‘We have suffered in the past from making democracy into a dogma, in the sense of thinking of it as something magical, exempt from the ordinary laws which govern human nature’ (Lindsay 1951: 74).