This study starts from the premise that attempts by scholars and other commentators to come to terms with the failure of liberal democracy throughout much of the world have rested on erroneous assumptions about preconditions necessary for its rise. Whereas conventional wisdom holds that liberal democracy arises out of a certain technological level of society, out of advanced cultural and material aspirations, or out of a recognizable “middle class” lifestyle, none of these factors matter as much as the ideas that people have about themselves and the world. In particular, as this work will show, in order for liberal democracy to be sustainable, a society needs individualism—a system of beliefs centered on one's inner worth and in one's capacity for judgment. It is exceedingly rare, sociologically and historically, for a large group of people to acquire such individualistic self-orientation, making successful liberal democracies unusual. The rise and proliferation of individualist belief systems requires social conditions that include a widespread breakdown of traditional culture, a frontier experience, and a process of civic nation building. Nowhere can we see this better than in Poland, the focus of this book. Poland's incomplete but authentic success at building liberal democracy at the turn of the twenty-first century was predicated on the earlier rise of individualism.

Thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mood of triumphalism that accompanied the apparent worldwide victory of democratic actors and values in the 1990s has become a distant memory. Many newfound democracies have crumbled, and many more have degenerated into authoritarian-democratic hybrids, while even the oldest democracies have seen the ascendancy of populist and authoritarian movements on a scale not seen since the 1930s. In current and recent discussions of liberal democracy, a growing tone of pessimism prevails. As the editor of a 2018 Foreign Affairs issue entitled “Is Democracy Dying?” has put it, “Some say that global democracy is experiencing its worst setback since the 1930s… . Those are the optimists. Pessimists fear that the game is already over, that democratic dominance has ended for good.”