Table of Contents

Prologue.

1. A constitution imbued with Hellenism: Greece, Europe, and the West.

2. The beginning: democracy in ancient Greece.

3. How Greek democracy came back into play, and finally left the stage.

4. Liberalism’s first victory.

5. Universal suffrage: act one.

6. Universal suffrage: act two.

7. Trouble for the “old mole”.

8. Europe “on the march”.

9. From the slaughter of the Communards to the “sacred unions”.

10. The Third Republic.

11. The second failure of universal suffrage.

12. The “European civil war”.

13. Progressive democracies, people’s democracies.

14. The cold war: democracy in retreat.

15. Towards the “mixed system”.

16. Was it a new beginning?.

Epilogue.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index

About the Author

Luciano Canfora is Professor of Classical Philology at Bari University, Italy. His previous publications include The Ideology of Classicism (1980), The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (1989) and Julius Caesar: The People’s Dictator (2004). He is the editor of Quaderni di Storia, Italy’s premier history journal.

Reviews

"Canfora's book provides powerful insights into the idealogical use of democracy."
European Review of Labour and Research