Protego ergo obligo: an inquiry into the meaning and destiny of liberal democracy
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Date
2020
Authors
Froese, Lukas
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Abstract
This thesis applies Bertrand de Jouvenel's theory of the growth of the modern state to the emergence of the liberal democratic type that prevails across the Western world today. Conventional wisdom would have it that this was a process of growing liberty from a state of primitive despotism to a comparatively non-interventionist state today; this thesis argues that the reverse is true: the modern state emerged as a result of a progressive expansion of services and protections on the part of the state that had the effect of rendering the whole population dependent upon the state to a far greater degree than in the past; which dependence enables the central authority to make ever greater demands upon its subjects.
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political theory