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This reply to Gila Stopler's provocative piece on the possible complicity of political liberalism and right-wing populism welcomes Stopler's strategy of identifying structural weaknesses in liberal theory. But it also presents three specific disagreements: first, it is argued that Rawls is much less of a defender of the status quo in really existing liberal democracies than Stopler makes him out to be; second, the argument is advanced that political liberalism has significant resources to counter right-wing populism; and, third and most important, it is claimed, following the work of philosophers such as Gina Schouten, that political liberalism can (and must) incorporate feminist concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses democratic theories highlighting the political science concept of "Populism." The article notes that populism is on the rise presenting examples of the American Tea Party, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement in Italy and Front National in France. Populism is described as popular policy demands being articulated including lower taxes, immigration and urban elite. Opinion of political theorist Ernesto Laclau, democracy and liberalism are discussed.

An essay is presented that examines the democracy within the European Union (EU). The author argues that it is legitimate for EU to interfere in the domestic politics of individual member states to protect liberal democracy. Some concerns about EU interventions include the absence of single, fully agreed-upon model of European liberal democracy and only smaller and powerless member states would be subjected to interference.

The article examines the militant democracy in relation to a democratic regime that adopts illiberal measures to prevent subverting of democracy. It informs that the term militant democracy was first used in the mid-1930s when European countries were being taken over by authoritarian movements in order to abolish liberal democracy. It adds that a doctrine of militant democracy was officially adopted by the Constitutional Court in the early 1950s. It further mentions that the justifications for militant democracy within individual countries remain highly contested.

This note explores new ways of thinking about the history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that more attention ought to be paid to the interaction between political thought or imagination on the one hand and, on the other, actual political institutions as they were designed, sometimes destroyed, an often re-designed in the course of twentieth-century European history. With this comes a clearer focus on 'in-between figures' (such as public lawyers). The note then outlines an argument concerning the emergence—even triumph—of a particular set of institutions and normative ideas (or sometimes just intuitions) in Western Europe after 1945, a set that was largely extended to Southern as well as Eastern Europe towards the end of the century. What is summed up as a conception of constrained civilian democratic administrative statehood did not reflect any traditional 'ism' and constituted a genuinely new ideological configuration. Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? ... If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. Victor Serge Democracy has developed wherever the abstract appeal of the ideologue and the concrete experimentation of the practical man have worked together. A. D. Lindsay [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]