Ute Daniel is going to present a working paper on 'Betreutes Wählen. Wahlrechtsdebatten im deutschen Kaiserreich am Beispiel des Großherzogtums Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (Anfang 20. Jahrhundert)'- 'Assisted Voting. Suffrage Debates in the German Empire with the example of the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach (beginning of the 20th century)'

The historiography of democracy mostly tends to focus on movements and endeavours the aims of which were to foster democratic developments and political participation. These topics are extremely important. But they do not help to understand why democratic constitutions were established or universal franchise was introduced (or why both was rejected). So my project asks why monarchs and governments, parliaments and parties in the course of the 19th and early 20th century extended the franchise (or why they refused to extend it). The underlying hypothesis is, that universal suffrage – the core of democracy as we understand it today – was brought about neither by pro-democratic movements nor by governing classes convinced of the inevitability of democratic developments before 1914, but by the First World War.

Cesare Cuttica presents a working paper on 'All against Homo Democraticus: reflections on democracy in early modern England'

Winston Churchill once famously declared: ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.1 This was certainly not true for the great majority of thinkers who wrote about politics in the early modern period. Not that things had been any better in ancient Greece: for Plato Demokratia was the rule of the rabble. Likewise, Socrates, Aristotle, Thucydides and Aristophanes all decried democracy, and Polybius used the pejorative ‘ochlocracy’ to describe its degeneration. The legacy of this mistrust towards popular rule persisted through to the Roman epoch into the Middle Ages and found fertile ground in England, not just from the Civil Wars (1642) onwards, but since the start of the Elizabethan reign (1558). By accepting this picture, or by observing that since democracy then did not exist, criticisms of it are not worth exploring before the nineteenth century, the historiographical mainstream has left a few major questions unanswered:2 why was this so? How was such widespread criticism of popular government articulated? In what ways did different authors and genres depict the people and their power? Which political concerns and social prejudices informed this anti-democratic paradigm? What was democracy actually thought to stand for? In order to address these points the following pages analyse how anti-democratic ideas were elaborated in political, theological, philosophical and public discourse in the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline reigns. In particular, they offer a panoramic view onto the variegated landscape of anti-democratic thought to show continuity and changes informing its rhetoric. Inevitably selective, the chronologically-ordered sections of the paper provide a hopefully innovative illustration of an important but overlooked topic as well as an examination of the long-term relevance of principles that are still much debated today.