What Makes Democracies Endure?

The history of twentieth-century European communist parties shows that extremists can be moderated by robust democratic institutions. Without them, however, the inclusion of extremist parties may undermine democracy.

While many obstacles to democracy gravely mar Algeria's political life, the country's trajectory still affords some grounds for guarded optimism.

This is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—for classical liberal theory and its crucial distinction between the state of nature and the civil state. Which is better for liberty: nature…