1 Liberal Democracy in Crisis: rewriting liberalism at a time of democratic backsliding 1 By Vassilios Paipais University of St Andrews vp31@st-andrews.ac.uk Introduction Today, most liberal regimes (in both the ideological and the constitutional, political sense) in the advanced Western world are typically referred to as either ‘liberal democracies’ or, more often, simply ‘democracies.’ This reflects one of the most striking ways in which twentieth-century liberalism differs from the older forms of liberal republicanism that emerged in the late eighteenth-century, as manifested in the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions. These revolutions may have been inspired by ideas and principles that we now consider liberal (establishing constitutional and limited government, the rule of law, and the protection of individual rights), but they were nowhere near full-blown democracies (understood as elections via universal suffrage). Arguably, the gradual convergence between liberalism and democracy - yet always, in Judith Shklar’s (1989: 37) words, as ‘a marriage of convenience’ - is the work of nineteenth-century enlightened liberals, such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, who developed liberalism as a progressive ideology of social and economic reform with a distinctive emancipatory dynamic (Rosenblatt, 2018; Moyn, 2023). And yet, the proposition that liberalism and democracy are by nature symbiotic, or are meant to be, has always been contested. Nineteenth-century liberals may have unanimously defended personal freedom, a vision of social progress, and the cultivation of creative individuality, but they hardly agreed on the economic, social, and political 1 I would like to thank Nicholas Onuf, Richard Ned Lebow, and Constantinos Arvanitopoulos for useful discussions on the topic of this paper. This paper was presented at the International Conference 1974- 2024: 50 Years from the Greek Transition to democracy, Konstantinos G. Karamanlis Foundation, Athens, 1-2 November 2024.