Militant Democracy: The Limits of Democratic Tolerance [Hardcover]

Introduction 

1. Origin and development

2. Alternatives and criticism

3. Democracy as self-correction

Conclusion 

Epilogue

The book posits a theory of militant democracy. Drawing on Karl Popper and Dutch legal scholar George Van den Bergh, it examines the reasons for justifying legal action against extremist parties and develops a new theory of democratic self-correction.

Bastiaan R. Rijpkema is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He received his LLB in Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam (2010) and his LLM in Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (cum laude) from Leiden University (2011). In 2015 he obtained his PhD at Leiden University with a dissertation on militant democracy, which was published in Dutch as Weerbare democratie: de grenzen van democratische tolerantie (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2015). For Weerbare democratie he was awarded the prize for the best Dutch political book of the year in 2016, the Prinsjesboekenprijs. In 2017 he won the New Scientist Wetenschapstalentprijs 2017 (New Scientist Science Talent Prize), the prize for the most talented young researcher of the Netherlands and Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium).

This book aims to present a comprehensive theory of militant democracy and to answer questions such as: How can a democracy protect itself against its own downfall? And when is intervention against antidemocrats justified?

Against the backdrop of historical and current examples, this book examines a variety of theories from philosophers and legal scholars such as Karl Loewenstein, Karl Popper and Carl Schmitt as well as contemporary alternatives. It compares their interpretations of democracy and militant democracy,lÃ%