The Politics of Moderation in Modern European History (eBook)

This book charts the varieties of political moderation in modern European history from the French Revolution to the present day. It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely-recognized need for a more nuanced political discourse. The contributors demonstrate how the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way that can help us to navigate the tensions of the current political climate. At the same time, the volume offers a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of Third Ways, of finding the middle between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view.

Ido de Haan is Professor of Political History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He has published on nineteenth-century European political history, on the history and memory of the Holocaust, on Jewish history, and on the history of citizenship, democracy, and the welfare state. He currently studies the history of neoliberalism in the Netherlands.

Matthijs Lok is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His publications focus on the politics of memory and forgetting in the Restoration era, on the Counter-Enlightenment, European conservatism and nationalism, on the history of state formation and civil administration, and on the historiography of Europe.