Liberal Alternatives during the Crisis of Democracy: The Political Economist Moritz Julius Bonn and the Era of the Two World Wars

The work of the political economist Moritz Julius Bonn (1873–1965), one of the prolific intellectuals of his time, but today undeservingly forgotten, covers the main issues of political liberalism from the Kaiserreich to the Bundesrepublik. An early critic of imperialism and colonial adventures, he not only reflected on the change of foreign politics in the aftermath of World War I but set out to argue for the Weimar Republic to become a Western democracy. His defense of the parliamentary system, his claim for a democratic capitalism, his plea for European unity, and his early critique of bolshevism and fascism in the interwar era constituted ideas that gained a formative influence during the Cold War after 1945: a theory of totalitarianism, a concept of militant democracy, and Western European integration.