"The Democratic Age" is the first comprehensive study of political thought in Europe to be published since the end of the Cold War, taking the entire continent into account. It begins in 1918 and extends to the collapse of the communist or real socialist states of Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. In a masterful blend of intellectual and cultural history, enriched by a wealth of highly vivid biographical sketches of influential, and in some cases forgotten, thinkers of all kinds, Jan-Werner Müller traces which political ideas and figures shaped the age of ideological extremes up to 1945 and which have significantly determined the fate of Europe thereafter. Max Weber is discussed alongside the forerunners of fascism, the Frankfurt School, and "1968," as well as neoconservative think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society.