Brett Fairbarin, German History
One [should] be somewhat in awe of Professor Anderson.... This book is exemplary for how history ought to be written.
Review
Although the Weimar Republic may have been the first German democratic state, it was not, Margaret Lavinia Anderson shows in Practicing Democracy, Germany's first experience of democracy. Anderson argues that the interplay among the popular experience, institutional structure, and the political practice of universal male suffrage in Reichstag elections paradoxically produced a political culture of democracy in the nondemocratic imperial German state. Anderson's explanation of [this] paradox has important implications not only for German history, but also for recent political science literature on the transition to democracy. [Anderson's book] is theoretically startling, persuasively argued, richly detailed, and a pleasure to read."
