Tracing the history of democracy and its interruptions from the beginning of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, the sociologist and historian Manuel Villaverde Cabral, researcher emeritus of the University of Lisbon, shows how Max Weber’s theoretical pessimism is still relevant in this political time which has seen a fragmentation of parties – the organisations on which ‘bourgeois democracy’ are founded – and the emergence of new populisms.