Historians on Democracy. A Roundtable Series on the Past, Present and Future of Democracy in a Transatlantic Perspective

A Documentation

Edited by Christina Morina, Colin Berg, Theo Flint, Ute Frevert

In the spring of 2025, in response to the re-election of Donald J. Trump as 47th president of the USA, a group of historians working in the United States, Germany and Europe held a series of virtual conversations on the past, present and future of democracy. The aim was to share and discuss historical expertise in light of an extraordinary moment in time. The series was organized by the four editors of this collection and co-hosted by The New School in New York, Bielefeld University, the American Historical Association and the Max Weber Foundation. In six thematic panels, scholars working on issues related to the rise and demise of democratic orders in history gathered from mid-April to mid-June 2025 to provide concise inputs (5 minutes) meant to preserve a critical public sphere and enrich it with profound, conceptionally and empirically grounded insights from their respective fields and to reflect jointly on the current state of democracy in the United States (and beyond) in consideration of this knowledge. Furthermore, the series was to foster exchange of personal and professional experiences since the 2024 election, to weigh potential response strategies, to strengthen existing ties and to forge new ones.
Four weeks into the 2^nd Trump administration, initiator Christina Morina sent an email to a few dozen American and German colleagues asking for their thoughts on how individual historians as well as the profession on the whole could and should react to the administration’s unprecedented attacks on democratic rules, norms and institutions, including the universities. In response to the various suggestions coming from the community she wrote: “Even though I think open letters, our writings and special issue publications can be important what I think is most needed are public professional spaces in which views, experiences and analyses can be exchanged, historical analogies and their potential lessons can be pondered, and strategies weighed. Experiencing the first weeks of the second Trump administration inside the US, I am astounded how little follows thus far from the prevalent sense of worry and urgency, within and outside academia. This is not to diminish the incidental protests or the individual statements and positionings by colleagues, including some university presidents, in response to the many steps taken in this country towards autocracy in virtually all areas of society. But it does not suffice. What can we do? I would like to organize a series of public Zoom-conversations in the coming weeks to reflect on this situation in the open, to actively counter the spreading sense of fear.”
In this Blog we document the 31 contributions created in the context of the panel series. The contributions were not altered in content but slightly edited for publication and (in some cases) shortened to equal length. Thus, the original panel structure and contemporaneous logic of the contributions has been preserved: Colleagues shared their expertise and reflections on the history of democracy in the moment of its attempted destruc-tion in the present.
For the purpose of this online documentation, no references have been added to the texts. Instead, a list of further readings, collated from references mentioned in the original inputs and from suggestions made by all authors in preparation of this publication, will be added to the Blog in the coming days and weeks.
The documentation of the resulting conversations includes the following six themes and contributors:

1. What was, what is, and what can be done?
   Christina Morina (The New School/University Bielefeld)
   James Grossman (University of Chicago)
   Dagmar Herzog (CUNY)
   Colin Berg (The New School)
   Jürgen Kocka (FU Berlin)
2. The Role of Civil Society
   Jeremy Varon (The New School NYC)
   Marion Kaplan (New York University)
   Till van Rahden (University Montréal)
   Stephen Milder (LMU Munich)
3. Democratic Institutions
   Debarati Bagchi (Max Weber Foundation Delhi)
   Martina Kessel (University Bielefeld)
   Adam Knowles (University Zürich)
   Kenneth Ledford (Case Western Reserve University)
   Sarah Jones Weicksel (American Historical Association)
4. On Transatlantic Alliances
   Beatrice de Graaf (University Utrecht)
   Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland)
   Harold James (Princeton University)
   Paul Nolte (FU Berlin)
   Kerstin Maria Pahl (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin)
5. The Rule of Law
   Mohamed Camara (Columbia Law School)
   Ute Frevert (Max Weber Foundation)
   Deborah S. Gonzalez (Roger Williams University School of Law)
   Benjamin C. Hett (Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center)
   Samuel Miner (Institute for Contemporary History, Munich)
6. Liberal Democracy and Capitalism
   Christina Morina (The New School/Bielefeld University)
   David Abraham (University of Miami)
   Rebecca Brueckmann (Carleton College)
   Daniel Judt (Yale)
   Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt University)
   Samuel Moyn (Yale)

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