There is no escaping mass mobilization interstate war again, even in Europe — not in life, and not in scholarship. But for some social scientists and historians, it never went away. World War I in particular has long been seen as not just a catastrophic conflict but a transformational one that continues to shape basic institutions and beliefs.

Many scholars have noticed, as did contemporaries, that World War I was followed by a wave of democratization. Others have observed another wave of democratization as well as of welfare state development in the aftermath of World War II. These are troubling observations. World War I was a disastrous conflict that unleashed unprecedented bloodshed and slaughter and brutalized a generation. In meeting after meeting, until the very eve of the war, the international labor and socialist movement had affirmed that there was no higher priority than stopping such a conflict from breaking out.¹ So it is more than a little disconcerting to entertain the idea that, among its unintended consequences, the war might have fostered democracy — a central and long-standing labor and socialist goal. Nevertheless, students of politics and society have developed several explanations that suggest it might have done just that.

In an important and ambitious book, War and Democracy: Labor and the Politics of Peace, Elizabeth Kier casts a skeptical eye on these accounts.² Her conception of democracy encompasses not just a system of government but also a redistributive welfare state. This is an unusually broad conception that includes civil and political rights as well as social rights and aspects of economic policy. The resulting discussion merges two classic debates: one that seeks to explain suffrage expansion and the growth of representative and responsible government, and one that seeks to explain the emergence and growth of the welfare state.