Such a suggestion would be well-intentioned, but completely antithetic to the spirit of liberalism. One may not make the way to liberal thinking easier for anyone, for what is of importance is not that men declare themselves liberals, but that they become liberals and think and act as liberals. A second objection that can be raised against the terminology used in this book is that liberalism and democracy are not here conceived as opposites. This view is, even historically, altogether untenable. It was the parliamentary, not the constitutional, monarchy that liberalism strove for, and its defeat in this regard consisted precisely in the fact that in the German Empire and in Austria it was able to achieve only a constitutional monarchy.
Liberalism is the more comprehensive concept.
It denotes an ideology embracing all of social life. The ideology of democracy encompasses only that part of the realm of social relationships that refers to the constitution of the state. The reason why liberalism must necessarily demand democracy as its political corollary was demonstrated in the first part of this book. To show why all antiliberal movements, including socialism, must also be antidemocratic is the task of investigations that undertake to provide a thorough analysis of the character of these ideologies. In regard to socialism, I have attempted this in my book of that title.