The above named book is an examination into the complex relations between the international system and domestic institutionalisations of democracy – the key question being whether the current international system may be said to promote or hinder these processes. Also central to its concern is a critical evaluation of the efficacy of liberal internationalism – a potentially significant interpretation of the international system, of democracy and of their interrelations.

While the thesis draws on the work of many authors within and outside of the specific International Relations academic literature, its structure is provided by analyses of the following five core texts:

1. Barrington Moore Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
   
2. Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation
   
3. Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
   
4. Sammuel Huntington Political Order in Changing Societies
   
5. David Held Democracy and the Global Order

The reasons for choosing these particular texts are given in the introductory chapter but the extraordinary insights generated by these authors, the theoretical strengths and limitations of their analyses – especially as they relate to conceptualisations of the international system and its interaction with domestic systems of rule – all of which I seek to highlight, help formulate the salient areas for further investigation into this important subject and, I hope, provide some basis upon which to conclude whether indeed the current international system may be said to promote or hinder the institutionalisation of democracy.

There is another aspect to the thesis which needs to be specified here, namely the explicit pre-conceptions that I bring to the analysis. These are the related concepts of ‘combined and uneven development’ and ‘world-historical-time.’ My contention is that these are important to understanding how the international system interacts with domestic realms at particular historical conjunctions to help produce political outcomes and that their deployment provides an advance on liberal internationalist assumptions.