Until a decade ago, the reigning common sense was that there is an unproblematic positive correlation between democracy and capitalism: capitalism created the conditions for democratization, and advanced capitalist countries had more stable democracies. The world today gives us plenty of reasons to doubt that common sense. Not only is liberal democracy under serious threat at the heart of the advanced capitalist world, the trajectory of capital accumulation in recent decades – whether it be the rise of oligarchic power, mass surveillance, or extractive imperialism – seem incompatible with, if not outright hostile to, democratic politics. However, despite plenty of conversation about ‘crisis of democracy’, political theory in general and democratic theory in particular has not undertaken a systematic exploration of the relationship between democracy and capitalism. That is the subject of this course. The course is divided into five thematic parts. Across all ages, the poor and propertyless has far outnumbered the wealthy and propertied. So it was logical to think that political power in the hand of the many would threaten the rule of property and the propertied. This was the view of democracy from ancient Athens up until the beginning of the twentieth century. The first part of the course looks at this long historical period to understand why democracy made the rich anxious, and why class struggles and democratic struggles often went hand in hand. The second part of the course explores whether capitalism structurally is, or can be, democratic? Does the control of the productive resources of the society in a few private hands distort the ideal of democratic rule? How do democratic citizens accept the tyranny of the boss at the capitalist workplace where we spent most of our lives? How does the market set constraints on what we are allowed to democratically demand? In the advanced capitalist world, the postwar era produced a détente between democracy and capitalism, and consequently gave birth to the idea that the two can not only peacefully cohabit, but actually strengthen each other. In the third part we ask: What were the mechanisms to achieve this resolution? Was it a temporary truce or a happy marriage? Were these ideas and institutions sound and sustainable or were there contradictions that could not be resolved? However, this détente was never fully achieved in the global periphery. The fourth part of the course would explore the nature of colonial capitalism and its postcolonial legacies to analyze the particularly fraught dynamics between democracy and capitalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the final part of the course would engage with two speculative questions: 1. Can democracy survive capitalism? And 2. Can we overcome capitalism democratically? These are questions that liberals, socialists and democrats have debated for over a century. We will draw from those debates to think about our current moment, and the paths ahead. The course would be engaging with literature across the disciplines of political theory, history, and political economy, including by thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Alexis Tocqueville, W.E.B. DuBois, Michał Kalecki, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Karl Polanyi, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Sheldon Wolin, Samir Amin, Gøsta Esping-Anderson, Adam Przeworski, Stuart Hall, Wendy Brown, and Elizabeth Anderson.