The course will start by defining democracy and capitalism as they appear in the modern world. We continue by introducing 1. the idea of regime cycles dating back to antiquity, and their attempted explanations (in Aristotle, and Polybius among others) and 2. the theory of business cycles or economic crises as leading to stages and forms of capitalist regimes, including classical liberalism, bonapartism, welfare states, fascism, neo-liberalism and neo-populism. We go on to discuss the related cyclical trend in recent political sociology, from breakdown of democracy, to transition and consolidation patterns of liberal democracies, and finally to recent tendencies of democratic erosion and backsliding. We end with the ancient question, whether the cyclical pattern can be broken by constitutional devices or, more likely, by forms of institutional reconstruction that alter the fundamental relation between capitalism and democracy..