Clearly, the "politico-moral" is a phenomenon that extends beyond democracies: any despotism (including 20th-century totalitarianisms) that has ever claimed to be building an ideal society on earth would qualify. The key development leading towards it would seem to be a loss of understanding, or a loss of nerve, on the part of individuals who once possessed a sense of their own moral responsibilities, and who therefore also had a sense of the rather different way in which government was meant to operate as the provider of a framework for their own moral life.

So long as a population retains those proper senses of the moral and the political, it should actually benefit from a democratic constitution, as this will enable it to express more decisively, through the ballot-box, its dislike of those who want to introduce "politico-moral" projects. Minogue emphasises that democracy in itself does not give rise to the servile mentality; that mentality may be the product of many cultural and social changes. But once the servile mind exists, it has a mutually reinforcing relationship with the "politico-moral" approach to government; and when it develops in a democracy, all three — servility, politico-morality and democracy — link hands in a viciously circling danse macabre.

If this all sounds rather abstract, well, it is. Minogue is a philosopher; there are pages here devoted to the nature of individualism, or the difference between a desire and an impulse, or the concept of a right. His closest affinity is with the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, whose distinction between the state as a "civil association" (good) and the state as an "enterprise association" (bad) is invoked at key moments. 

Other affinities are with Thomas Hobbes and Eric Voegelin, and there are even some surprisingly respectful invocations of Hegel. While the prose is marvellously jargon-free, some non-philosophical readers may find that real effort is required to keep all Minogue's distinctions and sub-arguments in their heads as they go along.

But the effort will not be wasted; and there are many incidental aphoristic pleasures to be had along the way. For example, here is Minogue on the educationalists' desire to avoid exposing children to the experience of failure: "Common sense tells us that failure might well be regarded as a discovery process. It tells people what they are not good at." Or on the rhetoric of liberation: "There are few liberations without some undertow of a new servitude."

Or on the syndrome of Westerners developing an ideology of anti-Westernism: "It is an interesting question whether those who reject their civilisation on moral grounds exemplify moral abasement or moral megalomania. The answer, of course, is that the abasement is collective, and the megalomania is personal." Or on the need for elementary realism in politics: "Realism here rests on the one empirical proposition that no perfecting of the world would be possible without entrusting to rulers such a plenitude of power as would addle their wits."

This is a book that may leave readers, at the end, still puzzling over some of the reasons for the fundamental changes it describes. But they will find their wits distinctly less addled than before.