Identity and Democracy

Democracy and issues of identity have been linked throughout history. Since ancient Greece, questions of citizenship, participation, rights, and duties have been tied to understandings of race, ethnicity, sex, and class. In later attempts to universalize democratic principles and connect them with human nature, identity and difference became subordinate to theories of universal human nature and shared identity found in Enlightenment reason and Romantic humanism. As criticisms of those periods and particularly of universal notions of human ...