Democracy

The term democracy originates from ancient Greek and means rule by the people (demos). Traditionally, political theorists begin their considerations about democracy with aristocratic philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and deduce from there that ancient Greek philosophers opposed the concept of democracy. This is true in one way or another as far as these philosophers concerned, but many other philosophers were critical of Athenian democracy from a humanist perspective—just because it rested upon slavery and excluded women and foreigners from decision making. Epicurus' anti-political position, for example, might be read as a search for a much more comprehensive concept of democracy to include all subordinate classes and sections of society in decision making.

The development of the concept of democracy was not solely due to the ancient Greeks. Democracy as an institution to run general affairs of society is an [Page 444]innovation of a much earlier period. What we read in Plato's and Aristotle's writings is in fact why in Athens the implementation of an earlier form of democracy became problematic. It has to do with the division of society into social classes with contradictory material interests, which throws also some light on the modern problems of democracy. A society with social classes like ancient Greek societies could no longer assimilate the earlier form of democracy that allowed all male and female adults to participate in decision making.

In modern political thought, traditionally the theories of democracy are categorized on how they conceptualize the people, citizenship, majority, and minority. This approach touches one of the most crucial problems of the theory of democracy only on the surface because it takes the division of society into the majority and minority for granted or it leads to a distorted presentation of the problems involved if it accounts merely for elections and issues in governments. Political manipulation and distorted presentations may result in misperceptions of the issues in question;this manipulation may result in elections that may reverse what is the majority and the minority in reality. In Aristotle's political thought, the majority referred to the poor—that is, expropriated sections of society—and the minority is described as propertied nobility. John Stuart Mill's consideration about the tyranny of the majority has to do with the question of what might be the result if subordinate classes, the vast majority of population, are franchised. Provided they are conscious of their real interests, they could easily vote aside propertied classes and expropriate the expropriator. This worry motivates Aristotle in antiquity, as well as Mill in modernity, in the construction of what might be the best form of government. It is this worry that also gave rise to the elitist theory of democracy;for example, the work of Joseph Schumpeter. With Mill's proposal to weight votes in favor of richer and the better educated, the bourgeois democratic thought gives up one of the most essential concepts of democracy: the concept of equality, which is a contribution of Protestant Reformation to modern theory of democracy. This may also explain what Norberto Bobbio observed;namely, that liberal democracies tend to restrict the rights of the people if they express their will to participate in decision making rather than leaving it to the elites in governments.

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