Democracy, Democratic Education and Administration

Democracy—Definition and History

Democracy, from the Greek demos, meaning “common people,” and kratos, meaning “strength and power,” literally means government of the people. Generally, it is accepted that there are two forms of democracy—direct, in which the people directly rule on the issues before them, and representative, in which the people elect others to do state craft for them. Beyond that, defining democracy becomes more problematic, particularly in looking at the outer appearances of different democratic forms. Part of the reason for this is that democracy is based upon two separate defining concepts. The first is that the individual person has certain rights (or as Locke wrote, “inalienable rights”). The second is that societies require specific responsibilities of their individual members. The intersection of social responsibility and individual right is a place that is constantly in flux, and often local conditions influence how such intersections play out. Thus, while the common definition of government by the people is a workable place to start in the discussion of democracy, it is already extremely problematic to the point that Laurence Whitehead called it “vexed” in 1997.

The rise of the first representative democracy is traced to the ancient Athenians in 462 BC. However, by current political standards, Athenian democracy was anything but representative. Women, slaves, and those who were not 100% Athenian were not allowed to participate in the democratic processes of the day. This meant that a specific elite was vested with the responsibility for governing. Furthermore, later Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, expressed doubts about the efficacy of democracy as a viable and efficient form of governance.

In the West, ideas about democracy languished until the Reformation movement sparked by Martin Luther, but conceptualized by John Calvin. With a reformed church came the need to work out the relationship between governance on earth and governance in heaven. Luther worked out this problem by following the eschatological argument of Paul—that it was [Page 277]better to obey the king on earth knowing that his was a temporal existence than to risk offending God above. Calvin analyzed the problem much more subtly. In his monumental treatise The Institutes of Christian Religion, Calvin attempted to account for the need for earthly governance. He reasoned that three forms of government were available to men—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—but since man's nature was imperfect, the best of these would be either aristocracy or democracy. Thus, Calvin concluded that through governance by the many, those things that were inconsistent with the kingdom of God would be appropriately controlled. So within the Reformation movement (the Roman Catholic Church did not officially endorse democracy until Vatican II) was the seed of democratic governance. As Calvin's thinking became more and more influential within Protestant religious communities on the European continent, the secular philosophical concepts needed to institute democratic forms came to fruition, particularly in the works of Enlightenment scholars.

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