Democracy

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Democracy is the most valued and also perhaps the vaguest of political concepts in the modern world. Political systems as diverse as the USA, various one-party states in Africa and communist states all describe themselves as democracies. Indeed, it is characteristic of this vagueness that when a UNESCO conference on democracy was held in 1950, more than 50 nations, representing a full range of political systems, each insisted that they were (and sometimes that only they were) a democracy.

The word ‘democracy’ is derived from two ancient Greek words: demos (‘the people’) and kratos (‘strength’). By itself democracy means little more than that, in some undefined sense, political power is ultimately in the hands of the whole adult population, and that no smaller group has the right to rule. Democracy only takes on a more useful meaning when qualified by one of the other words with which it is associated, for example liberal democracy, representative democracy, participatory democracy or direct democracy.

Those who seek to justify the title ‘democracy’ for a society where power is clearly in the hands of one section of the population (for example, in many Third World or communist countries) mean something rather different.

The claim is not really that the people rule, but that they are ruled in their own interests. Defenders of the system operating in the Soviet Union before the changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, claimed that until economic and social progress has been made, and a true ‘socialist man’ created by education, that is until the masses have lost their false consciousness, democratic procedures would be worse than useless. Their argument was that people cannot be left to choose their own leaders, or make their own political choices, until their vision is genuinely free of distortion and they can identify their real needs. This version of democracy has a close connection with the theory of positive liberty.

One way of making sense of this diversity of usages is to suggest that a claim to being democratic is, in a sense, a ‘negative’ claim. That is, a democratic society is one that will not accept the right of any élite to rule except when it can justify itself in terms of mass approval or especial emergency. For example, a claim to rule simply because one was of superior birth, race, religious perception or intellectual power would be negated by the demand for democracy. Democracy is, almost inevitably, negative in this sense, because its basic principle, the right of a majority over any minority, is not capable of justification as a good in itself.