Modernity and Schism in Understanding Democracy

The two centuries following the American and French Revolutions are marked by a wide propagation of the republican system, or representative government. Although the founders of the new republican system explicitly contrasted it with democracy, the modern representative governments as practiced in industrialized countries today are commonly interpreted as democracies, primarily due to universal suffrage. This chapter describes the transformations in understanding democracy in real politics as well as responses to these transformations in theoretical works with proposals for how to improve the performance of representative democracy. We argue that the redefinition of democracy perplexed scholars, especially those who have dealt with the voting problem in a general context of universal suffrage by attempting to design a universal voting procedure. It turns out that voting, practiced for centuries in simple situations, is not appropriate as a universal tool of democratic decision making. In 1951, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem established that egalitarian, majority-based democracy has its limits; beyond these limits, only a hierarchy headed with a ‘first man’ can operate as its extension, which resembles the structure of representative government. However, its democratic legitimacy depends on the degree of its representativeness, that is, how well the hierarchy represents the public interest. Herewith, we conclude this part of the book and pose the question to be studied next.