Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

DEVELOPMENT OF TODAY’S DEMOCRACY:
PEOPLE, POWER, AND HUMAN PERSONALITY
Iurii Mielkov e Anatoliy Tolstoukhov
CHARITY ORGANIZATION ‘CENTER FOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY’, KIEV, UKRAINE
DEMOCRACY IS NOW ONE OF THE MOST COMMON TERMS USED IN PUBLIC RHETO-
RIC;, however, it seldom serves as an object of philosophical reflection.
Democracy could sometimes appear as a ‘worn out’, devaluated notion,
deprived of any clear sense. The specific situation with democracy in
post-communist countries in fact resembles their recent past – the
usage of the word ‘democracy’ equals to that of ‘communism’ several
decades ago: the term is being widely used in official discourse, but
nobody takes it for real. As Ukrainian sociologist Iryna Popova explains
that situation:
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DEVELOPMENT OF TODAY’S
DEMOCRACY:
PEOPLE, POWER, AND
HUMAN PERSONALITY
Iurii Mielkov e Anatoliy
Tolstoukhov
…parading the ‘democracy’ of our society, constant usage of the term
‘democracy’ in the situation of lawlessness and actual violation of people’s
rights, considerable spreading of poorness and poverty is a blasphemy,
because it leads to devaluation of that word, to the commonplace perception
of democracy as a situation where ‘everything goes’, and ‘a plain man’
has no protection against that. In other words, against the background
of our practices that term obtains the sense directly opposite to what a
researcher means by it [Popova, 2008, p. 19–20].
That is, the today’s popular term ‘democracy’ often describes a
situation quite different from what democracy really (classically and