Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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DEMOCRACY TODAY
theoretically) is. And the fact that many today’s born democrats in
Ukraine and other countries of the ex-USSR are former convinced
communists only strengthens the idea that ‘democracy’ could be
perceived rather as a keyword that denotes belonging of titular
‘democrats’ to the self-proclaimed ‘power party’. Indeed, some leaders
of the former USSR republics in 1991 have just renamed their
parties ‘democratic’ instead of ‘communist’, and then they were
elected presidents. At the same time, authors from both East and
West, like Alexander Zinovyev or Colin Crouch, tend to describe
the contemporary social situation as a ‘post-democracy’ [Crouch,
2004; Zinovyev, 2006].
Nevertheless, we still believe that phenomenon of democracy
should not be reduced to its ‘Realpolitik’ connotation, providing the
space for its philosophical comprehension – and its true realization.
Democracy from the philosophical perspective is not just a given state
of affairs, a certain way of organizing the political system (featuring
general elections, parliament, freedom of speech etc. etc.) – it is rather
an ideal image of harmonious social life, which could indeed be presented
as a process of its development and its implementation in reality
for every human person.
Our position here is close to the tradition of participatory democracy
and opposes a neo-classical understanding of democracy, that of
Schumpeter or Sartori, who present democracy as a limited form of élite
activity. We would like to cite the criticism of that position by Canadian
theoretician of participatory democracy, C. B. Macpherson:
The model of democracy that has been raised to orthodoxy in American
political science… is counter-democratic (by the older concept of democracy)
in that it empties out, as being normative, unrealistic, or utopian,
the egalitarian and developmental moral ideal of the original liberaldemocratic
theory, and accepts as an adequate model (and proclaims as
the only accurate model) of democracy, a competition between two or
more élite groups for the power to govern the whole society. Democracy
is held to be consistent with, and even to require, a low level of citizen
participation: only so, it is said, is the political system likely to stay in
equilibrium. Democracy is reduced from a humanist aspiration to a
market equilibrium system. And although the new orthodox theory