Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

claims scientific neutrality, its value judgment is clear enough: whatever
works, is right – that is, whatever enables the existing class-stratified
society to operate without intolerable friction is best [Macpherson,
1973, p. 78–79].
At the same time, striving for representing democracy as a process
of achieving the ideal without any limitations and reservations is
not necessarily an unreal enterprise criticized by theoreticians of élite
democracy for its utopist inclinations. In fact, American champion of
participatory democracy Benjamin Barber argues that there are already
two types of democracy present in today’s society: official democracy
with its ‘Big politics’, party intrigues, corruption and bureaucracy, – and
real ‘neighborhood democracy’ with its practice of local self-government
and grassroots voluntary activities. That’s why, according to Barber, we
have to expand our understanding of what counts as democratic, rather
than expanding democracy itself [Barber, 1984, p.XIV]. However we
think that the philosophical approach to democracy is aimed at limiting
that understanding rather than expanding it – for every philosophical
definition sets strict limitations to a term in order to differentiate the
entity it designates out from things unfit for the notion in question. In
other words, democracy is to be distinguished from other phenomena
that exist in our society and title themselves as democracy while being
indeed something very different.
So, how should philosophy understand the term ‘democracy’?
The most simple and usual one is the understanding of democracy
as just ‘power of the people’, as the people’s sovereignty, where the
people are the source, the bearers, and the conductors of power. Such
a formulation presented an adequate guideline and served as a roadmap
for social and political structure during the age of Absolutism,
for then the usual reality was the dominance of a sole monarch or a
narrow circle of persons possessing power either by force or by the
right of birth. Then the ideal of the power for all the people – and
not one single person or single exclusive estate – was progressive
and revolutionary.
But today such an approach to understanding and defining
democracy turns out to be very abstract – that is, not clear enough
in order to serve as a lodestar in the semidarkness of the political life
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DEVELOPMENT OF TODAY’S
DEMOCRACY:
PEOPLE, POWER, AND
HUMAN PERSONALITY
Iurii Mielkov e Anatoliy
Tolstoukhov