1 Moreover, my focus is narrowly political. Economics—and especially the relationship of democracy to capitalism and socialism—is left to one side.

2 “Theology as critical reflection on praxis” (Gutierrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973], p. 6Google Scholar).

3 Cf. Hegel, G. W. F., Logic, trans. Wallace, W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 115–32Google Scholar; Stace, W. T., The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1928), pp. 88–89ff.Google Scholar; Ollman, Bertell, Dialectical Investigations (New York: Rouledge, 1993).Google Scholar

4 Sophisticated representatives of this older view are Cook, Thomas I., History of Political Philosophy (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1936)Google Scholar and Ebenstein, William, Great Political Thinkers (New York: Holt, 1951)Google Scholar. But note the Ebenstein puts in italics his view that, “On the whole, the practical effect of Hobbes has been to strengthen the doctrine of the absolute state” (p. 341).

5 Sabine's comment that Hobbes's “individualism is the thoroughly modern element in” his philosophy, “and the respect in which he caught most clearly the note of the coming age” (A History of Political Theory [New York: Holt, 1937], p. 475Google Scholar). See also Strauss's comment: “If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the State with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes” (Natural Right and History [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953], pp. 181–182.Google Scholar)

6 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), chap. 13.Google Scholar

7 Lovejoy, Arthur, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).Google Scholar

8 Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations (New York: Dent, 1967)Google Scholar, Bk. 9, med. 1; cf. also Jer. 31: 27–34.

9 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 11.

10 Russell, Betrand, A History of Western Philosphy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945)Google Scholar, Bk. 3, pt. 1, chap. 6.

11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and the Discourses, trans, and ed. Cole, G. D. H. (London: Dent, 1973), chap. 4.Google Scholar

12 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 17.

13 Alternative schema for structuring the history of modern democracy can be found, e.g., in Dahl, Robert A., Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Duncan, Graeme, ed., Democratic Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Sartori, Giovanni, Democratic Theory (New York: Praeger, 1983)Google Scholar; Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Hew York: Harper, 1942)Google Scholar; and Strombers, Roland, Democracy: A Short Analytical History (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1996)Google Scholar. Especially important for this essay are Sabine, G. H., “Two Democratic Traditions,” Philosophical Review 61 (1952): 451–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dewey, John, Individualism, Old and New (New York: Minton, 1930)Google Scholar. All of these books and the many like them deal more or less frontally with the problem of definitions. It might be thought that the historical scheme being advanced in this paper is merely making explicit what is implicit in Marx, especially what is in The Manifesto. Certainly Marx is instructive, and his specific contributions to the history of democracy will be featured below. But Marx is too interested in economics to be a contributor to the history of democratic ideas. He shows little concern or respect for politics or the political process. Certainly he has no focus on the central theme of this essay: the movement and development of political ideas through conversation.

14 It may be useful to urge the reader to compare this spare and perhaps bleak definition of liberal democracy's core emphases to a more rounded “main stream” discussion such as that contained in Pennock, J. Roland, Liberal Democracy (New York: Reinhart, 1950).Google Scholar

15 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1927), chap. 1.Google Scholar

16 Riker, William, Liberalism Against Populism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), chap. 1.Google Scholar

17 Lasswell, Harold, Who Gets What, When, How (London: Whittlesey House, 1936).Google Scholar

18 Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

19 It may be important to stress that the confessional life's so-called “secular” form is still effectively religious, a search for personal ultimates.

20 Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Bradley, S., 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), chap. 31.Google Scholar

21 Arendt, Hannah, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1951)Google Scholar; Talmon, Jacob, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960)Google Scholar; Macpherson, C. B., The Real World of Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), esp. chap. 2.Google Scholar

22 The use of the word totalitarian to help describe this version of democracy has been avoided not because it is not deserved but because the term is so emotionally loaded its use would probably shield liberal democracy from the case being made against it.

23 Thus the answer to the proverbial question, Rousseau: Totalitarian or Liberal? Chapman, John (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956)Google Scholar is probably best given as: neither, both, and more.

24 Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. 1, chap. 8 (see fn. 27 below).

25 Mill, John Stuart, The Autobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 104.Google Scholar

26 Habermas, Jürgen, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Bachrach, Peter and Botwinick, Aryeh, Power and Empowerment: A Radical Theory of Participatory Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Barber, Benjamin, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Port Huron Statement (New York: S.D.S., 1962)Google Scholar; but also, importantly, Green, T. H., Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans, 1941)Google Scholar; Lindsay, A. D., The Modern Democratic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947)Google Scholar; Barker, Ernest, Reflections on Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942).Google Scholar

27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. Cole, G. D. H. (London: Dent, 1973)Google Scholar. The Cole translation is preferred because, both in his introduction and in his translation, Cole consistently puts a communitarian interpretation on Rousseau (e.g., “obedience to law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty,” instead of “I” or “one”—the original French is indefinite).

28 The most complete and precise intellectual statement of the “remarkable change” Rousseau requires is in Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942)Google Scholar: “concrete freedom consists in this, that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right (as they do in the sphere of the family and civil society) but, for one thing, they also pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and, for another thing, they know and will the universal; they even recognize it as their own substantive mind; they take it as their end and aim and are active in its pursuit. The result is that the universal does not prevail or achieve completion except along with particular interests and through the cooperation of knowing and willing; and individuals likewise do not live as private persons for their own ends alone, but in the very act of willing these they will the universal in the light of the universal, and their activity is consciously aimed at none but the universal end” (para. 260).

29 Participatory democracy's emphasis on open-ended conversation has prompted the witticism that “Democracy,” or, maybe, democratic socialism, “takes too many evenings.” But the remark, usually attributed to Oscar Wilde, is specious. It not only begs the question, if the group does not decide, who will? It denigrates the intrinsic value of social life.

30 Hinckley, Barbara, Stability and Change in Congress (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).Google Scholar

31 Hints of this kind of thinking are broadly evident in the work of Croly, Herbert, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1915), chap. 12Google Scholar, “The Advent of Direct Government,” and other “progressives,” including Woodrow Wilson, in his comments on the presidency (Constitutional Government in the United States [New York: Columbia, 1908])Google Scholar. See also Clinton Rossiter's claim that the. presidency “embodies” the American people's “majesty and reflects their character” (The American Presidency [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954], p. 250Google Scholar); also Bums, James McGregor (The Deadlock of Democracy [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963], chap. 14, “Strategy for Americans”)Google Scholar, and Mansfield, Harvey (Taming the Prince [New York: The Free Press, 1989], chap. 6, “Machiavelli and the Modern Executive”).Google Scholar

32 Brown, Robert McAfee, Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).Google Scholar

33 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1996).Google Scholar

34 Gutmann, Amy and Thompson, Dennis, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).Google Scholar