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Plato and Democracy

On Democratic Theories

Huong Nguyen considers current trends in democratic thinking.

Someone made a provocative and skeptical comment on democracy to me: “‘Democracy’ is a meaningless term. Communists have referred to their political systems as ‘peoples’ democracies’. Though often forgotten today, fascists and Nazis claimed that their regimes rested on ‘the will of the people’. Even among those today who subscribe to some version of liberal democracy, there is no agreement about what ‘democracy’ means or entails. Libraries are filled with volumes defending competing versions of democracy – deliberative, participatory, elite-based, and so on.

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