The spirit of the founders of the undemocratic democracy, page 1

Abstract :The spirit of the founders of the modern undemocratic "democracy"

Claiming “democracy” - without giving more power to the demos (the people)- the representatives of our political systems are not only trapped the people they claim to serve, is the language itself that they have Betrayed: How now to update the anti-democratic discourse, practices, systems and politicians grouped under the label “Democrat”? The shift in meaning has been the word “democracy” is probably the biggest masterstroke of propaganda modern politics.

A translation for ATS members.

Autor : Francis Dupuis-Deri (1999) Professor, Department of Political Science, UQAM.

An article published in the journal Agon, No 22, September 1999, pp. 95-114

Introduction

“The spirit of the founders of the modern undemocratic democracy”. One can almost say that the political theorizing was invented to show that democracy, the government of men by themselves, necessarily turns reign of the mob … If there is something like the Western tradition of political thought, It begins with the profoundly undemocratic means. ”, J. S. MC Celland.

Today

TODAY, almost all actors and political thinkers claim to democracy. But the founders of our representative democracy were openly antidemocratic, using the word “democracy” to describe and denigrate their opponents too radical. This paradox - the antidemocratic underlying the so-called “democracies” modern - is very clear when immersed himself in reading the speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles, personal letters and poems of the revolutionary period, As American than French. In fact, almost incantatory power that has the word “democracy” today makes us forget that for more than two thousand years, the term “democracy” had a very negative effect for almost all political thinkers, and no political player it is not the champion.

Since Athens, was meant by “democracy” the direct government of the people assembled in the agora to propose legislation, debate and vote. Of course, the Athenian democracy was not perfect, women, slaves and metics being excluded. But this problem of exclusion - that deserves to be thought - had what can resonance for two thousand years since the monarchy, imperial or so-called “democratic” practice almost always self-slavery and the exclusion of women from the public sphere. The definition of democracy is little interest in these problems, which were not in the eyes of thinkers and political actors. They focused instead on the form of direct government of democracy as incompatible with any kind of representation. This descriptive definition was accompanied by a normative sense pejorative: democracy was a diet low because people are easily manipulated by demagogues and leaves easily led by his passions. Worse yet, what people fundamentally irrational is unable to discern the “common good” - a phrase that ignores the conflicts inherent in living together - and threatens to impose equality policies since at the agora the poor will always outnumber the rich. In short, democracy would tend inevitably to one of two pathological forms: the tyranny of the majority or chaos. The founding fathers of the first “democratic” modern shared vision of democracy.

We are thus confronted with a paradoxical situation: our plans “democratic” were founded by individuals deeply and openly antidemocratic. This undemocratic, we intend to explore here, is a fundamental element of our contemporary representative systems. During his training, our representative system is known as “democracy” but rather under that of “republic”, two terms are not synonyms, far from it. However, a change of label occurs, both the United States and France, late in the first half of the nineteenth century [1]. Therefore, the openly anti-democratic regimes adopted for reasons that today would be called marketing policy, the term “democracy”. As antidemocratic inherent in our representative system, this antidemocratic founding fathers seems to be explained in terms of both sociological, political and economic philosophy and linguistics.

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[edit on 3-12-2009 by psychederic]

[edit on 3-12-2009 by psychederic]