Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Democracy is a word, the real of gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened. It is a great word, whose history I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”
Walt Whitman
Defining Democracy
George Orwell addressed the problem of defining democracy in his essay “Politics and the English Language”. He made the point that "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity”, resulting from “a gap between one's real and one's declared aims”. In that context, he identified some political words that have been “abused” to the point that they have “several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another”. With regard to democracy, he said:
“In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it: consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”
It is true that the term democracy has come to mean different things to different people but attempts to define democracy are not “resisted from all sides” – only by the defenders of other kinds of regimes – the false friends and true enemies of democracy.
In this passage from his Second Treaties of Government, John Locke used the term “perfect democracy” in the same way the term “pure democracy” is sometimes used to describe the form of government commonly known as direct democracy. In a direct democracy, every citizen who is governed by the laws that are put in place has an equal vote and votes directly to determine what laws will be enacted, as well as to determine the form and the powers of their government, what rights will be protected by their government, and what public policies are put in place.
Locke identified majority rule as the essential element that makes a government a pure democracy. He asserted that a majority of the members of a community had “the whole power of the community naturally in them” and “may employ all that power in making laws for the community” because “every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation, to everyone of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it".
John Locke (1632-1704)