Abstract: In the previous chapter I sought to justify democracy as a form of government in terms of certain common interests that could not otherwise be attended to. The argument moved from protective considerations, through a thought-experiment about the most plausible alternative to democracy to considerations of political equality under conditions of human fallibility. Someone might argue at this point that, despite the role of the principle of political equality in this account, the pattern of justification used makes the defence of democracy external to the attitudes and perceptions of citizens. On this account democracy is primarily a means by which citizens attend to certain common interests rather than a practice through which individuals develop themselves and their potentialities. Does this not miss certain intrinsic merits that democratic government might be thought to have? Instead of a largely instrumental argument for democracy, should we not seek to ground the practice of democracy is something more internal to the conception of an individual's good? As Hannah Arendt (1958, p. 198) once put it, there is an interpretation of the political, in which the distinctive human capacities of speaking and writing not only have 'the most intimate relationship to the public world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it'.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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