ABSTRACT
There are hardly any other words in any language that are as frequently employed as are democracy and knowledge. Nor are there many words that consistently meet with such fondness and approval as knowledge and democracy. The favorable appeal that surrounds the abstract terms knowledge and democracy, and the general displeasure that surrounds their absence, for example in the sense of “we know very little” or “totalitarian regime,” is virtually without competition when it comes to concepts that characterize societal conditions other than merely psychological or individual dispositions, such as love, luck, or health. By the same token, and as the philosopher Immanuel Kant already observed in the early 18th century, there are very complex relations (circles) between liberty and knowledge, as well as between liberty and any deficit of knowledge and democracy.
