ABSTRACT
There is in our own day an almost general prejudice in favour of democracy. Almost everybody is a ‘democrat’, and the name of democracy is invoked in support of the most diverse social systems and theories. This general acceptance of the name of democracy, even by persons who are obviously not in any real sense ‘democrats’, is perhaps largely to be explained by the fact that the idea of democracy has become almost inextricably tangled up with the idea of representative government, or rather with a particular theory of representative government based on a totally false theory of representation.
