ABSTRACT
The ideal of active individual freedom gives a highly distinctive form to the problem of political order and political life. In the modern period of history, roughly the past two centuries, our culture has developed political freedom, embodied in representative institutions; we have become committed to democracy as an ideal on its own account and as a prerequisite for other freedoms, religious, cultural, social and economic. The relations between economic and political freedom will be the topic of the following chapter; the present chapter deals with the meaning and problems of democracy itself, with only incidental reference to the particular tasks and dangers confronted by it, which happen to come from the side of economic life.
