ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches some of the more common renderings of democracy to bring to light the specific political interests that they serve. It shows that the divisions between democracy and these elitist forms of governance are not as clear-cut as they may sound. Democracy as practiced by most states derives from the time of European liberalism, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Democracy as a high-stakes political topic has been subjected to many competing efforts to influence the general public. Representative democracy is associated with the controversial school of European political thought known as liberalism or liberal humanism. One set of terms for democratic practice comes from traditions that have not had good relations with European-modeled states, such as the term "councils" associated with some Indigenous or tribal forms of governance. Multiple conceptions of democracy prevent any single definition from monopolizing our thinking and give us room to bring each to crisis through critical questioning.
