ABSTRACT
We are all democrats now. So much so that though democracy is frequently advocated, it is far less frequently either defined or justified. We all know it is a good thing, and no one bothers to ask what kind of good thing it is. But it was not always so. The first use of the term ‘democracy’ by Aristotle was dismissive, an indication of a ‘corrupt’ form of politics, of misrule by the unfit masses who governed in their own interests rather than in those of the whole community. When the idea began to take shape in something like its present form as government by the people in late eighteenth-century Europe, ‘democracy’ was still for many a term descriptive of disorder and subversion. Throughout the nineteenth century democracy meant, for conservatives and for many liberals, the self-interested and ignorant domination of the state by the poor, the end of responsible government, and the inception of disorder. Good government, they argued, consisted of applying the correct principles in the correct manner, and only people of skill, wisdom and experience could do this. To place government in the hands of the people was to place it in the hands of those who knew neither what best to do, nor how best to do it.
