ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes two different streams of thought: one consisting of writers sympathetic to popular rule, the other consisting of anti-democratic writers. It argues that writers from the earliest times have understood that popular regimes, like other regimes, would inevitably have leaders. The heterogeneous collection of writers whose attention to the problems of leadership in popular orders stirs Professor Walker to regard them as "elitists" were all familiar with these two streams of thought and experience, the democratic and the anti-democratic. In outlining what he has chosen to call "the elitist theory of democracy", Professor Walker has constructed a paradigm that his intended victims will all regard as a caricature. Like every good caricature, it combines verisimilitude with exaggeration and distortion. To understand the problems Professor Walker is concerned with one needs more analysis across nations as well as within the United States itself.
