ABSTRACT
The assertion that the dominant trend of our age is toward an ever fuller development of democratic patterns of thought and behaviour may sound paradoxical in view of the frequency with which dictatorships nowadays are superseding democracy. At the early stages of democratization, the political decision process was controlled by more or less homogeneous economic and intellectual elites. Modern democracy often breaks down because it is burdened with far more complex decision problems than those facing early democratic societies with their more homogeneous ruling groups. The democratic principle does not deny that under conditions of fair competition some individuals will turn out to be superior to others; it merely demands that the competition be fair, i.e. that some people be not given a higher initial status than others. In pre-democratic society, all social authority is inextricably linked to the idea of the ontological superiority of the wielder of authority.
