ABSTRACT
Our highest ideals, as efforts to realise them fail, become the source of our most profound disappointment and extreme reactions. Democracy, in the advanced societies, has departed widely in practice from the conceptions of the great liberal-democratic theorists, and then again, from the reconceptions of the apologists for these errant paths. The initial argument of this work was that the modern state, or advanced industrial democratic society, was an elusive, transient phenomenon – like any other form of human organisation, in process of adaptation to a changing environment. Secular, centralised, specialised and participatory, it has suffered the contradictory challenges of ideology, regional separatism, interdependence of functions within its enlarged competence, and apparently ineluctable oligarchical elitist tendencies within large organisations. At the same time, its real independence, in the international environment, has been reduced -particularly by technological developments.
