ABSTRACT
The practice of democracy requires appropriate rules of disclosure, precisely because they are not private; otherwise the underlying democratic principle of political equality can be undermined. Indeed the whole notion of democracy presumes some degree of equality in a society. Obviously, how extensive the scope of that equality has to be depends initially on the meaning of the word “democracy”. In the 20th century establishing democracy would depend not just on granting the vote to all adults, but also in there being institutions to filter opinion so that public debate and public policy-making were not chaotic. When activists turn partly towards direct action in opposing anti-egalitarians the danger to democracy is that it could then move from being a temporary expedient for these activists to becoming a key vehicle in the pursuit of an egalitarian agenda. Especially during Cold War, some political writers used to claim that equality was necessarily in conflict with liberty, and that the latter should prevail.
