ABSTRACT
It is time to bring together the lines of thought from the previous two chapters. Van den Bergh was the first to develop and formulate a fully-fledged theory of militant democracy. On the one hand there is the ‘principled democracy’, in which particular values are considered a criterion for admission to the democratic process. For Van den Bergh those principles are freedom of conscience and equality before the law. Parties failing to acknowledge these principles are excluded from democratic participation. On the other hand we find in his inaugural lecture the idea of ‘democracy as self-correction’: democracy is characterized by the unique feature of enabling the people to correct their own mistakes, an idea also proposed by the French jurist Milan Markovitch. Democracy then only guards the outmost boundaries: decisions must be revocable. The framework must remain intact; within it everything is possible. There will always be the next elections, always a next moment at which the people can express their views.
