ABSTRACT
All the great revolutions have focused on one or another aspect of democracy. Historically, democracy seems to have signified the struggle to eliminate class discrepancies, but in recent years, especially since World War II in the United States and conspicuously through the work of Arthur Bentley, David Truman, and Robert Dahl, democracy has come to mean a politics of bargaining and consensus. Democracy is usually associated with Western forms of government, especially parliamentary activity and political parties, but it was also a concern in the classical Marxist literature and it is relevant to socialism everywhere. The forms of democracy associated with capitalism tend to be representative, but participatory forms have also appeared under both capitalism and socialism. A theoretical conceptualization of economic democracy, including democratic control of investment and production, is elaborated by Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Democracy and Capitalism. Throughout the twentieth century, experiments with participatory democracy have often appeared in revolutionary and liberating settings.
