ABSTRACT
The adherents of formal democracy – whose starting-point is not the conduct of real life, but a abstract construction – naturally incline towards this error, especially in those societies where intellectual and historical conditions lend an unusually powerful vitality to opposing antidemocratic tendencies. In general, the essence of democracy is by no means 'peace', or the 'absence of force'. All democracy is 'formal', since the problems of the development of common knowledge, law and order, moral responsibility, personal dignity, equal justice, and so on, are formal problems, relating to the 'structure' of human social relations. As regards the matter of 'levels', it is undeniable that the believers in freedom and in despotism both operate on the level of reality – if not, these things become aesthetic knick-knacks, and they make themselves a laughing-stock with their moral poses. The way of the most fantastic moral backsliding is paved with schemes for a 'faultless', 'contradictionless', 'squeaky clean', 'consistent' morality.
