ABSTRACT
The earliest sustained defense of the democratic ethos in the Occidental world dates back to 424-403 b.c. It comes to us via Thucydides, who offers a spirited defense of the Athenian democracy in his Peloponnesian War where he pictures an Athenian statesman Pericles railing against the despotic Sparta. Members of the liberal faction in the Russian parliament headed by Grigory Yavlinsky declared at a meeting in St. Petersburg that "Russia was becoming a society with the trappings of freedom, but controlled in reality from the top." Implicit in the pragmatist outlook on civil society is the notion of "moral imagination," which may be construed as a phase in the evolution of a democratic polity toward an emotionally intelligent community. A society that lets itself be informed by moral imagination is marked by the equitable distribution of economic and symbolic resources which practically enable every member of society to participate in civil discourse.
