From politics to the political

The subject of democracy is widely contested and has a multitude of interpretations and meanings across many political persuasions, although the origin of the word is actually very clear. Democracy’s meaning comes from the Greek word demokratia: demos meaning ‘people’ and kratos meaning ‘rule’. ¹ Therefore the word means ‘the rule of the people’ as opposed to the rule of nature, the rule of a monarch or a dictator. The discourse of democracy, however, becomes ambiguous and complicated, and often contradicts its original meaning. It could be argued that on some accounts democracy has triumphed because in the past many political thinkers were critical of democracy, whereas most political thinkers today call themselves democrats and agree that society should be democratic in some sense. At the same time a situation has emerged that is becoming commonly known as a ‘crisis of democracy’, a term coined by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man , a thesis that predicted the dawn of an everlasting, US-led, New World Order. He declared a ‘total exhaustion’ of all other modern alternatives to free-market democracy. ²