ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the meaning of participatory democracy, affirms and demonstrates its relevance, explains its operation, and shows the obligations it imposes on those who are participants. It identifies an inclusive and continuing political function everywhere common to human culture—the determination and administration of social and public policy. The diversity of political forms and structures among constituted groups is at least as broad and change-exhibiting as that of any other dimension of organized life—family or economy. A theory of participatory democracy requires the dropping of the concept of the state and a revision of the concept of government. In Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism and communism, there is denigration of the state and eulogization of an economic class, and ultimately of a nonalienated "new man." In Marx's socialism, there is denigration of the nonconforming individual and eulogization of the socialist state. The locus of discretion must, then, under a democratic order remain with the community at large.
