Three mistakes about democracy

Philip Pettit

pp. 187-199

in: Allyn Fives, Keith Breen (eds), Philosophy and political engagement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Pettit addresses three claims that are often made among contemporary policy-makers, political scientists, and political theorists about democracy. The three claims are associated with the work of Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Schumpeter, and William Riker, respectively, and Pettit endeavours to show they are false and, indeed, revealingly false: they display a serious misunderstanding of the nature and appeal of democracy. Pettit does so from the perspective of the republican tradition that emerged in classical Rome, a tradition built around a conception of freedom as non-domination, one that requires a rich conception of democracy of a kind that the mistakes charted here would cause us to overlook.

Cited authors

Schumpeter Joseph

Berlin Isaiah