Majority rules OK?

It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed rather elastic even at the time. Honest thinkers have had more difficulty in deciding what it means. At one extreme, it has its literal meaning: a system of government by the people. At the other, it has no meaning at all: just a hurrah word for whatever political arrangements the speaker admires, as in the expression ‘Democratic and Popular Republic of North Korea’.

The starting point of Dunn’s remarkable book is that in its proper sense only the Athenians have ever really tried democracy. They put the power to make laws and conduct public affairs in the hands of a general assembly of all citizens, and allowed large citizen juries, which were in effect mini-assemblies, to pronounce on innocence and guilt in criminal cases.