Main Objective: To enable the participants

to acquire a sound knowledge of theories

on democracy and relate these theories to
known democratic practices in historical
and political developments.
The course also seeks to answer the
following questions:
1. What are the essentials of democracy?

2. What is the rationale for democratizing

a society?
3. In democratic praxis, what types of
democracy have emerged?
4. What types of democracy work in
which geographical zones?
5. What challenges to democracy have
evolved?

Essentials of Democracy
Architecture of Democracy
Types of Democracy
Democratization Principles
Democratic Peace Doctrine
Democratic Practices in
Asia Pacific Europe
North America
Africa
Latin America

Boix, Carles. Democracy and Redistribution.

Cambridge,M.A.: Cambridge University
Press, 2003
Goodin, Robert E..Reflective Democracy.
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Rasler, Karen A.. Puzzles of the Democratic
Peace Theory,Geopolitics, and the
Transformation of World Politics. N.Y.2005

Thought Papers on assigned topics.

Preliminary Examination (Classroom)
Final Examination (Take Home)
Course Paper of participants choice. It
reflects discussions during the semester
and participants survey of cases and
studies. To be submitted on Final Exam
day.
Attendance: 80% of total number of hours

Spragens Jr.,Thomas A.. Reason and

Demo
cracy. Duke University Press. Durkham
and
London, 1990.
Whitehead, Laurence. Democratization:
Theory and Experience. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.

Demos = people
Kratos = power to rule
We relate demonstrations to political
expressions of people (demos) as they
essay their interests that reflect a
number of people or sectors. They
articulate private interests unheeded
by elected representatives. Taking to
the streets or street parliaments reflect

a direct way of participation endeared to the

communitarians during the period of Greek citystates.
The polis/ city-states were composed of a few
hundreds of families. Men of property assembled
to legislate, execute legislations, and administer
justice at the given assembly place. Women were
left behind to look after the household and
manage the slaves. Democracy was then nascent
and its flowering had to see the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution when protection of human
rights was the banner.

Greek Conception of Democracy

-Polity is a work of nature
-Greek democracy was oriented toward an
integrated community
-Greeks saw civil freedom as best
expressed
in the right to participate in common
decisions

Liberal Conception of Democracy

-Modern liberalism construes polity as an
artificial product of the human will;
-Liberal democracy is individualistic and
libertarian in emphasis;
-Modern liberalism tends to focus in
contrast on civil liberties as private rights

against public power.

Post-positivist conception of a rational
society suggests that a liberalism that is
fully modern philosophically, both can and
should assimilate some of the more vital
aspects of classical Greek democracy.
The centrality of the agora in Greek
democracy is reincarnated in the
institutionalized public

dialogue of a rational society.

Although it cherishes individual rights and accepts the

importance of a protected realm of the private, a rational
society cannot function without a vigorous public sphere.
As the Greeks recognized, it is the encounter of citizens
in public discourse that reflects and ratifies their moral
equality and their moral standing.
Likewise embodied in the rational society, the focus of
the public sphere on the common good creates the
sense of community and obligation to larger goals that
keeps a liberal society from disintegrating into a mere
instrumentality of possessive individualism.

The Greek derogation of anyone who was

purely private is echoed by the rational
societys insistence on the necessity of
widespread participation.

Greek conception of Politics as a

practice as reincorporated into the
post-positivist reality. Alasdair
MacIntyres sense of the term

A practice is any coherent and complex

form of socially established cooperative
human activity through which goods internal
to that form of activity are realized in the
course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence which are appropriate to, and
partially definitive of, that form of activity.
Aristotle conceives politics as a practice
with

Goods internal to itself. MacIntyre observes.

Differences between Aristotle and James Mill:
The contrast grows directly out of the
difference between conceiving rationality as
practical and conceiving it as technical.
Technical rationality is by definition
instrumental. It is a means to an end outside

of itself that is established prerationally.

Politics as techne cannot be a practice,
then, because the goods it seeks are
always goods external to its own activity.
To conceive political activity as praxis
rather than techne
as the post-positivist conception of
rational practice does in agreement with
Aristotle, in contrast, makes it, properly
done, a virtue rather than a skill.

Rationalizing Society meant Weberian

bureaucratic instrumentalism or
Leninist manipulation. The concept is
not the iron cage of technical reason.
It is instead the supremely human
practice in which citizens flourish as
they create a good life together.

Communitarians: MacIntyre, Sandel,

Robert Bellah. These men found liberal
practices undesirable in that these were
incoherent and unconvincing. Liberal
practices are construed as unrestrainedly
individualistic in ways that verge upon
anarchism or nihilism. Liberalism is seen
as frustrating and detracting from the
achievement of a political community that
can know a good in common that we
cannot know alone.

Liberalism Defenders:
Rawls denied that liberalism rests upon
the (inadequate) metaphysical basis
Sandel argues to be implicit in it.
Amy Gutmann has argued that rightsbased liberals can recognize the
conditional priority of justice without
embracing deontological metaethics or
collapsing into teleology.

Stephen Holmes has averred that MacIntyres

portrait of liberalism is ludicrous animated
by the need to believe and to belong.

Don Herzog, asks the communitarians to

explain in some more detail than they have
just what sort of politics they are offering,
wonders out loud if there are deep
similarities between civic humanists in the
academy and the moral majority(and) if the
republican tradition has an element of
hostility to individualism itself,

If virtuous citizens are unpleasantly like

robots.
Partial Reconciliation between
Liberalism and Communitarianism:
The reconciliation proceeds at both the
political and philosophical levels.
Political - Rational conduct requires the

Insistence upon some of the most

fundamental liberal values. Politics
cannot approximate the standards of a
rational enterprise unless all
participants are accorded basic rights
and enjoy basic liberties of thought and
expression. Rationality mandates
respect for the personal autonomy that
liberalism cherishes.