Democracy Before, In, and After Schumpeter

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe classical model of democracy that Schumpeter criticizes is manufactured out of a variety of earlier ideas, not those of any one thinker or even one school of thought. His critique of the central ideals by which he defines the model—those of the common will and the common good—remains persuasive. People’s preferences are too messy and too manipulable to allow us to think that mass democracy can promote those ideals, as he defines them. Should we endorse his purely electoral model of democracy, then, and accept that people do not exercise any control over government? Not necessarily. We can expand democracy to include the constitutional and contestatory constraints that people impose on their rulers. We may hope that people can rely on such democratic controls to ensure that government operates by community standards.