Pure Democracy Research Articles

워즈워스의 “숭고한” 공화국: 스위스 신화의 정치학

This paper is an attempt to examine the idea of a republic in the Wordsworth’s poetic career in relation with the Swiss myth. The Swiss myth was a popular belief that an ideal democracy is being practiced in the small communities located in the mountainous areas of the Alps each one of which could be called a mini republic, a microcosm of the ancient republics such as Athene or Sparta. Such small republics were peopled by the native inhabitants naturally equipped with civic virtues such as patriotism, a spirit of independence, frugality, and self-government all of which were grown in constant contact with the sublime landscape of the Alps. Wordsworth began his poetic career publishing a topographical poem Descriptive Sketches based upon his trip to the Alps which was made in 1790 under the charm of Switzerland as a country of pure democracy and sublime landscape. The Swiss myth, along with its aesthetic and political ramification, was always the source of inspiration in Wordsworth’s public life particularly in relation with his political sentiments. In this paper, I am trying to explore the significance of the Swiss myth in the transformation of Wordsworth’s political standpoint. I start with E. P. Thompson’s sincere question about Wordsworth’s apparently groundless optimism which managed to survive after all those traumas of political disenchantment. The secret, I argue, is that the Swiss myth provided him with a spiritual model with which to build an alternative Swiss in his native Lake District. Wordsworth’s ambitious project failed, of course, leaving the opprobrium of political apostasy only. It was undeniably an apostasy indeed after a certain point in his life, but his impossible dream for an alternative Swiss in the Lake District, I would like to argue, was dreamed due to his desperate wish to keep his republican idealism alive by building a ‘sublime’ republic of his own in whatever terms.

Economocracy versus capitalism

This work is an analysis of the Economocracy and Representative Economocracy. A reformed economic system is required for the transformation of global grown debt to sustainable levels. The challenge to avoid economic worldwide deadlock yields the emerging need for economocracy as a premium democracy, serving with that way social stability. The economic system of Economocracy is based on the free market but simultaneously faces all disturbances from wars, depressions, economic crises, and interest rates. Economocracy is the proportional system of Democracy in a political view, in the case of the economy. It is the only economic system that supports pure Democracy and can face global dept, healthcare problems, third world poverty, appropriate space programs, and any economic dysfunction which be an obstacle to pure democracy. This is the first peer-review publication of Economocracy after seven years of birth of Economocracy by working papers. This paper aims to clarify that capitalism has fundamental problems in many aspects. Primarily it is not plausible to regime any dysfunction of the local economies and in general at a worldwide level. Well-standing democracy cannot exist without economocracy, meaning that the control of the economy from the people and for the people, is the balanced way for economic affairs and then democracy. The interest rates and the global debt it is not plausible to be served by capitalism. The Economocracy is formed on the aspect of an economic unit globally that will control the global economic uncontrolled problems. Capitalism just moving the economic obligations or the future by depressing countries, and generations of people, and as result, it is to have wars, not pure democracies, and unlimited exploitation of the planet's resources without barriers, for profits. Also, economocracy can protect democracy from authoritarianism, as countries that do not comply with the aspects of Economocracy and democracy will not receive the “free amounts” of money for the enforcement of lower income, for medical care system, and other purposes. The purpose of the papers is to show is to present this economic system, using theoretical and mathematical terms and analysis. For this reason, is used a hypothetical scenario, but with real amounts, showing how will function Economocracy. The results comply with the initial hypothesis that global debt and interest rates could be covered by economocracy without causing inflation, in fact with way could be faced inflation from a plausible increase in prices, as this amount of money going for special purposes and don’t affect the banking system, the market, the level of prices or in the general economy.

Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder

Reviewed by: Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder Melissa DeVelvis (bio) Calhoun: American Heretic. By Robert Elder. (New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. 656. Cloth, $35.00.) In his sweeping and timely biography of John C. Calhoun, Robert Elder brings a “titan” of the U.S. Senate into the twenty-first century. Rather than viewing Calhoun as a man “out of step with the flow of history,” Elder argues that he “belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past” (xiv). Elder painstakingly unpacks Calhoun’s political philosophy as it developed over fifty years to argue that he was a modern politician, not a demagogue clinging to slavery and the past, as some have claimed. A proponent of free trade, westward expansion, and internal improvements, Elder’s Calhoun was dedicated to the Union, provided that this union preserved slaveholding privileges. In telling the story of Calhoun’s life, from 1782 to 1850, Elder also crafts a story of the United States. This origin story—of both man and nation—is dependent on the subjugation and enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Calhoun’s political philosophy and its evolution, expressed publicly throughout his career but culminating in two posthumous treatises, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (both published in 1851), receive the most attention in Elder’s work. Elder convincingly argues that Calhoun’s ideas of the concurrent majority and his belief that the United States was not a nation but a “federal republic of sovereign states” have shaped constitutional thinking into the twenty-first century (488). The concurrent majority, or “unanimous consent of all the interests in a given society” (484), would provide minority interests with veto power and protect a country from the “absolutism” of a pure democracy (482). Elder guides the reader through Calhoun’s thought processes, from fully endorsing the War of 1812, to inventing and justifying nullification, to fiercely debating the addition of California and Oregon to the Union. Through every milestone, Elder informs the reader when Calhoun was acting in line with his stated beliefs and when, perhaps in the name of his own ambition or to preserve slavery, he contradicted his principles. The readability of these sections says much about Elder’s skills as an author. Elder also creates a nuanced picture of Calhoun as a man. Calhoun’s closest confidantes were often women, such as his mother-in-law, Floride Bonneau Colhoun, and favorite child, Anna. He highly valued Anna’s [End Page 262] political mind, to the point that she frequently accompanied Calhoun to Washington and served as his secretary. In the case of Calhoun’s wife Floride, Elder encountered the historian’s worst nightmare: most of her correspondence was either destroyed or lost. Without this resource, Elder cannot tell us much about the Calhouns’ relationship or Floride’s notable ostracism of Peggy Eaton. In her surviving letters, however, we learn that she was far from a benevolent slave owner and frequently expressed her frustrations from the plantation at Fort Hill when her husband refused to sell enslaved people whom she found difficult. What is perhaps most remarkable about Elder’s work is his attention to the enslaved men and women that surrounded Calhoun. It is more widely known that Calhoun was a white supremacist who reshaped slavery from a “necessary evil” to a “positive good” and asserted that Black slavery was “the best guarantee to equality among whites” (178). Elder, however, gives names to the people Calhoun enslaved whenever possible. In tracing Calhoun’s life, we also follow the lives of Sawney, his wife Tilla, and his children, Issey and Young Sawney, who resisted the Calhouns’ control through arson and running away. Elder reminds the reader of the Black families separated during every move, marriage, and death of the white Calhoun family. Calhoun’s state, idealized nation, and livelihood were entirely dependent on slave labor. Yet Calhoun’s dedication to slavery, Elder notes, did not mean he was “old-fashioned” (340). Instead, Calhoun argued that American progress could not exist without U.S. slavery, and he applied an international lens to support his antiabolitionist stance. Elder’s argument...

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Men Were Not Angels- Medisonian View of Government

Unfortunately, men are not angels and administration is an important tool to provide internal and external controls. Madison (1787b) states that assuming any form of government can secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the human being is an imaginary idea. The virtue, in fact, should be used to select the rulers. The selection of the rulers who will be exact protectors of the public prosperity is paramount for the stability of government. Madison claims that people, by nature, have different religions, ambitions, and perceptions about government. Considering all these, they follow different leaders. Madison did not believe that a real democracy can propose a treatment for the badness of factions. In society, only very few citizens can assemble and administer the government in person. Pure democracy, therefore, does not work with the factions in the society. Madison also asserted the need for additional precautions in the Constitution to restrict government and protect freedom. The most important one was the dividing and balancing of powers. Ultimately, political freedom needs economic freedom, and vice versa. To protect both, there should be limited government. Actual constitutional government is a potential alternative to the vision of a perfect design society. The idea is to operate the principle of self-organization.

Свободный депутатский мандат: за и против

The article considers some positive features of the independent deputy mandate conception and notes some of its shortcomings. For the purpose of analysis of the legal nature of a deputy mandate, the author considers it necessary to identify three interconnected legal relations where a deputy has different legal statuses and different rights, obligations and responsibilities. In a lasting legal relation with the electorate the deputy acts as their representative, in the legal relation with the party that has nominated him, he is a representative of this party, and in the legal relation with the people of the Russian Federation (their portion) he is a representative of these people (their portion) who should express their will in the adopted decisions as part of the relevant representative body. There are some imperative elements in the lasting electoral legal relations, but in his relations with the people of the Russian Federation (their portion) there prevail some features of the independent mandate. According to the author, all these legal relations are active pattern relations whose active centre is in the deputy’s obligations directly related to the interests of the representees and their relevant right to demand to observe them and bring the deputy to responsibility when these obligations are not performed. These features of a deputy mandate suggest a binding, imperative model of legal regulation at the heart of which there should be legal obligation and subsequent legal responsibility. At the present time, based on the prevailing interpretation of the independent mandate, in order to regulate the deputy’s constitutional-legal status, another permissible, dispositive model of legal regulation is applied, that allows for the deputy to act at his discretion. In this context the article justifies the necessity of the Russian federal legislation improvement by reinforcement of certain elements of a deputy mandate’s mandatory nature, laying down his obligations and responsibility including a recall as a form of pure democracy.

Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.

The Perils of "Pure Democracy": Minority Rights, Liquor Politics, and Popular Sovereignty in Antebellum America

Examining conflict over local option liquor license laws passed in numerous states during the mid-1840s, this article exposes a pioneering moment in the history of direct democracy. Spurred by the temperance movement's crusade against alcohol and liquor licensing, local option laws empowered local voting majorities, in a referendum-like manner, to decide annually at the ballot box whether or not licenses would be issued. Based on investigation of reform literature, legislative reports, newspapers, and court opinions, this article illustrates how reformers' enlistment of the ideas of majority rule and popular political empowerment to legitimate local option prompted debates that moved beyond the propriety of restrictive liquor regulation and resulted in a widespread reassessment of fundamental tenets of American popular sovereignty. Turning to the activities of liquor dealers and others who resisted local option, this article uncovers a groundbreaking strain of dissent that coalesced in Delaware. By suggesting limits to popular political empowerment and majority rule and stressing the ability of representative democracies to protect minority rights, attorneys representing pro-liquor forces convinced Delaware's highest court to declare local option unconstitutional. Not only did their ideas reverberate in other court decisions and policy debates of the period, but they established a lasting practice of questioning ballot box legislation grounded in the ideas of James Madison and other elite thinkers concerned about the threat of majority tyranny. In the process, pro-liquor groups helped democratize the tradition of questioning majority rule for future use by other nonelite minorities.

Constitutions and Democratic Performance in Semi-Presidential Democracies

AbstractIn 1946 there were three democracies in the world with constitutions that, on the one hand, required the government to obtain the support of a legislative majority in order to come to and remain in power and, on the other hand, established a popularly elected president. In 2002, this number had grown to 25. Constitutions with this feature are often considered to be problematic, and, given the number of new democracies that have adopted them, have received considerable attention from political scientists. The primary concern has to do with the potential for conflict between the assembly supported government and the popularly elected president, which may lead to unstable governments, policy paralysis, and the eventual undermining of the democratic regime. Concern has also been raised regarding the negative role a popularly elected president may have on party development and the ‘chain of delegation’ that in a pure parliamentary democracy runs from voters to government through political parties. In this paper, we examine the effect the combination of assembly confidence with a popularly elected president has on government instability, accountability, legislative effectiveness, and democratic survival. We also examine the impact on these outcomes of different combinations of presidential powers. We find that the introduction of a popularly elected president in parliamentary constitutions is of little significant impact and that the preoccupation with the specific powers of the president is mostly overblown.

‘A world which is not yet’: Peasants, civil society and the state

Historically, the construction of democracy and ‘civil society’ has been linked by both the political left and right to struggles over property, the market and the State. What conservatives and neoliberals feared, and socialists hoped for, was that‘pure democracy’ would enable peasants and workers to capture the State, and thus use the latter to transform existing property and exchange relations. Having relied on the strong State to maintain its socio-economic privileges, the political right first opposed and then endorsed (representative) democracy, thereby combining a populist‘from above’ attempt to generate the support of workers and peasants with the idea of a strong capitalist State. Positioning‘civil society’ within the capitalist system, modernization theory sought the incorporation of peasants and workers into the bourgeois polity without, however, challenging existing traditional rural culture. The latter was the identity subsequently mobilized by‘new’ populist postmodernism to construct a concept of a locally-based agrarian‘civil society’ outside and against the capitalist State. Resisting – but no longer attempting to capture or control – the State, this form of ‘civil society’ seeks merely to establish or re-establish local and systemically non-specific forms of democracy. This, it is argued here, replicates the historical project not of the left but of conservatism and neoliberalism, and as such is politically disempowering for peasants and workers.

Local government internal structure, external constraints and the median voter

This paper examines how internal structure and external constraints affect local government ability to meet voters' demands. It applies the revealed preference method to US counties to identify those that fail to satisfy the pure democracy outcome of the median voter hypothesis (MVH). Probit analysis identifies the factors associated with counties that satisfy the MVH. Internal government structure does not matter but restricting home rule increases the likelihood of satisfying the MVH equilibrium, the latter result consistent with the leviathan model. The systematic differences found for urban and rural county governments reinforce this conclusion.

The Promise and Perils of Hybrid Democracy (The Henry Lecture, University of Oklahoma Law School, October 13, 2005)

For most Americans, democracy in the United States is not entirely representative in structure, and none of us lives in a pure direct democracy where laws are made only through popular votes. Instead, for over seventy percent of Americans, including those in Oklahoma, government is a hybrid democracy - a combination of direct democracy and representative institutions at the state and local levels, which in turn influences national politics. Hybrid democracy is here to stay, so we need to better understand how its components interact. But even if we were writing on a clean slate and had the ability to choose between a purely representative system and one with some elements of direct democracy, I think we would do well to adopt some sort of hybrid. A system that allows the possibility of the initiative and referendum provides a check on elected representatives beyond the accountability of periodic elections. In this Lecture, I will suggest some of the benefits that a hybrid system can provide in three realms. First, hybrid elections allow candidates to make more credible promises by running on a platform that includes simultaneous enactment of initiatives. The association of an initiative with a candidate may also provide a richer information environment for voters, although recent scholarship draws into question whether voting cues are invariably enhanced by the strategic use of direct democracy by politicians. Second, the initiative process provides a way to circumvent the self-interest of legislators in designing institutions of government. Third, the possibility of using initiatives to enact policy supplies political actors with a tool that can serve majoritarian interests and counter special interest influence in legislative bargaining. As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is demonstrating in California, governance by initiative profoundly changes the dynamics of interbranch bargaining, although it does not seem to be a sustainable strategy if used frequently. As I discuss these benefits, I will also underscore the dangers of hybrid democracy and discuss reforms that seek to reduce the perils while maximizing the promise of our hybrid system.

The Third Science War

The ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, whose central moment was the Sokal hoax, was understood to be ‘political’, but it was never quite clear what the political issue was. Two recent books, James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?(2001) and Phillip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy(2001), attempt in different ways to reflect on and extend the discussion from a ‘Left’ perspective. Brown argues Sokal’s case from a perspective of philosophical rationalism and anti-naturalism. Kitcher’s argument is that the aim of science is significant truth, and significance is a valuative notion. Explanation is relative to interests or values. But this does not mean that truth does not matter, or that the world has no influence on what we believe - the two considerations, significance and truth, interact and co-evolve. If this is true, how science is governed, and particularly what is studied, make a difference. A well-ordered science would be one in which decisions about what is studied would be both wise and democratic. Pure democracy would undermine wisdom, so a novel relation is needed, in which the preferences of voters would be tutored and a family-like dialogue would allow optimal choices to be made. Both discussions point to a genuine political dilemma over science and democracy, related to the dilemma faced by the Old Left, which hoped that science, through ‘Planning’, would seamlessly integrate itself into the social good in solidarity with the proletariat. Kitcher grasps that the forms of Liberal Democracy are not up to the task of dealing with science - and thus places himself at the opposite pole from thinkers like Habermas, who think that the Left must expand Public Reason. So the issue is ‘Who rules?’ and whether the proper role of science in society is one that effectively precludes ‘democratic control.’

Alternativen der parlamentarischen Demokratie

AbstractIt is often said that the parliament should represent the opinions found in the population and that the government should be held accountable for its political program. It is shown in the paper that these two functions rely on two different basic models of democracy which are not fully compatible with each other: the model of a pure representative democracy and the model of a pure two party competition. Unaccountable governments, voter alienation, strategic voting, and governmental instability are shown to be consequences of this institutional mix. These problems may be avoided with reforms towards one or the other basic model.

Anonymity on the Internet: ACLU of Georgia v. Miller

The Internet allows anyone with a computer and a telephone line to talk to total strangers anywhere in the world. In the pure democracy of the Internet, chat sessions can become virtual masquerade parties, where users can express their own personalities or create new ones, depending on the circumstances and their individual whims. This can all take place based on the anonymity that is intrinsic to the Internet.

The Development of Property Rights on the Canadian and American Mining Frontiers

Introduction It has sometimes been asserted that the history of mining in North America represents a kind of pure democracy, in which mining law was created by the miners without intervention from lawyers or politicians, and particularly without the input, interference, or advice of corrupt Eastern lawmakers. The classic expression of this idea is the Turner thesis, made popular by the turn of the century historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In an address to the American Historical Association given in 1893, Turner posited that the American frontier, not Washington or England, was the source of American democracy.(1) The Turner thesis, that war-horse of American historiography, has been battered over the decades by scholars who have shown that the west was far less egalitarian and democratic than populist myth would have it. As Howard Lamar has pointed out, the rigidity of Turner's idea--that a chapter in American history had closed--made his thesis useless as a guide for the present and future.(2) American historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick(3) have shown that the west was subject to much the same historical, economic, and political forces as the rest of the country. Yet because it contains so much that Americans would like to see in themselves, the thesis retains a seductiveness that makes it hard to ignore--if it is not true, it seems that it ought to be true. In Canada, on the other hand, a country that has had more frontier than the U.S.A., the idea that these regions have dominated Canadian political institutions (though they have at times influenced them) seems absurd. In this country the frontier populist myth is so faint that this particular historical horse has never left the starting gate. Yet if Turner was wrong, then Canada and the United States are not as different as some Canadian nationalists would prefer to believe. Despite the assaults on Turner, there are some episodes in American history that do seem to confirm his idea that the frontier was the wellspring of democracy. One of them is the early history of western mining, particularly mining law and regulations. A number of scholars working in the field of property rights have demonstrated that mining law in the western United States sprang from the experiences and the demands of the miners rather than being imposed by legislatures; its contractual nature was first established by the miners and only later codified into law. Despite what rugged individualists in northern Canada may claim, the region in this century has been heavily influenced and almost totally controlled by the central government. This is as true of mining as of any other facet of the northern experience. Except for a very brief and uncharacteristic episode, the history of mining north of sixty degrees has followed a very different pattern from the Turnerian ideal. Far from being the well-spring of democracy in this country, the northern mining districts have served as examples of a much different tradition. The Klondike gold rush in particular can best be understood not as a flowering of regional democracy, but in terms of one of the oldest and most traditional historiographical interpretations in English Canadian history--Donald Creighton's theory of metropolitanism. In 1937 Creighton published The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, an attempt to understand Canadian history through a study of the influence of the St. Lawrence valley over the rest of the country.(4) Even after sixty years his view of Canada's history remains powerful, proof that some historical ideas do not lose validity with age; from the fur trade to the Canadian Pacific Railway to the National Energy Policy, it is difficult to argue with his contention that the Toronto-Montreal core has shaped Canada in the light of its own commercial interests. Though Creighton did not decry this control, others did, particularly regional historians, and what Creighton called metropolitanism, others have called internal colonialism. …

Presidential political systems and contemporary administrative reform: Israelʼs “semi-presidentialism” as a natural experiment

How suitable is the New Public Management (NPM), which developed in parliamentary systems, to presidential democracies? The answer is important to reform efforts in the U.S. federal government and in several Latin American nations. According to Fred Riggs, the requirements of successful public administration in “presidentialist” and parliamentary systems differ considerably. Israelʼs experience with reform presents a natural experiment that supports Riggs” theory of presidentialisi administration. Israel embarked on NPM-style reforms when it was a pure parliamentary democracy. Its reform program was revised in ways that fit Riggsʼ prescriptions for presidentialism after the country adopted major electoral and structural changes that made it “semi-presidentialist.” Although a single case study of limited duration, the Israeli experience suggests that there is a distinctive logic to presidentialist administration that is readily understood by government officials who perforce must assess the demands of constitutional structure on administrative arrangements.

Kant, Democracy, and History

Kant, Democracy, and History Kurt Taylor Gaubatz (bio) In his essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), Immanuel Kant predicted that republican forms of government would eventually dominate the world. This, he wrote, was part of nature’s “secret plan”: The “cosmopolitan goal” of history was the general enlightenment of humanity and the universalization of republicanism as the basis of social organization. 1 Kant’s prediction was a bold one. At the time, the number of democracies in the world could be counted twice on the fingers of one hand. His views have proved influential as well as prescient. Many of his ideas about the nature and causes of republican expansion have since been incorporated into the basic liberal creed. And while general enlightenment may still seem elusive, some scholars have suggested that we are currently in the midst of an extraordinary global movement toward democracy. 2 Controversy remains, however, about both the scope and the sustainability of this so-called democratic revolution. Consider, for example, the contrast between two recent musings on the subject: Francis Fukuyama sees in the events of the past decade the harbingers of the “end of history”—the inevitable and conclusive victory of mass democracy as the dominant form of governance. Paul Kennedy, on the other hand, having examined population dynamics and historical cycles, foresees a gloomy and increasingly antidemocratic future for the world. 3 At this moment of extreme uncertainty—or perhaps competing certainties—about the future of worldwide democratization, we would do well to reflect carefully on the dynamics of democratization that have brought us to this point. This essay surveys the past two hundred years to provide an [End Page 136] empirical assessment of Kant’s forecasts. More than simply an exercise in explicating Kant, it is an attempt to put into perspective the most recent wave of global democratic expansion and efforts to make the promotion of democracy a cornerstone of the foreign policy of democratic nations. From this broader historical point of view, worldwide democratization appears less inexorable than recent trends have led many to suppose, and the practical advantages of democratic governance that have frequently been touted in the post-Cold War era are less apparent. Clearly, there are many different conceptions of democracy. Kant makes a distinction between republicanism, in which legislative and executive powers are separated, and pure democracy, which Kant feared might lead to despotism, with an executive claiming to represent the popular will. Whatever the label, Kant’s argument that the true “civil state” requires representative institutions, the protection of individual rights, and the separation of legislative and executive powers clearly evokes the modern Western ideal of liberal democracy. 4 In this essay, the terms “republican,” “liberal,” and “democratic” are used interchangeably to refer to political systems in which power is vested in representative institutions and individual rights are sufficiently protected to make those institutions effective. My classification of regimes as “democracies” draws on the work of Michael Doyle and on Freedom House’s identification of “free” regimes in its annual “Comparative Survey of Freedom.” 5 Kant’s Three Arguments Kant’s prediction of the expansion of republicanism relies on three different arguments: an argument from nature, an argument from practicality, and an argument from morality. The mechanisms of democratic expansion that these arguments outline have resurfaced in many contemporary accounts of the current global trend toward democracy. The argument from nature. Kant maintains that humankind must regard its own development as one of nature’s objectives. History, in his view, is governed initially by providence and then, with growing self-awareness, by humans themselves. Self-conscious management of human affairs is a necessary condition of humanity’s moral growth. Such self-consciousness can be achieved only when people are free to govern themselves both individually and collectively. Collective self-government requires effective representative institutions. If the natural destiny of humankind is to be fulfilled, then, republicanism is a necessary feature of historical progress. There is considerable debate about the degree of determinism implied in Kant’s notion of a plan of nature. A minimum position is that Kant [End Page 137] holds that natural progress in human events cannot be...

Pure democracy.

Pure democracy.

Pure democracy.

Pure democracy.