Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: Book One
What is progressivism?
Book One Synopsis: The main subject of Book One is progressivism as a political philosophy. The characters discuss the relationship between progressivism and forms of liberalism, e.g., modern (American) liberalism and classical liberalism. Unlike liberal political philosophies, which emphasize to varying degrees the significance of individual human beings and the need for rights as a safeguard against state oppression, progressivism is a form of collectivism. The characters consider the relationship between progressivism and other forms of collectivism, e.g., fascism. Progressives often advocate for the expansion of democracy. The characters consider different conceptions of what it might mean to expand democracy and the practical possibilities for such an expansion. The characters also consider the relationship between democratic procedures and the principle of popular sovereignty.
Dramatis Personae
Emma – 30 years old; Fifth-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in political philosophy and epistemology; ABD (“all-but-dissertation”); dating Andre
Andre – 35 years old; Fourth-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in philosophy of science; Academic Advisor to undergraduate students in the Philosophy Department; dating Emma
Connor – 24 years old; Second-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in normative ethics; a devout political progressive
Jack – 25 years old; Second-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in logic and epistemology; a devout political libertarian
Book One
[September 2009. Several graduate students studying philosophy at the local university are gathered at a party to celebrate the start of the fall semester. They have just learned that, in response to pressures exerted by the financial crisis and ongoing recession, the University Administration is planning to shift resources away from the humanities toward business education and the physical sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Significant cuts to the Philosophy Department’s budget are planned. The Department Chair has been “voluntarily reassigned” (read: fired). Fewer and less generous funding opportunities will be available to the graduate students moving forward. Several members of the Department’s support staff will be laid off. Open faculty positions in the Philosophy Department will not be filled. A number of prominent faculty members are openly seeking to leave the University. To make matters more ominous for the graduate students, the Administration has indicated that it will soon deliver news of further changes to the Department’s organizational structure.]
Jack [laughing and shouting]: …Hitler was the greatest progressive who ever lived!
Emma [walking up to the group]: Who was Hitler?
Jack: Hitler.
Emma: Hitler was Hitler?
Jack: Right.
Emma: That’s exactly what I’ve always thought. No, seriously, what are you babbling on about? What about Hitler?
Jack: He and Connor share a political philosophy.
Connor: Oh, come on! Just because I call myself a progressive and – according to you – Hitler was characteristic of a kind of political progressivism doesn’t make me a Nazi.
Jack: No, it just makes you stupid and historically ill-informed – or, maybe I should say, ill-informed about history…
Emma: How about “Historically ill-informed about history”?
Jack: Right, thanks. The point is that you might want to re-consider identifying your views with a political philosophy so closely associated with eugenics and, yes, Nazism. I know you’re not a Nazi. What I don’t know is why you’ve chosen to describe your views using a term that eugenicists and Nazis used to describe their views.
Emma: As much as I hate to agree with Jackie boy here, I have to say, he’s got a point. It’s not a very good look, Connor.
Andre: Plus, why do you need a new term for good old-fashioned American liberalism? It was confusing enough when non-liberals insisted on describing themselves as liberals. Why compound confusions? Why pour the same musty statist wine into yet another bottle?
Jack: Especially a bottle with a desiccated Swastika label on it?
Andre: Or is progressivism supposed to be something different from American liberalism? What do you mean by “progressive”? What makes your politics uniquely progressive rather than, say, liberal in the traditional American sense?
Connor: That’s a good question. I can’t say, exactly. I mean, I do normative ethics, not the history of political philosophy.
Jack: Aren’t you ethically obligated to understand the basis of your political beliefs better than you apparently do – not to mention their implications – given your evident desire to foist them on the rest of us?
Connor: Yeah, I suppose…
Jack: Well, then…
Connor [fidgeting]: Well…[hemming and hawing]
Emma: Give him a minute…he’s thinking.
Jack: I know. I can see the gears turning in his head.
Connor: I guess I would say that, for me, democracy is the most important consideration in politics. I want the people to be sovereign. I favor the liberation of democratic decision-making from its various legal and constitutional constraints.
Jack: So, direct democracy, basically?
Connor: More democracy and more direct democracy, yes.
Jack: That’s less a political philosophy than a slogan...
Andre: Does democracy vary in terms of more and less? I mean, you can have some democracy or none, but it’s not clear to me that, if you have some democracy, there is any meaningful sense in which one political system can be said to be more or less democratic than another.
Connor: An election in which all citizens can vote is obviously more democratic than one in which only a subset of citizens is eligible to vote.
Andre: Only eligibility-to-vote matters? Doesn’t actual participation matter? What if every citizen eligible to vote participates in a limited-suffrage context, but none of the citizens participates in an unlimited-suffrage context? It’s not obvious to me which is “more democratic” [makes quotation marks in the air]. What if several of the institutional features historically associated with democracy – freedom of speech and expression, a free media, for example – are present in some limited democracy, but not in some unlimited democracy? If there is any meaningful sense in which a political system can be said to be more or less democratic than some other, it does not seem to be a simple function of the number or ratio of citizens eligible to vote.
Connor: Good point. Well taken. What about this? When I say that I want more democracy, what I mean is that I want more of the decisions made throughout society – especially, I should say, more of the decisions concerning the economy – to be made democratically. Workers and consumers should control economic institutions, not greedy, money-grubbing, capitalists. Production and distribution decisions should be made democratically, to meet the needs of the people rather than the desires of businessmen. A political system in which more decisions are made democratically is obviously more democratic than one in which fewer decisions are made through democratic means.
Jack: So, central planning, basically? Socialism…albeit, maybe, without the collectivization of property? You can own things, but you’re limited in your capacity to do as you please with the things you own. These decisions, or many of them, at least, are to be made democratically and the property owner must follow along. Is that the idea?
Connor: Yeah, something like that. Corporations might be worker-owned, but the principle would be the same.
Andre: It’s still not obvious to me that you’ve offered a workable definition of “more democracy.” You stated a definition, while hinting at a second, neither of which strikes me as defensible. You asserted that the number of decisions taken democratically defines the extent to which a political system is democratic, while hinting that it is actually the importance of the decisions taken democratically that determines the extent of democracy in a political system. Which is it? Which system is more democratic, a political system where, say, more decisions – but not those economic decisions concerning production and distribution that you deem so important – are made democratically, or a system in which these – but only these decisions – are made democratically, and all other decisions are made in some other way, say, individually, by those persons most immediately concerned, autocratically, by some totalitarian dictator, or randomly, by – I don’t know – pulling balls from an urn?
Connor: I see what you’re doing. Any criterion that may seem intuitively plausible as a measure of the extent to which a political system is democratic, you will argue, is potentially in tension with some other criterion that might also seem plausible as a measure of a system’s democratic-ness…if you will.
Andre [smiles]: Yes, that’s what I’m doing. So far, you’ve offered three independent criteria, the proportion of citizens eligible to vote, the proportion of decisions made democratically, and the importance of decisions made democratically. I offered two more: the extent of actual participation, rather than mere eligibility to participate, in democratic procedures, and the presence or absence of various liberalities historically associated with democracies.
Connor: But, surely, you will agree that a system in which more citizens are both eligible to vote and in fact participate in elections, and in which more decisions, and more important decisions, are taken democratically, is more democratic than a system in which none of these things occur…
Andre: I already conceded that we can distinguish systems that exhibit some democratic features from those that display no such features. So, yes, I agree that easy cases are easy. They are also uninteresting. The hard cases are interesting precisely because they’re hard. Indeed, it’s not obvious to me that a society that displays all the features you mention but which lacks all of those liberalities I mentioned previously is per se more democratic than one in which those liberalities are present, but where no decisions are made democratically. You’re fetishizing voting, but voting is only one and, as it happens, perhaps not a very important feature of democracy. What is important is that the people are sovereign. However, given this objective, it must be remembered that every democracy that has ever existed has limited the suffrage in some way, if only to persons over a particular age, but typically, in other respects, as well. Indeed, unless you are willing to countenance the absurdity of infant suffrage, every democratic system must limit its conception of the people whose sovereignty matters in at least this and perhaps in other ways. Similarly, every democratic system that has ever existed has limited the decisions with regard to which the people are sovereign to a small subset of the decisions taken in society. Again, this must be the case, unless you are willing to countenance the absurdity of using democratic means to decide, say, what I have for breakfast tomorrow and, I don’t know, how many times Emma presses the snooze button in the morning. Democracy must be limited because, as a practical matter, not every decision can be taken democratically, much less that anyone wants every decision, like how many times Emma presses the snooze button in the morning, to be made democratically.
Jack: Like I said before, appealing for more democracy and for more direct democracy is just empty sloganeering. There are four things, at least, that you must specify, Connor, if your appeal is to be more than an empty slogan. First, who will be included in the demos? That is, who will be eligible to participate in democratic decision-making? Second, what decisions or what kinds of decisions will be made democratically, and what decisions will be left to other persons, or to other mechanisms? Third, what constitutes victory in various electoral contexts, a simple majority, a supermajority of some degree, unanimity? Fourth, how will democratic decisions be made? Will they be made through the mediation of representatives or immediately, directly? Is voting, as such, even necessary? Are we really so deficient in imagination that we cannot conceive of any other mechanisms through which people might express their political preferences? Are the choices really that citizens must either show up early in the morning at their local, dirty, sweat-and-mopwater-stinking, elementary school gymnasium to yank their levers behind a shower curtain or, what, a rapid and inescapable descent into tyranny?
Andre: We can speak meaningfully about more and less with regard to some of those dimensions, but not all of them. It is not clear that there is any connection between the extent to which a political system is democratic and the criterion of a winning majority, for example. A simple, fifty-percent-plus-one, majority has been most frequently favored, historically, but not universally and not necessarily because it is more democratic than other possible criteria. Similarly, I see no necessary connection between the extent of a system’s democratic-ness – if you will – and the direct or indirect nature of its democratic mechanisms. Representative democracy can display a high degree of popular sovereignty and direct democracy might fail to make decisions or, especially, might fail to generate outcomes that respect popular sovereignty.
Connor: How is that? How could direct democracy not respect popular sovereignty?
Andre: It shouldn’t be hard to conceive of a decision made through direct democracy that leads to an outcome that does not respect popular sovereignty. Just imagine a policy decided through democratic means that – for whatever reason, government inefficiency or corruption, say – leads to results exactly opposite of those originally promised for it, results counter to the expectations that inclined voters to support the policy in the first place. So, this can happen, obviously, but I think it can also happen that, whatever its ultimate results, a decision can fail to respect popular sovereignty, despite being made through direct-democratic means. Just imagine a policy passed through direct democracy, but with very few voters, such that the policy passed fails to reflect the interests or preferences of the majority of eligible voters, much less of everyone in society. In order to ensure that direct democracy respects popular sovereignty, it would seem to be necessary to either make voting mandatory or somehow otherwise ensure that a proportion of eligible voters participates sufficient to reflect the interests of the majority or supermajority, or what have you. If this condition isn’t met, then the connection between democracy, direct or otherwise, and popular sovereignty, which we might think is a necessary connection, can be easily broken.
Connor: I may be amenable to making voting compulsory…
Andre: In political systems like ours and like most other Western democracies, where suffrage is already universal for all adults, regardless of race, color, creed, or whatever, there aren’t many obvious ways to expand democracy, except to mandate or otherwise coerce increased participation. But, this is where my worry about the aforementioned liberalities is relevant. Whatever else might be said for a political system in which participation, in the form of voting, is mandatory, it’s not particularly liberal. To the extent that various freedoms are historical accompaniments, if not conceptual requirements, of democratic systems, it is not clear that compulsory voting would mean more, rather than less, democracy. But, more to my current point, even compulsory voting would not suffice to ensure the connection between democracy and popular sovereignty. Just imagine a scenario in which everyone votes in a direct-democratic setting, but voters are convinced to support a policy against their actual interests, either because they don’t know their own interests very well or, what might be the same thing, because they are taken in by political charlatans who convince them to make policy decisions against their own interests. We might say about such a case that popular sovereignty is respected in appearance only. Is popular sovereignty about voting, even if the results don’t accord with popular preferences, or is it about policies that – at least in the reasons that motivate their passing, if not in their eventual results – are consistent with the people’s preferences or interests?
Connor: Ideally, I think we want results consistent with the popular will, not merely policies motivated by popular concerns.
Andre: I think so, too. I also think that it is because this is the ultimate goal that democracy, direct or otherwise, is ever instituted. What I am less confident about is the connection between democracy and popular sovereignty. I think it is less secure than it might seem.
Emma: In any case, one thing is sure, I think: a representative system, such as ours, cannot be made both more direct, less representative, and, at the same time, more democratic. Starting from a system of representative democracy, you might move to a world of more democracy, either in the sense that more people are represented – that is, the suffrage is expanded – or in the sense that the subset of decisions made via representative democracy is expanded, or you could move to a world of direct democracy, meaning that the decisions made in the former representative system come to be made directly by voters, without the mediation of political representatives. However, I don’t see how you could expand either the suffrage or the scope of decisions made democratically, and also remove the mediation of political representatives. Moving in the direction of more democracy necessarily means moving away from – or, at least, no closer to – direct democracy, and conversely, more direct democracy means no more democracy, if not less, in fact.
Connor: Why should that be true?
Emma: A newly-formed direct democracy must be more limited than the representative democracy out of which it is formed, because a smaller part of the populace has the resources, in terms of time, money, and interest in political matters, to engage in direct democracy than can be represented in a representative system. A representative system permits the representation of more people than can directly participate in direct democracy. Moreover, a smaller subset of decisions can be made via direct-democratic means than can be made through representative democracy. Much of the value of a representative system lies in the fact that citizens do not have to engage in the day-to-day stomach-churning drivel of politics in order to participate. If you make participation more onerous, which direct democracy definitely does, you will get less of it.
Connor: I consider political participation to be an honor and a privilege, and I suspect that most people inclined to progressivism do so, as well. I think there are a lot of people who would look at a more direct-democratic system as an opportunity.
Emma: Of course, some would, but most wouldn’t. There are people who respond to a price increase by either failing to adjust their consumption or by buying more of the relevant good, but most people respond by cutting their consumption. If you increase the cost of political participation, most people will buy less of it.
Connor: Well, if that’s true, then it’s just another reason to make voting compulsory. Easy-peasy.
Andre: Farewell, liberal democracy. We hardly knew ye.
Emma: OK, but then you will just run up against the other problem. If you are going to force everyone to vote in a direct-democratic context, while also leaving them time, energy, and income enough to lead semi-normal lives, if you are not going to turn them into single-minded machines for the making of political decisions, one moment choosing what Andre eats for breakfast and the next second deciding how many times I hit the snooze button in the morning, all while subsisting on state-produced gruel – God knows no one has time to produce anything else in your Utopia – then the range of decisions that can be decided via direct democracy surely cannot be expanded and probably must be severely restricted from what it was prior to the transition to direct democracy.
Jack [smiling]: The fact that fewer political decisions can be made via direct democracy, that fewer stupid laws and tedious regulations can be passed, is probably the best argument for it. Still, it strikes me as obviously a pipe dream, for all the reasons you mention, to think that both democracy and direct democracy can be expanded together.
Emma: Anyway, Connor, you can’t start from a representative system and make it both more direct and more democratic. Moving from a representative system to a direct system means either that fewer – or, more exactly, no more – decisions can be made democratically or that fewer – or, more exactly, no more – persons can participate in the system. If you don’t like the current system, you’re not going to like the results of the “more direct and more democratic” system you are suggesting.
Connor: You’re not making its practical application sound very appealing, admittedly.
Andre: So, is that all there is to progressivism? More democracy, in some not-so-easily-defined sense, and more direct democracy, to the extent this can be made consistent with the demand for more democracy?
Connor: No, there’s more to it. Public policy should be more rational and more moral. Rather than leaving society to the chaos and cruelty of markets, and the selfish pursuit of profits, we have made sufficient scientific and moral progress to rationalize policymaking. I think we should use all of the scientific knowledge and moral understanding at our disposal to advance the general will, the public interest, the common good, the collective interests of society, what have you.
Emma [shaking head]: Oh, Connie…
Jack: Oh God! Rousseau! Or is it Robespierre?!
Emma: Well, Rousseau would not have liked the science bit, but—
Jack: True. But the “general will” nonsense is pure Rousseau.
Emma: Right.
Andre: OK, I see. So, there’s at least one crucial difference between you and a liberal. Your political philosophy is ultimately about the collective, not about the individuals who constitute the collective. In that sense, you’re not a liberal…not even in the sense of the traditional American left. Even if the means they propose are not especially liberal, the ends of American liberals are at least truly liberal. They have always understood the primary political problem in terms of individual human beings and their rights, and, especially, in the fact that either too few individuals have rights or the rights that some individuals ostensibly possess are routinely ignored by the state, the police, and various other powerful interests. A progressive apparently has no use for such old-fashioned notions like individual rights, at least, not as far as they might hinder the progress, as the progressive conceives it, of the collective.
Connor: Individual rights strike me as rather overrated, especially given the aforementioned scientific and moral progress, not to mention the fact that such rights are too often employed by the privileged as bulwarks against incursions on their interests by the less privileged. What we need are not rights per se, but moral and scientific expertise, such as I think we have already achieved, in order to realize the chosen ends of an expanded democratic electorate. Individuals need the right to vote, but expertise will take care of realizing the ends decided by the enlarged constituency.
Jack: But, Connor, on your philosophy, there can be nothing in the law to prevent the state from sacrificing you, me, or any other individual, for the sake of the ostensive general will. If the electorate chooses an end that the experts decide requires your sacrifice—
Connor: I am pretty sure that the police can do whatever they want to us now. Do you really think the law is any assurance against state injustice?
Jack: I feel better with the constitutional protection than I would without it. The rule of law, for all the difficulties inherent in sustaining it, contributes something positive. Just look at states without it. I mean, would you rather live in Obama’s, or even G.W.’s, America, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia?
Connor: Fair enough. But, surely, there are other and more profound differences between the U.S. and Kampuchea than the existence of individual rights in the first country and their absence in the second. The maturity of the American electorate, its long experience with democratic forms, peaceful transitions of power, the resilience of other American political traditions and institutions…are these really insufficient? I want to create a morally righteous political and social system that reflects the will of the whole people. Do we really need rights in order to avoid descending into Khmer Rouge-like chaos?
Andre: The American electorate matured under a system of rights. Its long history with democracy, peaceful transitions of power, the traditions and institutions of American democracy all presuppose the existence of rights. Take these away at the founding of the republic and who knows how American history would have unfolded counterfactually? Take these away now and who knows what the future holds?
Jack: In what sense could a state without – or with only very limited – individual rights ever be morally righteous? In the ideal progressive state, justice is anything that promotes the interests of the collective. What would be unjust in your preferred state would not necessarily be the state’s excessive use of force against an individual, but the failure to use excessive force against individuals when the perceived requirements of the common good called for it. Progressive justice does not strike me as a terribly morally righteous conception of justice.
Andre: How do you propose to create a morally righteous society that accords with the [makes quotation marks in the air] “will of the whole people” by taking away their rights? What is this thing, the “will of the whole people” [makes quotation marks in the air] anyway? How do you know what it is at any given time? And how do you transform this knowledge, assuming its adequacy, into a more righteous society?
Connor: It’s not that hard. It just requires politicians that are properly oriented with regard to the general will.
Andre: But, what is the general will? Is it just whatever is implicit in the latest democratic election, is it just whatever a majority of the electorate wants at any given moment, as expressed electorally? If this is what you mean by “general will,” then how can it ever be truly general, given that it might reflect nothing more than a bare – fifty-percent-plus-one – majority of the electorate? The interests and desires of the losers of the most recent election are just to be ignored? Or is the general will something that transcends the results of the most recent election? Is it some sort of abstraction of the citizens’ mutual interests, regardless of whether the citizens know these interests or not, regardless of what interests they express electorally?
Connor: To be truly general, it must be more like the latter than the former.
Andre: But, then, how does one learn about the general will? If the general will were just whatever the majority of the electorate wanted, we might imagine the results of the most recent election providing some knowledge of the general will. But, you’ve just said that electoral results are irrelevant to the general will, so how do policymakers learn what the general will wants them to do at any given moment?
Connor: Like I said, it just takes appropriately enlightened politicians. I would offer Obama as a perfect example of someone who has his finger on the moral pulse of the citizens and, if he doesn’t personally know how to realize what the general will requires, he knows enough to rely on the best scientific experts to ensure that the general will is respected. All that is required is to elect more people like Obama: honest, caring, in touch with the prevailing moral zeitgeist, educated, and knowledgeable.
Emma: That’s not an answer, Connor. That just pushes the problem back a level. Assuming you’re right about Obama’s moral and intellectual genius, how do we identify the Obama-like politicians, who know the general will, and either know how to realize or know how to identify experts who know how to realize goals associated with it?
Andre: In any case, one thing is certain: it’s your preference for the interests of the collective over those of the individual, together with this business about putting science to work in the interests of the collective, that makes you a progressive rather than a liberal. The shoe fits, but I have to agree with Jackie here: I have no idea why you’d want to wear it. It’s not Nazism, but it’s like Nazism…“with a human face”?
Jack: Was it Orwell who said something like, “If you want to see the future, imagine a boot forever stamping on a human face”?
Connor: What nonsense! Didn’t I just say that Obama, not Hitler, is my political archetype? Explain to me how I have anything in common with the Nazis? I want to take advantage of our moral progress, use science to realize goals associated with the general will, and improve society. The Nazis rounded up Jews and other people that they deemed sub-human – without any justification, I might add – put them in concentration camps, and brutally tortured, exploited, and ultimately discarded them, in an effort to purify the Aryan ra—
Jack: They thought they were using science to improve society, too.
Andre: Right. You say they had no justification for their actions, and, surely, you are right in an objective sense. But, they thought they had a justification. Indeed, they offered the same justification that you would likely offer to support your own policy preferences…SCIENCE!
Jack: It just so happens that the particular science or research program, or whatever you want to call it, that the Nazis relied upon – eugenics – went out of fashion with swing dancing…I mean, the first time that swing dancing went out of fashion.
Connor: Eugenics is not making a comeback. I really don’t see why your worries should worry me.
Andre: Actually, it’s worse than I said. Their justification was that the general will required a particular application of scientific, eugenic, wisdom. Of course, when they said “general,” they didn’t mean it in your expansive sense, as they excluded from the general will the interests of non-Aryans and others. So, yeah, congratulations, you’re not a Nazi, if only because you have a more expansive conception of “general.”
Book One: For Further Reading
On Progressivism
Woodrow Wilson – Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics ([1885] 2002), Routledge
Herbert Croly – Progressive Democracy ([1914] 1997), Routledge
Walter Lippmann – Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest ([1914] 2015), University of Wisconsin Press
James T. Kloppenberg – Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920(1988), Oxford University Press
John Dewey – The Political Writings (1993), Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (eds.), Hackett
Bob Pepperman Taylor – Citizenship and Democratic Doubt: The Legacy of Progressive Thought (2004), University of Kansas Press
Michael McGerr – A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (2003), Oxford University Press
United States Congress Progressive Caucus – “What We Stand For” (Retrieved January 24, 2022), https://progressives.house.gov/what-we-stand-for
On Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “General Will”
Jean Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses ([1762] 2002), Yale University Press
Christopher Bertram – “Rousseau’s Legacy in Two Conceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent,” Review of Politics (2012), 74: 403–420
On Democracy and Popular Sovereignty
Nathan Tarcov – “Popular Sovereignty (in Democratic Political Theory),” Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (1986), Leonard Levy (ed.), 3: 1426
Edmund S. Morgan – Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1989), Norton
Paulina Ochoa Espejo – The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (2011), Penn State University Press
On Progressivism, Individual Rights, and Eugenics
Thomas C. Leonard – Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2017), Princeton University Press
Adam Cohen – Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (2016), Penguin
Book One: Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the similarities and differences between classical liberalism, modern American liberalism, and progressivism.
2. Describe and explain the implications for individual rights of collectivist political philosophies.
3. In what respects must real-world democracies be limited?
4. How might democracy be expanded in theory? Why might it be difficult to expand democracy in practice?
5. In what ways have individual rights sometimes been used to protect the interests of the privileged against those of the unprivileged? Do rights also protect the unprivileged against the privileged, if so, how? Consider historical examples.
6. What are the two possible meanings of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the general will? Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each conception.
7. Discuss the relationship between democratic procedures and the principle of popular sovereignty. Under what conditions do such procedures conform to rather than conflict with the principle of popular sovereignty?