Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources (1991)

Zusammenfassung

It has been observed that ‘democracy’ has become a universal formula of legitimation for a broad range of radically different societies and their respective modes of governance and political participation. By the mid-1970s, there was virtually no regime between Chile and China that did not rest its claim to legitimacy upon being ‘democratic’ in some sense, or at least upon its being in the process of some transition to some version of democracy. Thus, the term ‘democracy’ seemed to have lost its distinctiveness: it failed to highlight significant differences between socio-political arrangements.