Abstract
The Stoic philosophers of the fourth century BC believed in the idea of oikeiosis. Oikeiosis proposed to gradually expand one’s closest attachments to oneself on to the family, society and eventually all of humanity. The early Stoic philosopher Hierocles depicted the idea of oikeiosis through his concentric circles of identity: the innermost circle represented the individual; the surrounding circles stood for immediate family, extended family, local group, citizens, countrymen and humanity, in this order. The objective of oikeiosis was to draw in people from the outer circles into the inner ones, based on the assumption that all human beings belong to one single and universal community with a shared morality at the core. As such, oikeiosis became the basis of cosmopolitan ethics.1
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Notes
Terry Karl coined the term “fallacy of electoralism” to refer to the inadequacy of equating democratization with elections alone (Karl 2000, Carothers 2002, Diamond 2002). Committing the fallacy was about adopting an excessively minimalist definition of democracy in which accountability, the broadest meaning of representative democracy according to Schmitter (2004: 47), was relegated to elections. The fallacy instigated numerous and broader definitions and measurements of democracies and democratization (Schmitter and Karl 1991, Munck and Verkuilen 2002). It also led to the distinction between an electoral and a liberal democracy. The latter refused considering systems with enclaves of authoritarianism as democratic even though the overall system was based on fair, free and competitive elections, legitimate constitutions and effective multiparties. It required extended legal and political rights for citizens, and strengthened horizontal accountability among governing institutions (R. A. Dahl et al., The Democracy Sourcebook, Boston: The MIT Press, 2003. Available at http://downloads.pavroz.ru/files/democracysourcebook.pdf).
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© 2014 Peride K. Blind
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Blind, P.K. (2014). The Concentric Circles of Democratization: Teasing Out the Common Drivers. In: Policy-Driven Democratization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294784_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294784_2
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