Conclusion

Abstract

This study is an exercise in what one commentator called the “ennobling of democracy” (Pangle 1992). That is to say, it strives to reinvigorate contemporary reflection on democracy by casting our gaze back to the philosophical foundations of a way of life. Regrettably, even the supporters of that way of life today seldom feel compelled to offer a comprehensive account of its original purpose and continuing value as a form of political organization. Part of this process of reflection necessarily involves grasping the full implications of what it meant for seventeenth and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson to habilitate the concept of democracy that had been largely discredited by the classical tradition of political philosophy and the subsequent millennium of religious dominance over politics in the West. Today, we are accustomed to thinking of democracy in terms of the “almost irresistible global tide” described so vividly by Samuel Huntington at the end of the Cold War (Huntington 1992: 21). The three waves of democratization that Huntington identified correspond to the dynamic forces of massive social change and temporary reversals that marked the nineteenth and twentieth century.¹