Abstract
As the quotation from Aristotle makes clear, there is nothing new about the claim that a democracy may fail because its members are, or become, too poor and too desperate to live within its constraints. This volume is about the viability of Bolivia’s newly established democracy, and Bolivia is the poorest republic in South America. But before entering into the specifics of the Bolivian case, this introduction considers the more theoretical questions that arise from the idea of democratic ‘viability’. This can be traced back to Aristotle, who in the fourth part of his Politics qualified his search for the best regime as such by the need to identify the regime that would suit given conditions.
‘The duty of the true democrat is to see that the population is not destitute; for destitution is a cause of a corrupt democracy.’
Aristotle
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© 2001 Laurence Whitehead
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Whitehead, L. (2001). The Viability of Democracy. In: Crabtree, J., Whitehead, L. (eds) Towards Democratic Viability. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905246_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905246_1
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