"Aristos: Well, I’ve tried to help you to see another vision than democracy. Mine is a vision of a well-qualified minority, whom I call the guardians, experts in the art and science of governing, who rule over the rest, governing in the best interests of all, fully respecting the principle of equal consideration, indeed perhaps upholding it far better than would the people if they were to govern themselves. Paradoxically, then, at its best such a system might actually rest on the consent of all. In this way, a system of guardianship might attain one of the most important ends of both anarchism and democracy—but by very different means. Demos: I admit that it is a powerful vision. It has always been the strongest competitor to the democratic vision and remains so today, when so many nondemocratic regimes—left, right, revolutionary, conservative, traditional—justify themselves by appealing to it for legitimacy. If democracy were to decline and perhaps even to disappear from human history in the centuries to come, I think its place would be taken by hierarchical regimes claiming to be legitimate because they were governed by guardians of virtue and knowledge."
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Democracy and Its Critics
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