"To begin with, as the defense of "democracy" against "its critics" descends very quickly to the "real world" of polyarchy, the many contemporary critics of polyarchy who conceive themselves not as critics of democracy but as its advocates receive short shrift at best. Plato, Lenin, and MacIntyre are handily dispatched; Milbrand, Bachrach, Domhoff, Cohen and Rogers, Mansbridge, and Barber, to name just a few of polyarchy's well-known critics, are virtually ignored. Dahl's treatment of C. Wright Mills is indicative: once again an empirical democratic theorist trots out the criticism that "elite theorists" fail "to provide much evidence on the chain of control from these elites to the outcomes—for example, beliefs, agendas, or government decisions—over which they presumably dominate." If elites, whoever or whatever they are, do not dominate over beliefs, agendas, and government decisions, then why can't the criteria for the democratic process be met? If contribution to the agenda, for example, is random, then surely we have "equal opportunity;" that is what the phrase means. Contrarily, in the absence of equal opportunity what else have we but elite domination?"

"Whatever form it takes, the democracy of our successors will not and cannot be the democracy of our predecessors. Nor should it be."

"Dahl's theory leads to a way of reconciling a limited form of judicial guardianship with democracy, but it rejects any broad form of judicial policymaking. In this respect, Dahl's political theory provides a foundation for a theory of judicial review similar to that found in John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust, a work which Dahl himself cites. Judicial review is justified when it is properly used to maintain the democratic process; it is not justified as a substitute for a democratic policymaking process. Thus, giving the judiciary the authority to strike down laws that violate rights of free speech or free assembly does not necessarily contravene the democratic ideal. However, permitting unelected judges to make substantive policy decisions under the guise of constitutional or statutory interpretation clearly raises serious problems for democratic theory."

"My best, clearest, and most complete formulation is, I believe, in Democracy and Its Critics."

"Now my depression deepens much more than it ever did when reading Mill, for now we see one of the best minds in American political theory quite unwittingly confirming the worst things that have been said by critics of the kind of theory he practices."

"By asserting the existence of a dominant minority, these theories divert us from a realistic assessment of the true limits and potentialities of democracy in the modern world. Either they offer ill-founded hope for an apocalyptic revolutionary transformation that will lead us into the promised land of perfect freedom, self-realization, and full acceptance of the equal worth of all human beings; or else they offer us no hope at all and counsel us, directly or by implication, to give up the ancient vision of a society in which the citizens, possessing all the resources and institutions necessary to democracy, govern themselves as free and equal citizens."

"The discussion between Traditionalist, Modernist, and Pluralist breaks off, leaving us with three questions. First, in determining the common good, whose good ought to be taken into account? The answer, it should now be evident, is that in a collective decision the good of all persons significantly affected by the decision should be taken into account. Clearly, however, to apply that answer in practice is enormously complicated by the existence of pluralism within democratic countries, the existence of pluralism among democratic countries, and the existence of persons outside a democratic country who are seriously affected by decisions taken within the country. Second, how can the common good best be determined in collective decisions? Pluralism also compounds the difficulties of finding a satisfactory solution to this question. While we have concluded that the democratic process is best for arriving at binding collective decisions, a large political society (a country, to be more concrete) includes different associations and political units or types of units, each of which may lay a competing and conflicting claim that it is a proper democratic unit, and perhaps the only proper democratic unit, for making collective decisions on the matter in question. [...] Third, a question to which an answer has proved highly elusive: What is the substantive content of the common good? Once again, the search for an answer is complicated by the pluralism of modern democratic countries, where diversity sometimes appears to reduce common interests almost to the vanishing point or, Modernist might argue, to it. I want to show in the next chapter why in my view this answer, though tempting, is mistaken."

"Even if we grant that political parties are oligarchical, it does not follow that competing political parties necessarily produce an oligarchical political system."

"The last chapter left us with three central questions: (1) In determining the common good, whose good ought to be taken into account? (2) How can it best be determined in collective decisions? (3) What, substantively speaking, is the common good? As to the first I argued that in a collective decision the good of all persons significantly affected by the decision should be taken into account. [...] As we haven seen throughout this and the preceding chapter, pluralism compounds the difficulties of finding a satisfactory solution to the second question because, among other things, it requires us to consider how we are to determine which unit (or type of unit) is proper for making democratic decisions. [...] The unit ought to govern itself by the democratic process. The unit ought also to be justifiable as a relatively autonomous democratic unit, in the sense that it satisfies the criteria for a democratic unit set out in chapter 14. As to the third question, it should now be evident that it seems to me misguided to search for the good exclusively in the outcomes of collective decisions and ignore the good that pertains to the arrangements by which they are reached."

"James: What you and most other advocates of assembly democracy don't seem to recognize is how swiftly your own argument turns against you. I've already agreed that, as the number of citizens grows larger the opportunities for them to participate directly in decisions must necessarily decline. This is because, if nothing else has an upper limit, time does. Elementary arithmetic shows that if ten citizens were to meet for five hours-a long time for a meeting!-the maximum equal time each may be allowed for speaking, for parliamentary maneuvers, and for voting is thirty minutes. Small committees are the perfect example of participatory democracy, or at least they can be Even so, as most of us know from experience people who have other things to do would not look forward to attending many five-hour committee meetings a month. But you and Rousseau aren't talking about committees. You're talking about governing a state for heaven's sake! Jean-Jacques: Well, not only states. Other organizations and association might also be democratically run. James: That is so, of course. But let's go back to the arithmetic of participation. Once you go beyond the size of a committee, the opportunities for all the members to participate necessarily decline rapidly and drastically. Look. If the length of the assembly meeting remains at five hours and the number of citizens goes up to no more than a hundred, then each member has three minutes. At three hundred members you approach the vanishing point of one minute. The number of citizen. who were eligible to attend the assembly in classical Athens was twenty thousand. according to one common estimate; the best guesses of some scholars are two or three times that with just twenty thousand, if time were allocated equally in a five-hour meeting each citizen would have less than one second in which to participate! Jean-Jacques: Now, James, I can do arithmetic. I'm aware of calculations like these. But aren't they misleading? After all. not everyone wants to or has to participate by actually speaking. Among twenty thousand people there aren't twenty thousand different points of view on the issue, particularly if the citizens assemble after days, weeks, or months of discussions going on prior to the assembly. By the time of the meeting, probably only two or three alternatives will seem worth discussing seriously. So ten speakers, say, with about a half hour each to present their arguments, might well be plenty. Or let's say five speakers with a half hour each; that would leave time for brief questions and statements. Let's say five minutes for each intervention. That would allow thirty more people to participate. James: Bravo! Notice what you have just demonstrated. Thirty-five citizens actively participate in your assembly by speaking. What can the rest do? They can listen, think, and vote. So, in an assembly of twenty thousand, less than two-tenths of 1 present actively participate and more than 99.8 percent participate only by listening, thinking, and voting! A great privilege, your participatory democracy."

"Turning first to theory, it is hardly debatable that the likelihood of polyarchy in a country depends on the strength of certain conditions. The problem is to determine what those conditions are and how variations in them affect the likelihood of polyarchy. The most relevant patterns of development are these:1. In a country with a nonpolyarchal regime, favorable conditions develop and persist. Therefore it is highly likely that a transition to polyarchy occurs, that the institutions of polyarchy are consolidated, and that the polyarchal system persists that is, is stable. Thus, Given favorable conditions: then a nonpolyarchal regime (NPR) → stable polyarchy 2. In a country with a nonpolyarchal regime favorable conditions do not develop or are weak Therefore it is highly unlikely that a transition to polyarchy takes place and highly likely that a nonpolyarchal regime persists. Thus, Given unfavorable conditions: then NPR → NPR 3. In a country with a nonpolyarchal regime, the conditions are mixed or temporarily favorable. If under these conditions polyarchy develops, the likely possibilities are: 3.a. Polyarchy breaks down within a short time (less than twenty years), a transition to a nonpolyarchal regime occurs, and a nonpolyarchal regime persists: Given mixed or temporarily favorable conditions: then NPR → polyarchy → NPR 3.b. As in 3.a. except that the nonpolyarchal regime also breaks down, another transition to polyarchy occurs (redemocratization), polyarchy is consolidated and it persists: Given mixed or temporarily favorable conditions: then NPR → polyarchy → NPR → polyarchy 3.c. As in 3 b. except that polyarchy is not consolidated, and the system oscillates between polyarchy and nonpolyarchy: Given mixed or temporarily favorable conditions: then NPR → polyarchy → NPR → polyarchy → NPR → etc."

"The criterion of enlightened understanding, I suggested, could now be interpreted to mean that persons who understand their interests in the sense just given possess an enlightened understanding of their interests. Following this line of thought, I now propose that an essential element in the meaning of the common good among the members of a group is what the members would choose if they possessed the fullest attainable understanding of the experience that would result from their choice and its most relevant alternatives. Because enlightened understanding as essential also to the meaning of the common good. Still further, the rights and opportunities of the democratic process are elements of the common good. Even more broadly, because the institutions of polyarchy are necessary in order to employ the democratic process on a large scale, in a unit as large as a country all the institutions of polyarchy should also be counted as elements of the common good."

"A country is very likely to develop and sustain the institutions of polyarchy • if the means of violent coercion are dispersed or neutralized; • if it possesses an MDP society; • if it is culturally homogeneous, or if it is heterogeneous, is not segmented into strong and distinctive subcultures, or, if it is so segmented, its leaders have succeeded in creating a consociational arrangement for managing subcultural conflicts; • if it possesses a political culture and beliefs, particularly among political activists, that support the institutions of polyarchy; • and if it is not subject to intervention by a foreign power hostile to polyarchy."

"In the real world, then, answers to the question, what constitutes "a people" for democratic purposes? are far more likely to come from political action and conflict, which will often be accompanied by violence and coercion, than from reasoned inferences from democratic principles and practices. For as we have seen, in solving this particular problem democratic theory cannot take us very far. Democratic ideas, as I have said, do not yield a definitive answer. They presuppose that one has somehow been supplied, or will be supplied, by history and politics."

"In the Social Contract (1762), Rousseau still clung to the older vision of a people wielding final control over the government of a state that was small enough in population and territory to enable all the citizens to gather together in order to exercise their sovereignty in a single popular assembly. Yet less than a century later the belief that the nation of the country was the "natural" unit of sovereign government was so completely taken for granted that in his Considerations on Representative Government John Stuart Mill, stating in a single sentence what to him and his readers could be taken as a self-evident truth, dismissed the conventional wisdom of over two thousand years by rejecting the assumption that self-government necessarily required a unit small enough for the whole body of citizens to assemble. Even Mill, however, failed to see fully how radically the great increase in scale would necessarily transform the institutions and practices of democracy. At least eight important consequences have followed from that epochal change in the locus of democracy. Taken together they set the modern democratic state in sharp contrast to the older ideals and practices of democratic and republican governments. As a result, this modern descendant of the democratic idea lives uneasily with ancestral memories that unceasingly evoke the mournful plaint that present practices have fallen far away from ancient ideals. (Never mind that ancient practices themselves hardly conformed to ancient ideals.)"

"Like the majority principle, the democratic process presupposes a proper unit. The criteria of the democratic process presuppose the rightfulness of the unit itself."

"Polyarchy is a political order distinguished at the most general level by two broad characteristics: Citizenship is extended to a relatively high proportion of adults, and the rights of citizenship include the opportunity to oppose and vote out the highest officials in the government. The first characteristic distinguishes polyarchy from more exclusive systems of rule in which, though opposition is permitted, governments and their legal oppositions are restricted to a small group, as was the case in Britain, Belgium, Italy, and other countries before mass suffrage. The second characteristic distinguishes polyarchy from regimes in which, though most adults are citizens, citizenship does not include the right to oppose and vote out the government, as in modern authoritarian regimes."

"To the extent that a people is deprived of the opportunity to act autonomously and is governed by guardians, it is less likely to develop a sense of responsibility for its collective actions. To the extent that it is autonomous, then it may sometimes err and act unjustly. The democratic process is a gamble on the possibilities that a people, in acting autonomously, will learn how to act rightly."

"More specifically, and giving greater content to these two general features, polyarchy is a political order distinguished by the presence of seven institutions, all of which must exist for a government to be classified as a polyarchy.1. Elected officials. Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials. 2. Free and fair elections. Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon. 3. Inclusive suffrage. Practically all adults have the right to vote in the election of officials. 4. Right to run for office. Practically all adults have the right to run for elective offices in the government, though age limits may be higher for holding office than for the suffrage. 5. Freedom of expression. Citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined, including criticism of officials, the government, the regime, the socioeconomic order. and the prevailing ideology. 6. Alternative information. Citizens have a right to seek out alternative sources of information. Moreover, alternative sources of information exist and are protected by laws. 7. Associational autonomy. To achieve their various rights, including those listed above, citizens also have a right to form relatively independent associations or organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups."

"The democratic process, I have argued, is superior in at least three ways to other feasible ways by which people might be governed. First, it promotes freedom as no feasible alternative can; freedom in the form of individual and collective self-determination, in the degree of moral autonomy it encourages and allows, and in a broad range of other and more particular freedoms that are inherent in the democratic process, or are necessary prerequisites for its existence, or exist because people who support the idea and practice of the democratic process are, as a plain historical fact, also inclined to five generous support to other freedoms as well. Second, the democratic process promotes human development, not least in the capacity for exercising self-determination, moral autonomy, and responsibility for one's choices. Finally, it is the surest way (if by no means a perfect one) by which human beings can protect and advance the interests and goods they share with others."

"When one begins to search for general solutions, one's doubts about their utility are likely to grow stronger."

"Critic: But you do admit that the democratic process hardly exhausts all claims to substantive justice. As you just said, there are other claims, too. If so, isn't it perfectly reasonable to ask that these claims be protected in some way from being violated by decisions made through the democratic process? Advocate: Whether it's reasonable to ask for limitations on the democratic process depends on whether you can supply an alternative. That points to a third mistake. Unless you can specify a feasible alternative process that is more likely to produce just outcomes it is wrong to contend that a process for making collective decisions is defective solely because it may lead to unjust outcomes."

"The supposed failure of the democratic process to guarantee desirable substantive outcomes is in important respects spurious. We need to reject, as Advocate does, the familiar contrast between substance and process. For integral to the democratic process are substantive rights, goods, and interests that are often mistakenly thought to be threatened by it."

"A possible defect in almost any process for making decisions is that it may fail to achieve desirable results. Even a just process might sometimes produce an unjust outcome. A process might in principle meet all the requirements set out in the last chapters as fully as may be humanly possible. Yet might it not in some circumstances lead to morally undesirable results? The possibility suggests two fundamental objections to the democratic process. (1) It may do harm. (2) It may fail to achieve the common good."

"Viewed in this way the democratic process endows citizens with an extensive array of rights, liberties, and resources sufficient to permit hem to participate fully, as equal citizens, in the making of all the collective decisions by which they are bound. If adult persons must participate in collective decisions in order to protect their personal interests, including their interest as members of a community, to develop their human capacities, and to act as self-determining, morally responsible beings, then the democratic process is necessary to these ends as well. Seen in this light, the democratic process is not only essential to one of the most important of all political goods—the right of people to govern themselves—but itself a rich bundle of substantive goods."

"A political process that meets only the first two criteria, I have suggested, might be regarded as procedurally democratic in a narrow sense. In contrast, one that also meets the criterion of enlightened understanding can be regarded as fully democratic with respect to an agenda and in relation to a demos. At a still higher threshold, a process that in addition provides for final control of the agenda by its demos is fully democratic in relation to its demos. But only if the demos were inclusive enough to meet the fifth criterion could we describe the process of decisionmaking as fully democratic."

"The flaws in majority rule pointed out by Critic do great damage to the contention of majoritarians that the democratic process necessarily requires majority rule in all collective decisions. However, from the unassailable proposition that majority rule is imperfect—perhaps indeed highly imperfect—we cannot move directly to the conclusion that it should be replaced by an alternative rule for making collecting decisions. Before arriving at that conclusion, we would want to know whether a generally superior alternative can be found. As we shall see, the alternatives to majority rule are also deeply flawed."

"A person's interest or good is whatever that person would choose with fullest attainable understanding of the experience resulting from that choice and its most relevant alternatives."

"The upshot of our exploration of majority rule, then is this: The quest for a single rule to specify how collective decisions must be made in a system governed by the democratic process is destined to fail. No such rule, it seems, can be found. On the other hand, the defects in majority rule are far too serious to be brushed aside. They oblige us to look with the utmost skepticism on the claim that democracy necessarily requires majority rule. Yet we are entitled to be just as skeptical about claims that an alternative would be clearly superior to majority rule or more consistent with the democratic process and its values. For all the alternatives to majority rule are also seriously flawed. We may reasonably conclude, then, that judgments as to the best rule for collective decisions ought to be made only after a careful appraisal of the circumstances in which these decisions are likely to be taken. This conclusion is consistent with actual experience in different democratic countries, where people have adopted a variety of different rules and practices. In adopting or rejecting majority rule, the people in democratic countries have not necessarily violated the democratic process or the values that justify it. For under different conditions, the democratic process may properly be carried out under different rules for making collective decisions."

"The categorical principle might then be restated as follows:Modified Categorical Principle: Every adult subject to a government and its laws must be presumed to be qualified as, and has an unqualified right to be a member of the demos.There are, however, at least two sources of difficulty with the modified categorical principle. First, the boundary between childhood and adulthood presents some difficulty. … Thus the modified categorical principle runs the risk of circularity by defining "adults" as persons who are presumed to be qualified to govern. A second source of difficulty with the modified principle is caused by the presence in a country of foreigners who might be adult by any reasonable standards, who are subject to the laws of the country in which they temporarily reside, but who are not thereby qualified to participate in governing."

"A categorical principle of inclusion that overrides the need for a judgment is to competence is also unacceptable, for it is rendered untenable by such cases as children, feeble-minded persons, and foreigners of temporary residence, Insofar as Locke and Rousseau advanced a categorical principle, their defense of it is unconvincing., However, evidence suggests that they recognized these objections and never intended their argument to be taken as a rejection of the priority of a criterion of competence."

"The only defensible ground on which to exclude children from the demos is that they are not yet fully qualified. the need to exclude children on this ground was of course perfectly obvious to early democratic theorists. … The example of children is sufficient to show that the criterion of competence cannot reasonably be evaded, that any reasonable bounding of a demos must, by excluding children, necessarily exclude a large body of persons subject to the laws, and that any assertion of a universal right of all persons to membership is a demos cannot be sustained. It might be argued, however, that children constitute a comparatively well-defined and unique exception. Thus, once a distinction is allowed between children and adults, all adults subject to the laws must be included."

"Because a judgment on competence is contingent on weighing evidence and making inferences as to the intellectual and moral qualifications of specific categories of persons, a decision based on competence is inherently open to question. To be sure, a reasonable argument may be presented in behalf of a particular judgment as to the proper boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. But the exact location of any boundary is necessarily a highly debatable judgment, and from Aristotle onward the practical judgments of political philosophers have tended to reflect the prejudices of their times."

"In adopting the Strong Principle of Equality, we have already takes considerations like these into account. That principle, and the assumptions from which it is derived, provide reasonable grounds for adopting a criterion that approaches universality among adults. It is not only very much less arbitrary than Schumpeter's solution but far more inclusive than the restricted demos that was accepted, implicitly or explicitly, in the classical polis and by Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, or Mill. The fifth and final criterion for the democratic process is, then, as follows:The demos must include all adult members of the association except transients and persons proved to be mentally defective."

"It is misleading to suggest that there is one universally best solution to the problem of how best to protect fundamental rights and interests in a polyarchy."

"Insofar as the idea and practice of democracy are justified by the values of freedom, human development, and the protection and advancement of shared human interests, the idea and practice of democracy also presuppose three kinds of equality: the intrinsic moral equality of all persons; the equality expressed by the presumption that adult persons are entitled to personal autonomy in determining what is best for themselves, and following from these, political equality among citizens, as this is defined by the criteria for the democratic process."

"Locke and Rousseau appear to have advanced two different principles on which a claim to citizenship might be grounded. One is explicit, categorical, and universal, the other is implicit, contingent, and limiting:Categorical Principle: Every person subject to a government and its laws has an unqualified right to be a member of the demos (i.e., a citizen). Contingent Principle: Only persons who are qualified to govern, but all such persons, should be members of the demos (i.e., citizens)."

"The argument for the Strong Principle of Equality would appear to support the conclusion that everyone subject to the laws should be included in the demos, Everyone? Not quite: not children, for example, the Presumption of Personal Autonomy applies to adults. As we saw earlier, Athenian democrats did not find it anomalous that their demos included only a minority of adults."

"The criteria for a democratic process, ... do not specify a decision rule."

"What criteria, then, will be uniquely consistent with our assumptions and thereby provide us with the distinguishing features of a democratic process?Effective Participation: Throughout the process of making binding decisions, citizens ought to have an adequate opportunity, and an equal opportunity, for expressing their preferences as to the final outcome. They must have adequate and equal opportunities for placing questions on the agenda and for expressing reasons for endorsing one outcome rather than another.[…]Voting Equality at the Decisive stage: At the decisive stage of collective decisions, each citizen must be ensured an equal opportunity to express a choice that will be counted as equal in weight to the choice expressed by any other citizen. In determining outcomes at the decisive stage, these choices, and only these choices, must be taken into account.[…]Enlightened Understanding: […] Each citizen ought to have adequate and equal opportunities for discovering and validating (within the time permitted by the need for a decision) the choice on the matter to be decided that would best serve the citizen's interests.[…]Control of the Agenda: […] The demos must have the exclusive opportunity to decide how matters are to be placed on the agenda of matters that are to be decided by means of the democratic process."

"Advocates of guardianship contend that any process by which ordinary citizens rule is unlikely to achieve the public good, since ordinary citizens lack both the necessary knowledge and the necessary virtue. However, even advocates of democracy sometimes argue that no process is sufficient to ensure that the public good (the public interest, the good of all, etc.) will be achieved."

"If the good or interests of everyone should be weighed equally, and if each adult person is in general the best judge of his or her good or interests, then every adult member of an association is sufficiently well qualified, taken all around, to participate in making binding collective decisions that affect his or her good or interests, that is, to be a full citizen of the demos."

"Democracy means literally, rule by the people. But what does it mean to say that the people rule, the people is sovereign, a people governs itself? In order to rule, the people must have some way of ruling, a process for ruling. What are the distinctive characteristics of democratic process of government? … To answer these questions it is useful to proceed in three stages. First, since democracy is a political order it is useful to set out the assumptions that justify the existence of a political order. Second, we need to specify the assumptions that justify a democratic political order. … Third, we need to describe the essential criteria of a democratic political order and indicate how these follow from the assumptions."

"Inevitably, whenever democratic ideas are applied to the real world, actual democracy falls significantly short of ideal standards."

"One might object, I suppose, that enlightenment has nothing to do with democracy. But I think this would be a foolish and historically false assertion. It is foolish because democracy has usually been conceived as a system in which “rule by the people” makes it more likely that the “people: will get what it wants, or what it believes is best, than alternative systems like guardianship in which an elite determines what is best."

"To live together in an association, then, people need a process for arriving at governmental decisions: a political process."

"The persistence and generality of the assumption of intrinsic equality in systematic moral reasoning could be attributed to the existence of a norm so deeply entrenched in all Western cultures that we cannot reject it without denying our cultural heritage and thereby denying who we are."

"It is true that a democratic regime runs the risk that the people will make mistakes. But the risk of mistake exists in all regimes in the real, and the worst blunders of this century have been made by leaders in nondemocratic regimes. Moreover, the opportunity to make mistakes is an opportunity to learn. Just as we reject paternalism in individual decisions, because it prevents the development of our moral capacities, so too we should reject guardianship in public affairs, because it will stunt the development of the moral capacities of an entire people. At its best, only the democratic vision can offer the hope, which guardianship can never do, that by engaging in governing themselves, all people, and not merely a few, may learn to act as morally responsible human beings."

"This is simply that, when the idea of democracy is actively adopted by a people, it tends to produce the best feasible political system, or at any rate the best state taken all around. In this view, many of the philosophical justifications offered for democracy may be true. But they speak to political ideals rather than directly to human experience. A hardheaded look at human experience, historical and contemporary, shows that among political societies that have actually existed, or now exist, those that most nearly satisfy the criteria of the democratic idea are, taken all around, better than rest."

"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."