Is Democracy the Best Form of Government?

Abstract

In posing again the traditional question about the ‘best form of government’, we might take a lead (this time around) from an idea prevalent in a philosophical movement which is not expressly political — the phenomenological movement. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and other exponents of ‘phenomenology’ (or ‘existential phenomenology’), although they disagree about many things, seem to concur in at least one important insight: there is no possibility of studying consciousness in and for itself; consciousness is always consciousnessof something. In a somewhat parallel fashion, most people in our relativistic social milieu would be inclined to assent to the proposition that there is no validity to the pursuit of an ‘absolutely best’ form of government; in other words, a government can be adjudged ‘best’ only insofar as it is best-for the people who are governed.

Do democracies make more and greater mistakes than other forms of government? … Is not illegal lynching a lesser evil than legal liquidation? What is the difference between slavery, which the democracies abolished, and the labor camps which Soviet Russia has instituted? If we compare the (alleged) low level of universal education in American democracy with the high level of the selective aristocratic system in some European democracies, which is to be preferred? This being settled, how does the favored system compare in promise for humanity with the controlled system of education in Communist Russia?

M. ten Hoor, Freedom Limited

[The ‘old’ liberals, who were suspicious of interference from government in the affairs of the citizenry] had no glimpse of the fact that private control of the new forces of production, forces which affect the life of everyone, would operate in the same way as private unchecked control of political power. They saw the need for new legal institutions, and of different political conditions as a means to political liberty. But they failed to perceive that social control of economic forces is equally necessary if anything approaching economic equality and liberty is to be realised.

John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (1935)

The terrifying phenomenon of totalitarianism, which has been born into our world perhaps four times, did not issue from authoritarian systems, but in each case from a weak democracy: the one created by the February Revolution in Russia, the Weimar and the Italian Republics, and Chiang Kai-shek’s China.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Misconceptions about Russia’