Three problems continue to haunt democratic theory. One is that the right method does not always produce the right results. Majorities, even when properly counted, are sometimes wrong. Governments, even when representative and accountable, are sometimes oppressive or unwise. Justice …
If man is a rational animal, it is surely odd that he so often debates questions whose answers must be presupposed before the debate can take place. (I use the term “man” here in its primary dictionary meaning, to denote …
Ever since men climbed down from the trees and found it necessary to establish ground rules, they have fought over what those rules shall be. They have fought longest, and perhaps most bitterly, over the most fundamental rule of all—the …
Equality, wrote Alexandre Dumas the younger, brought kings to the guillotine and the people to the throne. Like most felicitous phrases, this is no more than a partial truth. New tyrants rather than “the people” often ascended to the momentarily …
There is only one serious question in political philosophy: What manner of men do we take ourselves and others to be? All other issues—not least the next fundamental question, By what right does any man or class command the services …
Of Democracy When asked how in the real world I distinguish a democratic from a nondemocratic state, I answer with a single question: who is the leader of the opposition? For without a political opposition, and the commotion it produces, no …
THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM, AND REVOLUTION, by Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers. 128 pp. $1.25. Every once in a while I seek a bit of comic relief from the burdens of our Kafkaesque world. One unfailing source has been, …
Bad books are easily ignored. They may waste an unwary reader’s time, but this is a minor irritant. Really bad books, however, are noxious: they insult the intelligence of readers; they also injure the cause they avowedly seek to promote. …
Definitions, whether of liberty or of other political terms, are neither true nor false. They are useful or mischievous, and in any case they change over time. They are useful, ordinarily, when they enable people to communicate, i.e., to understand …
