Essentials of democracy

SINCE these lectures were delivered in 1919 they have witnessed the world-wide economic crisis of 1931 and the Nazi Revolution. The latter event has made a sentence. on pages about the new democracy of Germany sadly out of date. The economic crisis put a severe strain upon post war democracy and the new European democracies have mostly succumbed to it; but England and, much more strikingly, America have shown that a democratic government can survive a crisis. The chief moral of the Nazi revolution for the student of democracy is that Germany has set forth with German thoroughness the real nature of the alternative to democracy. Fascist Italy and Bolshevist Russia had already made us talk of the totalitarian state, but neither Italy not Russia have worked out its implications with the same relentlessness as has National Socialist Get many. The main thesis of these lectures is that discussion is fundamental to democracy: that the purpose of democratic machinery is to represent differences: that democracy requires an official and encouraged opposition: that the principle of toleration is essential to it, and that finally democratic politics can only be successful in a democratic society and that that means a society of democratic non-political associations. It is pointed out that one implication of all this is that in a democracy politics are a secondary matter, for the purpose of the compulsory machinery of the state is to safeguard and harmonize a common life which has its inspiration in voluntary non-political activities. There can therefore be no compromise between the totalitarian state and democracy. This contrast between the two ways of organizing men: mass persuasion of men made as alike and as unanimous as possible and the discovery by discussion of a common plan which will give scope to differences is discussed in the second and third of these lectures, but the challenge of National Socialism has heightened and intensified it.