On Democracy
Dahl, Robert A.
A PARTISAN FOR DEMOCRACY Alan Wolfe If democracy means one person, one vote, Robert A. Dahl has been writing about democracy for just about as long as that proposition has been operative—at...
...Elections, a free press, autonomous associations, and inclusive citizenship are among the institutions required to make polyarchy work...
...And unlike those who believe that political science demands strict objectivity, Dahl has long shown a passionate concern for encouraging greater equality...
...Democratic countries are less likely to go to war than nondemocratic ones...
...Democracy, Dahl also argues, has ethical advantages over other systems...
...On Democracy offers Dahl, who is eighty-four-years-old, a chance to reflect on a lifetime of preoccupation with questions of how citizens can effectively shape the power exercised by states presumably on their behalf...
...Unlike many political theorists, he has never been afraid of analytic precision...
...Democracy, Dahl believes, exists when members of any association have a roughly equal say in deciding what that association does...
...And Switzerland did not extend the right to vote to women until after Dahl had already established himself as one of the major political scientists of the twentieth century...
...They are also more likely to be prosperous...
...Great Britain, for example, abolished double votes for professors at Oxford and Cambridge in 1948, two years before Dahl published his first book...
...One part of the book is conceptual...
...The ancient Greeks and Scandinavian tribes governed themselves in roughly this way, even if they excluded large numbers of people—slaves, women, foreigners—from the ranks of those eligible for equality...
...All these features of his work are on display in On Democracy...
...True, market economies create a broad middle class which comes to prize democratic institutions and practices...
...A PARTISAN FOR DEMOCRACY Alan Wolfe If democracy means one person, one vote, Robert A. Dahl has been writing about democracy for just about as long as that proposition has been operative—at least in a surprisingly large number of countries...
...Dahl's work has always been characterized by an unusual combination of analytical precision, empirical sensitivity, and passionate conviction...
...Unlike many quantitative political scientists, he focuses on large and important—indeed the largest and most important— questions...
...But Dahl also believes that "democracy and market capitalism are locked in a persistent conflict in which each modifies and limits the other...
...This last point suggests that there will be natural affinity between democracy and a market economy, but on this point Dahl is not so sure...
...Modern democracy, which Dahl calls polyarchy, calls for the creation of political institutions which can compensate for the fact that contemporary states are too big, and the lives of the people living within them too complex, for everyone to get together with any frequency to decide things in common...
...That may be why there has simply never been an enduring democratic system of governance in any society which relied on a nonmarket economy...
...Inequalities in economic resources, for example, inevitably translate into inequalities in political resources, and if the latter become too extensive, democratic institutions are severely crimped...
...Such goals as moral autonomy and human development are furthered by democracies...
...Commonweal 38 April 9,1999...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
