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Democracy is like clay, it’s shaped by its time and the concrete forms it takes are always moulded by historical circumstances. As a type of government to which consultation is central, it is extremely sensitive to the means of communication available. The democracy of ancient Athens was formed in …

[...] Referendums and deliberative democracy are similar in the sense that they turn directly to the ordinary citizen to ask his or her opinion, but other than that they are completely at odds with each other. In a referendum you ask everyone to vote on a subject that usually only a few know anythi…

With the demise of Athenian democracy, it fell into desuetude, then oblivion

Behold the pathogenesis of our electoral fundamentalism. The drawing of lots, the most democratic of all political instruments, lost out in the eighteenth century to elections, a procedure that was not invented as a democratic instrument but as a means of bringing a new, non-hereditary aristocracy …

The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy [...] a new upper bourgeoisie took power. It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but…