Re: democracy defined

[Robert Justin Lipkin]

       I don't think anything I said or implied suggests separating democracy from majority rule.  My point was that there are simple and complex conceptions of 'democracy.' While both include majority rule, only the latter appeals to moral and political concepts--equality, self-determination, deliberation -- which explain the desirability of majority rule. These underlying explanatory conditions of majority rule then in turn place constraints on the precise kind of majority rule the polity might seek.

       With regard to "self-rule," for me it connects both individual freedom and collective freedom. When I decide freely I am engaging in self-rule and when the people decide freely, we are engaging in self-rule. The notion of "self-rule" functions as a general or foundational term for referring to a subject, whether an individual person or a collectivity of people, engaged in governing itself. From my perspective, the fact that self-rule links the individual and the many in this manner renders it an attractive term which contributes to systematizing different, but interrelated, aspects of freedom.

Bobby Lipkin
Widener University School of Law
Delaware