Democracy is a form of government in which a substantial proportion of
the citizenry directly or indirectly participates in ruling the state. It
is thus distinct from governments controlled by a particular social class
or group or by a single person. In a direct democracy citizens vote on
laws in an assembly, as they did in ancient Greek city-states and do today
in New England towns. In an indirect democracy citizens elect officials to
represent them in government; representation is typical of most modern
democracies. Today the essential features of democracy, as understood in
the Western world, are that citizens be sufficiently free ~ in speech and
assembly, for example ~ to form competing political parties and that
voters be able to choose among the candidates of these parties in
regularly held elections.
The term democracy is derived
from the Greek words demos ("the people") and kratia
("rule"). The first democratic forms of government developed in the Greek
city-states during the 6th century . Although demos is sometimes said to mean just "the
poor," Aristotle's Constitution of Athens shows that in Athens all
citizens, rich and poor, participated fully in government; minors, women,
slaves, and foreigners, however ~ perhaps 90 percent of the
population ~ were not citizens.
Greek democratic institutions collapsed under the imperial onslaught
first of Macedonia and later of Rome. Republican Rome had popular
assemblies (comitia), in which the citizens met to elect officials and
make laws. The comitia lost their powers, however, first to the
aristocratic Roman Senate and ultimately to the Roman emperors. Democratic
ideas did not reappear on a significant scale until the 17th century. The
barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome in the 5th
century produced a European society that
was primarily concerned with security rather than with democratic
institutions. This gave rise to the rigidly hierarchical systems of
feudalism and manorialism. Political attitudes were, moreover, shaped by
the powerful Christian church, which taught, in effect, that existing
institutions had divine sanction.
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