Towards a Democratic Theory

Herman Finer

American Political Science Review, 1945, vol. 39, issue 2, 249-268

Abstract: The principal, indeed the desperate, task of democracy is to maintain itself; its second, to improve and refine itself. It is well to conceive our problem in practical terms, as it tends to sharpen and limit the inquiry; and, in a sense, part of the answer, at least, lies in the terms in which the question is posed. The problem is not an exercise in theory, but is urgently practical. So is the answer. But as all political science teaches, though it may come in institutional and psychological devices, in the background, promising and perhaps mocking, there is also the metaphysical element. And the last is inescapable. For this question needs solution: What Marxism is to Soviet Communism, and what Racialism is to the Nazi State, is X to Democracy. What is X?For we cannot assume that uncultivated men and women, unshaped by their institutions that already exist, or without a doctrine, can operate the democratic form of government. If that were so, nobody would have thought of education. If the instinctive response of mankind to its social problems were democracy, or ineluctably something else, the political scientist could happily surrender his Ph.D. and close his college doors.

Date: 1945
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