Participation in a democracy as Dewey conceived it requires critical and inquisitive habits of mind, an inclination toward cooperation with others, and a feeling of public spiritedness and a desire to achieve the common good. Because these habits and inclinations must be inculcated from a young age, Dewey placed great emphasis on education; indeed, he called public schools “the church of democracy.” His contributions to both the theory and practice of education were enormously influential in the United States in the 20th century (see also education, philosophy of).
Dewey offered little in the way of concrete proposals regarding the form that democratic institutions should take. Nevertheless, in The Public and Its Problems (1927) and other works, he contended that individuals cannot develop to their fullest potential except in a social democracy, or a democratic welfare-state. Accordingly, he held that democracies should possess strong regulatory powers. He also insisted that among the most important features of a social democracy should be the right of workers to participate directly in the control of the firms in which they are employed.
Given Dewey’s interest in education, it is not surprising that he was greatly concerned with the question of how citizens might better understand public affairs. Although he was a proponent of the application of the social sciences to the development of public policy, he sharply criticized intellectuals, academics, and political leaders who viewed the general public as incompetent and who often argued for some form of democratic elitism. Only the public, he maintained, can decide what the public interest is. In order for citizens to be able to make informed and responsible decisions about their common problems, he thought, it is important for them to engage in dialogue with each other in their local communities. Dewey’s emphasis on dialogue as a critical practice in a democracy inspired later political theorists to explore the vital role of deliberation in democratic systems. Habermas
In a series of works published after 1970, the German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, employing concepts borrowed from Anglo-American philosophy of language, argued that the idea of achieving a “rational consensus” within a group on questions of either fact or value presupposes the existence of what he called an “ideal speech situation.” In such a situation, participants would be able to evaluate each other’s assertions solely on the basis of reason and evidence in an atmosphere completely free of any nonrational “coercive” influences, including both physical and psychological coercion. Furthermore, all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain a rational consensus, and no time limits on the discussion would be imposed. Although difficult if not impossible to realize in practice, the ideal speech situation can be used as a model of free and open public discussion and a standard against which to evaluate the practices and institutions through which large political questions and issues of public policy are decided in actual democracies. Rawls
From the time of Mill until about the mid-20th century, most philosophers who defended democratic principles did so largely on the basis of utilitarian considerations—i.e., they argued that systems of government that are democratic in character are more likely than other systems to produce a greater amount of happiness (or well-being) for a greater number of people. Such justifications, however, were traditionally vulnerable to the objection that they could be used to support intuitively less-desirable forms of government in which the greater happiness of the majority is achieved by unfairly neglecting the rights and interests of a minority.
In A Theory of Justice (1971), the American philosopher John Rawls attempted to develop a nonutilitarian justification of a democratic political order characterized by fairness, equality, and individual rights. Reviving the notion of a social contract, which had been dormant since the 18th century, he imagined a hypothetical situation in which a group of rational individuals are rendered ignorant of all social and economic facts about themselves—including facts about their race, sex, religion, education, intelligence, talents or skills, and even their conception of the “good life”—and then asked to decide what general principles should govern the political institutions under which they live. From behind this “veil of ignorance,” Rawls argues, such a group would unanimously reject utilitarian principles—such as “political institutions should aim to maximize the happiness of the greatest number”—because no member of the group could know whether he belonged to a minority whose rights and interests might be neglected under institutions justified on utilitarian grounds. Instead, reason and self-interest would lead the group to adopt principles such as the following: (1) everyone should have a maximum and equal degree of liberty, including all the liberties traditionally associated with democracy; (2) everyone should have an equal opportunity to seek offices and positions that offer greater rewards of wealth, power, status, or other social goods; and (3) the distribution of wealth in society should be such that those who are least well-off are better off than they would be under any other distribution, whether equal or unequal. (Rawls holds that, given certain assumptions about human motivation, some inequality in the distribution of wealth may be necessary to achieve higher levels of productivity. It is therefore possible to imagine unequal distributions of wealth in which those who are least well-off are better off than they would be under an equal distribution.) These principles amount to an egalitarian form of democratic liberalism. Rawls is accordingly regarded as the leading philosophical defender of the modern democratic capitalist welfare state. “Ideal democracy”
As noted above, Aristotle found it useful to classify actually existing governments in terms of three “ideal constitutions.” For essentially the same reasons, the notion of an “ideal democracy” also can be useful for identifying and understanding the democratic characteristics of actually existing governments, be they of city-states, nation-states, or larger associations.
It is important to note that the term ideal is ambiguous. In one sense, a system is ideal if it is considered apart from, or in the absence of, certain empirical conditions, which in actuality are always present to some degree. Ideal systems in this sense are used to identify what features of an actual system are essential to it, or what underlying laws are responsible, in combination with empirical factors, for a system’s behaviour in actual circumstances. In another sense, a system is ideal if it is “best” from a moral point of view. An ideal system in this sense is a goal toward which a person or society ought to strive (even if it is not perfectly attainable in practice) and a standard against which the moral worth of what has been achieved, or of what exists, can be measured.
These two senses are often confused. Systems that are ideal in the first sense may, but need not, be ideal in the second sense. Accordingly, a description of an ideal democracy, such as the one below, need not be intended to prescribe a particular political system. Indeed, influential conceptions of ideal democracy have been offered by democracy’s enemies as well as by its friends. Features of ideal democracy
At a minimum, an ideal democracy would have the following features:
Effective participation. Before a policy is adopted or rejected, members of the dēmos have the opportunity to make their views about the policy known to other members.
Equality in voting. Members of the dēmos have the opportunity to vote for or against the policy, and all votes are counted as equal.