INTRODUCTION

My aim in this essay is to distinguish and comment on a specific movement of thought which I shall call “democracy as a telos.” This expression refers to a conception of democracy, cultivated by normative political philosophers, in which all democratic potentialities have at last been realized. The result is thought to be a perfected political community. Democracy as a telos must thus be distinguished from the actual liberal democracies we enjoy at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, democracy as a telos takes off from a specific rejection of such familiar institutions as elections, political parties, oppositions, a free press, and the rest, which are regarded, according to taste, as individualistic, bourgeois, atomistic, formal, and abstract. Democracy as a telos refers to the theories of reformers who, dissatisfied with our present condition, argue that only a radically transformed democracy can generate a real political community.

A telos is the natural completion of some process, and democracy as a telos suggests that we are en route to a better condition in which life accords as perfectly as may be with democracy. Hence, the term “democracy” in this sense may refer either to the practices that promise to bring this new condition about (such as participation, constitutional reform, ideal speech and deliberation, etc.) or to the new condition of human life itself.