A survey of democratic institutions and republics reveals the aristocratic origins of democracy.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice, this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

Representative democracy is often assessed from the standpoint of direct democracy. Recently, however, many theorists have come to argue that representation forms a democratic model in its own right. The most powerful claim in this direction is to be found within two quite different strands of thinking: the aesthetic theory of Frank Ankersmit and the savage theory of Claude Lefort. In this article, I show that while Ankersmit and Lefort converge in their critique of direct rule, they provide us with (...) two distinct models of democracy. Aesthetic democracy, I argue, in the end falls short as a democratic recuperation of representation. It reduces representation to delegation. Savage democracy proves more fruitful in this respect. It offers a representative view of politics without committing itself to the premises associated with political delegation. (shrink)

Berlin's presidential address to the Aristotelian Society dealt with one important gap in his conceptual wall against totalitarianism. If to be free implied knowledge and the exercise of reason, then the distinction between negative and positive views of liberty might be hard to maintain. Berlin argued that knowledge does not always liberate, which implies that freedom does not always depend on knowledge.