Forgotten Freedom: Misrepresentation of Democracy
The ways in which democratic processes are analyzed within many academic circles are fundamentally flawed.
Across nearly all of the academic departments around the world, questions of democracy are consistently brought up. These questions tend to focus on the elements that create democracy — particularly liberal democracy, which has its roots in the ideas and conceptions put forth by English philosophers such as John Locke. As such, the question of property also tends to find itself within the question of democracy.
Typically, an introductory political science class will feature the works of bourgeois scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington and others who specialize in the perceived transition from authoritarian leadership (as per liberal understandings of the term) towards their supposedly ‘inevitable’ democratization. Of course, democratization in this context solely refers to the adopting of liberal democratic political systems and structures which, perhaps strategically, leave out all other forms of the political system.
Interestingly enough, democracy studies predominantly deals with a false dichotomous approach towards specific states, namely focusing on the aforementioned idea of “authority” versus “democracy”. Some prefer to expand…
