Abstract

The debate over democracy in recent years has resumed where Schumpeter left it, on the question whether democracy constitutes a phenomenon in its own right with the full range of conceptual, economic and institutional apparatuses, or whether democracy is rather a method or set of techniques which can be applied in widely different political contexts to regulate the struggle for power. Marx, who wrote a paean to democracy as a unique constitutional form, ’the essence’ of the political, in his Critique of Hegel’s ’Philosophy of Right, turned in his last days to an historical analysis of the emergence of democracy out of primordial society characterized by the rule of family, clan and tribe. Marx’s various reflections throughout his life on the historical emergence of the polis and the way in which the modern world lay concealed in the heart of the ancient community have important implications for the question whether or not we delude ourselves in thinking that democracy as a modern programme bears any relation to that extraordinary epoch in the history of western civilization.