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A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.

— Ian Shapiro Three ways to Be a democrat (1994)

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Democracy

More quotes by Ian Shapiro

An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

The State of Democratic Theory (2003)

Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.

The Flight from Realityin the Human Science (2005)

Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....

The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ian Shapiro (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.