O φιλελευθερισμός και η δημοκρατία σε σταυροδρόμι

Abstract

Neoliberal interpretation of modern democracy that predominates today perceives all questioning of the latter’s liberal components or of the necessary relationship between political and economic freedom as .populism. and promotion of .unfree democracy., that is a total denial of liberal democracy itself. However, according to liberals, there is no necessary link between liberal and democratic ideology. On the contrary, they may differ symmetrically from each other, especially in the justification of coercion: in some cases, democratic ideology may justify a tyrannical majority, just as a liberal ideology may justify a .enlightened. despotism. In reality, however, there is a fundamental asymmetry between them. For democratic ideology, civil liberties are an intrinsic limit of majority decisions, because they are constitutive of citizenship and a condition of each citizen’s distinctiveness. For liberalism, however, since it has abandoned natural law, even negative freedom is a functional component of the spontaneous organic path to general prosperity and, therefore, expendable for the sake of the latter.