POLS 3500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: John Stuart Mill
18 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Dahl gives us 4 conceptions of democracy. Demos are the citizens or the people. Polis is the state, the community, city. Polity is the group of people who are citizens. Dahl knows that the purpose of the polis was to guide virtuous citizens. The point of a city was to encourage virtue individually. The demos isn"t all the people such as the slaves. They were all required to participate in the assembly. All administrative functions were elected by lot; you get picked by chance rather than appealing to the people. The demos has to be relatively small, 40,000 was a lot of people. Inherent limits: the groups must be small, selective citizenship (interests are left out), need to be autonomous, no idea of rights. Reality didn"t live up to the ideal (politics as usual) Republican model: people are social and political animals; they have to live together to form themselves into good citizens.
