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Article: Democracy
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
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DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRACY.
A literal translation of the Greek
d
ē
mokratia,
democracy means rule of the people, or government by the people. It was understood by the ancients as the direct participation of the citizen body in the government of the political community. The political and social institutions that originally gave rise to democracy both as a form of government and as a tool of political analysis soon died out, but democracy as an idea or an ideal persisted in various permutations through the survival or recovery of classical political thought.
CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT
In the classical and conventional typology of constitutions or forms of government, as in ...