DEMOCRACY: n. “government by the people”
The Greeks gave us demokratia. It combines two Greek terms, demos (“common people”) and kratos (“rule”). In simple terms, “rule by the common people.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites its first appearance in a thirteenth-century translation of Aristotle’s Politics.
The OED offers as its first definition, “that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them or by officers elected by them. In modern use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary difference of rank or...
is a retired secondary teacher of English and philosophy. For forty years he challenged students to dive deep into the classics of the Western canon, to think and write analytically, and to find the cultural constants reflected throughout that literature, art, and thought.
Get Salvo in your inbox! This article originally appeared in Salvo, Issue #64, Spring 2023 Copyright © 2024 Salvo | www.salvomag.com https://salvomag.com/article/salvo64/on-demagogracy
