This is a FACSIMILE REPRINT of an exceedingly difficult book to find.
1982 edition printed in 2025.
Please allow two weeks for the book to be delivered.
101 pages / 6" x 9"
Excerpt:
DEMOCRACY, in the correct, Jeffersonian sense of that word, still exerts a great influence over the thinking of our contemporaries, although no example of it in practice can be found in the world today. It is a theory that was first formulated in the democratic states of ancient Greece and has never been entirely forgotten since that time. It engendered the Mediaeval aphorism,vox populi, vox Dei, which, so far as I know, was first quoted by Alciun, who ridicules it; and it reappears in hundreds of modern writers who champion, in one form or another, the concept of majority rule. Although now reduced to a mere theory, it still has charms and evokes some odd tendencies in persons who are intelligent enough to discriminate between democracy and the common practice of running herds of biped cattle through polling places and counting their noses.
‘Populists’ must remember, first of all, that Jeffersonian democracy was not intended for Timbuktoo, Fiji, or Erewhon. It was designed for the thirteen colonies that had just won their independence–for a specific people in an historically unique situation.
