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Liberalism has provided both a necessary basis for modern democracy and also a constraint upon it. This duality makes a democratic critique of liberalism both imperative and also problematical, in so far as it threatens the conditions of liberal democracy itself. Two of these conditions are examined – the institution of representation and the principle of the limited state – to discover what limits they might impose on the justifiable ambitions of democratizers, to extend political participation on the one hand, and the social agenda for democratization on the other.
David Beetham (Sat,) studied this question.