Democratic Revisionism Revisited

This paper will examine recent developments in liberal-democratic theory that represent different reactions to theoretical challenges to postwar democratic revisionism, as well as different reactions to the of contemporary liberal democracy. One sort of response, exemplified by Samuel Huntington and Giovanni Sartori, has been a reassertion of the elitist theory of democracy. A rather different response is represented by Charles Lindblom and Robert Dahl, who have made attempts to reformulate the pluralist theory of democracy. Both groups, the neo-elitists and the revisionist pluralists, acknowledge, either implicitly or explicitly, that the theory and practice of contemporary liberal democracy face a crisis of some sort. Their contrasting assessments suggest profoundly different agendas for the future of liberal-democratic theory.