Democracy: the critical view

The article is devoted to the investigation of the problems and perspectives of democracy as the form of organization of the social and political existence in general and to the critical view on the nature and essence of democracy in particular. The authors say that the hard situation in some democratic states may be the result of some problems, which occur in the process of the democratic state building. It was noted that different shortcomings of the democracy became visible thousands years ago, in Ancient Greece, in poleis, and were described in the works of the ancient philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero, who wrote that democracy led to the chaos, riots and tyranny. It was found that democracy may be organically combined with the slave system, cruel rule, racism and contempt for human dignity. It was noted that the experience of the Ancient Greek poleis shows that under the democratic system only few percent of people really take part in the rule of the state, so, in fact, democracy is not the rule of people, but only some model (scheme) of the involvement of citizens in the exercise of power, and humanism, equality, freedom, respect of the human dignity as well as the achievement of the common welfare are not its characteristic features. It was said that ideas of the popular sovereignty and democracy are the trends of the bourgeois era, which were realized only in the XVIII century. On the other hand, the state and authority appeared few thousand years earlier, in the Ancient world, so democracy and popular sovereignty has no any relation to the nature of state and power. At the same time, democracy is the method of the organization of the authority after the termination of the traditions of statehood and of the political elite in the period of the bourgeois revolutions, which, in fact, leads to the rule of the rich or the degeneration of aristocratic rule into an oligarchy. It was found that ideas of democracy (the electability and changeability of power, the declaration of the people as its source, the separation and limitation of power, excessive freedom, etc.) directly contradict the main principles of the state sovereignty, described by J. Bodin, such as the supremacy, absoluteness, permanence, unity and indivisibility of state power, so it may be said that democracy undermines the fundamentals of statehood and make danger to the social welfare and order. It was underlined that excessive democracy may weaken the state. The authors came to the conclusion that, factually, democracy is not always suitable for the realization of its idealistic goals, such as election of the best representatives of society and making of the right decisions thanks to the involvement of the people into the management of the state.