A couple of hundred years ago, back at the time when Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna had reestablished absolutism across Europe, nobody would have been able to predict the political map of the world today, where absolute monarchies have been mostly wiped out and replaced by representative democracies. In these last two hundred years the political system of the world has changed dramatically in favour of a word that today means everything to politics: Democracy. No other word had ever before been perverted and overused as much as this one, especially at the time of describing what some claim isn’t democratic. A noun described as democratic seems to be impossible to improve, and all countries in the world claim to be such a thing, though not always appropriately.

Despite democracy being all over the place, we often forget what it means after all, which is what makes the word so wrongly used all the time. Democracy is a Greek word meaning “government of the people”, which in plain English can be explained as a government that rules basing itself on the will of it’s citizens. That will, is what’s referred to as the “democratic mandate” which we’ll discuss later on.

According to this just provided definition, we can’t really say that any of the countries today is governed as a pure democracy, but instead this widespread political model is named a “representative democracy”, which can be understood as a government of the elected representatives of the people. These representatives are in charge of the law-making, tax-collecting, country-governing, crime-judging, and resource-administrating business of the state, in an attempt of modifying a pure democracy utopia into a more functional system.

The representative democracy we live in today is the sum of centuries of development, combining many different philosophical principles and economic structures in an attempt to achieve a better political system than any other, if not a perfect one, though that later part hasn’t been quite successful. This giant ideological cocktail that our representative democracy is has blurred what’s the point of it. We constantly read and hear about how the government’s policy is wrong, or that it spends money where it shouldn’t, or how antidemocratic some laws are, yet we find ourselves unable to judge whether policies have been wrong, or we just don’t agree with the. Therefore, what’s a state supposed to do?

As a historical approach to the question, observing how peoples have organised throughout history and how states have come to be, we can see how the first forms of social organization were motivated by war and agriculture, or in other words, security and economical purposes. Some historians argue that raids might have pushed for the formation of large, organised settlements able to defend themselves more effectively, whilst others believe that agriculture, with it’s need for an organised, sedentary population and food surplus might have been the origin of cities and settlements. Either way, we can conclude that states and governments get their power and authority from their ability to provide protection, either from other humans as in war and crime, or from other threats, such as the access to food and water, natural disasters, epidemics, etc. This historical explanation is pretty tidy, and enforces the arguments of most conservative policy, that focuses on order and safety above other ideals such as individual freedom.

The philosophical approach to the question, however, is much more diverse and open to debate than the historical one. Philosophers have been debating about the nature of politics and the way to organise ourselves for a long time, and none of them seems to have provided us with a perfect system. In fact, most ancient Greek philosophers, notably Plato and Aristotle, saw in democracy the doom of it’s peoples, which is quite the opposite from what people thinks today. This is not unjustified, as the democracy in ancient Athens was notoriously corrupt, which is nothing we can say of today’s one, huh?

Aside from their views on alternative political models, Plato and Aristotle had different views on what was the aim for a state, upon which they based their utopian systems. Plato believed that we were meant to seek what’s good for the group, either the state or humanity itself, thus putting away all individual pleasure that distracted us from the general profit. Aristotle, on the other hand, argued that a state is supposed to benefit its citizens, and not necessarily the group as a whole, but as a collection of individuals. This debate between the benefit of the group as a whole and the benefit of it’s members is the basis of political philosophy and we can find successful examples in history for both principles.

Despite both ways of understanding the problem have been a matter of debate for a long time, the representative democracy in which we live in today, is more of an Aristotelian idea, rather than a Platonic one. The theoretical basis for our system was begun in the 18th century during the Enlightenment era, when most of it’s principles were established, such as the division of powers, by Montesquieu, or the social contract, by Rousseau. In fact, Rousseau’s social contract, one of the key foundations of representative democracy, is more of a pursuit of the benefit of the general public, rather than of the group as a whole.

It is from those Aristotelian principles and their development by the Enlightenment thinkers that our system was established as a theoretical entity, conceived as a government whose legitimacy and authority depends on popular approval, therefore becoming a representative of the general will. This general will is sovereign above anything else, and is the source of all power in society. This implies that a government’s policy is only legitimate if it’s backed up by popular approval, regardless of the outcome of it, or it’s reason to be.

Take, for instance, a nation and a period of time that has been the centre of much debate on the limits of what can democracy allow: Nazi Germany. Nazism was, indisputably, an ideology against humanity, including everything we associate with the lack of human rights, such as racism, brutal violence, oppression, and so on, and yet, the Nazi party won a democratic election. They didn’t take power backed by the strength of an army or by the fear of divine rage, but backed by millions of Germans that believed them to be the solution to their problems. Hitler’s government had, in essence, the democratic mandate to do what he was chosen for, which in this case was all the Nazi party program, though less than a decade later, even the most convinced German voters were persuaded they hadn’t made a particularly good choice.

Nazi Germany, proved that popular will is free to choose not to be free, which is quite a paradox, and even more ironically, western democracies waged war on them to force Germany to become a free country. This forces us to ask ourselves what are the limits of not only democracy but freedom itself, and what is the aim of a democratic government. Plato’s ideas fail in the real world by dismissing individual interests, and Aristotle’s fail at competing nations with a more centralised and organised power that can achieve results. Even democracy can turn itself off, as 1930’s Germany proved, leaving the democratic mandate in an uncomfortable situation. Demagogy and populism are an other good example of the limitations of the democratic mandate. Are fantastic promises that attract the masses a flaw of the general will, or the whole point of it?

In the end, we can’t tell there is no correct answer to the question of how we should organise ourselves. Perhaps it’s up to us and our reasoning to find what we believe to be the right way to do it, whether others agree with us or not. In fact, democracy may be all about the diversity of opinions on the subject, and it’s aim to establish a state that governs itself in the way the general will wants it to, even if the will of the people is not to be sovereign. Therefore, the next time we read about the government spending it’s money in something it shouldn’t we must ask ourselves what do we expect our government to do, and then we will be able to judge it from a cleaner perspective.