Today, democracy is what has been called an "essentially contested concept." We project our various pet values onto it, and then are puzzled that it cannot consistently hold them all. Francis Fukuyama, who has argued that democracy is "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution," refuses to admit the Athenian demos to the club, on the grounds that it failed to protect human rights -- notably, the right of its most famous citizen, Socrates, to corrupt the young and invent his own gods. Others are similarly loath to extend the rubric of democracy to present-day Iran, where elections are held under the supervision of a priestly caste, or to the Palestinian entity, on the grounds that the newly elected Hamas government is a terrorist organization.

The United States is governed neither by priests nor by terrorists (notwithstanding some overheated rhetoric to that effect) but by professional politicians -- or "electoral entrepreneurs," as the economist Joseph Schumpeter called them -- who compete for our votes. They are said to represent us, but representation is as vexed a notion as democracy itself. Clearly, politicians do not represent us in the sense of being like us: quite apart from some peculiar psychological characteristics common to the breed, they are older, maler, whiter and lawyers almost to a man. Ideally, though, they represent us in the sense of looking after our interests, the way a guardian represents an infant in law. Unlike an infant, we have an intermittent right to replace them with other politicians if we judge them to be ineffective in this representative role. But, owing to a byzantine division of labor, much of what politicians do is hidden away from the public eye. Moreover, in one of the more devastating theoretical arguments against democracy, Anthony Downs observed that most citizens have no economic incentive to learn enough about what politicians do to vote intelligently. Nearly half of American voters acquiesce in their infantilization by not voting at all.

Should any of this make us yearn for Athenian-style demokratia, where citizens come together on terms of equality to reach consensus about the common good? An innovation in this direction has been proposed by James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford, and Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor. They envisage a new national holiday, called "Deliberation Day," a couple of weeks before each major election. On this day, voters would gather in groups as large as 500 and hash out issues together, like the ancient Athenians. (Unlike the Athenians, participants in Deliberation Day would be paid $150 each.) If this sort of thing sounds appealing, keep in mind that the right to address your fellow citizens is accompanied by the less agreeable duty to heed what they have to say, and that means all of them.

If nothing else, the system we sloppily call democracy provides a way to get rid of a lousy regime without the bother of overthrowing it by force. As for its apparent historic inevitability, that may owe largely to the difficulty of finding any other source of legitimacy besides "the people." "Virtue"? That went out with Plato. "Embodying the national spirit" became unfashionable with Hitler, as did "expressing the will of the proletariat" with Stalin. True, some rulers continue to imagine that they were chosen by God. But almost no one takes that idea seriously anymore.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-23-06 Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.