Democracy doesn't always work

'It’s a mistake to think that things are a lot worse than they used to be, but it’s hard to deny the conclusion that democracies across Europe look increasingly threadbare. In Defending Politics (OUP, 2012), Matthew Flinders argues that democracy is far more fragile than we realise, and needs to be constantly renewed. Flinders’ central mistake, I think, is to believe it can justify itself, that we should stick with it because it works. But what happens when functional defences no longer hold?



I would say that democracy can’t sustain itself. It needs something from outside, something behind and beneath itself, on which it rests – a civil society captured by a particular vision of the good, and a commitment to human dignity. Of all people, Christians have a stake in that. As Jacques Maritain said, we are ‘children of the same God and redeemed by the same Christ... it is up to us to make every man our neighbour’. Everybody would say that democracy is better than the alternatives, but I’m not sure everyone would know why.

Paul Bickley

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