While democracy is heralded as something of a panacea it actually is simply a psychological enforcement device for spontaneous collaboration, that is, the democratic impulse is an adaptively genetically given propensity of the human organism. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx went so far as to say that democracy was superfluous. Hence, in a true dictatorship of the proletariat everybody is on the same page so there is no need for the mechanisms of democracy to facilitate the common good, but Marx hastens to add that it can't hurt, during the interregnum, to have recourse to such democratic institutions. One of the first progenitors of this theory, Francis Bacon (New Atlantis 1626), preceded Marx by 222 years. The idea was that parliaments would operate as debating societies in which representatives would iron out their disagreements and because of their common complementarity of expectations the debaters would inevitably reach homeostasis.. C.W. Mills posited much the same conceptual scheme in White Collar (1951) in which he theorized that informed publics were the guarantors of man's natural inclination to collectivism. For because of man's common communal endowment the significance of an actor's actions cannot be evaluated solely in terms of his personal values independently of the relational system in which he is implicated. His action orientations are selections he makes among normative alternatives which invariably impinge on the interests of the other actors with whom he interacts, and of the collectivities to which he belongs. His responsibility for these other and collectivity defined interests present moral problems. Problems pertaining to one's responsibility for the interests of a community. The moral aspect thus defines the institutional limits of permissiveness for action.
While democracy is heralded as something of a panacea it actually is simply a psychological enforcement device for spontaneous collaboration, that is, the democratic impulse is an adaptively genetically given propensity of the human organism. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx went so far as to say that democracy was superfluous. Hence, in a true dictatorship of the proletariat everybody is on the same page so there is no need for the mechanisms of democracy to facilitate the common good, but Marx hastens to add that it can't hurt, during the interregnum, to have recourse to such democratic institutions. One of the first progenitors of this theory, Francis Bacon (New Atlantis 1626), preceded Marx by 222 years. The idea was that parliaments would operate as debating societies in which representatives would iron out their disagreements and because of their common complementarity of expectations the debaters would inevitably reach homeostasis.. C.W. Mills posited much the same conceptual scheme in White Collar (1951) in which he theorized that informed publics were the guarantors of man's natural inclination to collectivism. For because of man's common communal endowment the significance of an actor's actions cannot be evaluated solely in terms of his personal values independently of the relational system in which he is implicated. His action orientations are selections he makes among normative alternatives which invariably impinge on the interests of the other actors with whom he interacts, and of the collectivities to which he belongs. His responsibility for these other and collectivity defined interests present moral problems. Problems pertaining to one's responsibility for the interests of a community. The moral aspect thus defines the institutional limits of permissiveness for action.