Origins and meaning of democracy

I haven't read Jacques Maritain on democracy, so I don't know whether Mr Paul Kokoski (The Sunday Times, January 9) quotes him correctly or not. In any case neither of them has the right to distort "human history", as Mr Kokoski does.

Mr Kokoski (or Maritain) claims that democracy "emerged in human history as a temporal expression of evangelical inspiration and as such, in a historical rather than a dogmatic sense, is closely linked to Christianity, the foundation of which is Catholicism." This is nonsense.

As any of our sixth form students knows, democracy emerged in classical Greece, it was a direct democracy, it was the creation of the Athenian polis, and its principles were declared by Pericles.

The roots of our modern representative democracy are traceable to the 18th century and more specifically to the Enlightenment, which was, basically a secular movement which promoted the 'rights of man' (sic). It was promoted by philosophers like John Locke, Rousseau, Tom Paine, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and strengthened by the American Constitution in the teeth of Catholic opposition.

Voicing the fear that democracy can become a "tyranny of the majority", thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Toqueville insisted that every democracy should protect its minorities by guaranteeing them certain feedom rights, notably the rights to freedom of belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. In this way our Western democracies became liberal democracies of the 'representative' rather than the 'direct'species.

At the heart of the notion of the liberal democracy lie the principles of pluralism and the neutrality of the state in matters of belief and private morality. The meaning of democracy has been corrupted several times, however, by autocrats and by totalitarian regimes who have all had one thing in common; a belief in the "objective dimension of goodness and value", their definition of it, and in the notion of a "common good", as long as they defined it themselves.

Lenin called for a democracy that accepts a plurality of ideas but within a 'single will', that 'will' in his case being Communism. Mr Kokoski makes the same call, only his 'single will' would be a national religion. No political regime, however, except a totalitarian one, "needs to be motivated by absolute values". And this is where Mr Kokoski's heart really lies. His contempt towards the decisions of the ballot box, for instance (how is "the democratic search for the common good" to be achieved if not through the ballot box?), show where his thoughts lie.