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Abstract

Liberal democracy is in crisis: “But ... do we know what it is?” “The confusion of terms”, claims Helena Rosenblatt, “impairs liberals’ understanding of their own principles and weakens their politics”, which “their opponents easily exploit the verbal ambiguities” – which is why it’s “high time that we clarify what the term ‘liberal democracy’ means and what it stands for”.1 What liberal democracy stands for depends on what we mean by asking that question, and that can be a number of things. “What exactly do we mean by liberal democracy?” What do we really mean by “liberal democracy”? The answers to these questions remain inseparable from how one responds to other, equally basic ones: What are the functions of liberal democracy? What are the dispositions of liberal democracy? How do liberal democracies function, in reality? What could be the functions of liberal democracies, possibly? That is increasingly hard to say. The form of government that, (according to Fareed Zakaria’s seminal article)2 appeared to require nothing more than respect for fundamental liberties, separation of powers and free and fair elections, has over the course of next two decades mutated into “a complicated interaction between [...] political competition, stable institutions of state, vibrant organs of civil society, meaningful political intermediaries”, which “reinforces the democratic virtues of popular sovereignty”, in which “the majority, either directly or through representative bodies,