THREE PARADOXES OF THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The article analyzes three paradoxes of the theory of democracy, which testify to the crisis of this theory. The reasons for the aggravated paradoxical vision of democracy can be considered both contradictions in the very theory of democracy and contradictions in the political practice of democratic states. In accordance with the proposed author's approach to the analysis of the paradoxes of the theory of democracy, attention should be focused on the key problem for the social form of existence, the problem of the relationship between freedom, equality, and justice. The social exists as the intersection of the natural (necessary) and the conscious (free). Interests as motivators of behavior were placed in this "pause". The "superstructure" in the form of collective consciousness produces values ​​as regulators of behavior. And the balance of interests and values ​​becomes the main social problem, solved on the basis of the ratio of freedom and equality, which is assessed as fair or unfair. The latter is transferred to the specific embodiment of a just or unjust order in the person of the state. The socialist value of the state priority of "workers' equality" was devalued in the early 90s of the 20th century due to the obvious dissonance between the theory and practice of equality and the collapse of the state order that represented this value - the USSR. Therefore, in the modern world, democratic systems balance on a fluid balance of freedom and order in the form of neo-liberal or neo-conservative state policies. But the desovereignization of the state postulated in D. Rodrik's paradox, confirmed by other researchers, casts doubt on the effectiveness of this policy in the modern world. In order to comprehend the paradoxes of the theory of democracy, the author submits the following statements for consideration: 1. Democracy and the state are coexisting forms of social organization that can temporarily intersect and thus create the illusion of their consistent combination. The basis of this illusion was laid by the European interpretation of the direct democracy of antiquity. 2. Under the conditions of representative democracy, the illusion of a consistent combination of democracy and the state is stimulated through the propaganda mechanism of state self-identification of the population, based on a person's tendency to self-deceive and on the ideologies encouraged by the state that are relevant in a particular social system: nationalism, patriotism, socialism, liberalism, the rule of law. 3. It is necessary to recognize the existence in the conditions of a representative democracy of a “political class” that has a special economic and psychological motivation for behavior and therefore is interested in preserving and maintaining a special type of status (as a democratic variety of class) inequality, including through the propaganda of the ideological dogma of democracy.