Positive review and analysis of Robert A. Dahl’s book on the nature and characteristics of a democracy.
This paper highlights the main points in Robert A. Dahl’s book on what defines a democracy. The paper looks at Dahl’s simple but effective method of explaining democracy, discusses Dahl’s approach to explaining democracy and the criteria he uses to define it, and gives an overview of Dahl’s comments on market capitalism and market capitalism’s place in a democracy. The paper concludes with a positive assessment of Dahl’s book and suggests that it is highly readable and informative.
The term, democracy, means many things in popular discourse. One has only to turn on the television to hear presidential speeches, public discussion, or news commentators espousing its virtues??goodness,? ?virtue,? and ?liberty,? almost as if the term has become synonymous with freedom itself. In fact this trend is becoming so prevalent, that I find myself checking with each new release of Microsoft Word, if the term democracy might yield freedom in its thesaurus.