What Is Democracy? Modern Transformations and Democratic Futures

10/6/2025

Part 2 of 2: From liberal evolution to decolonial possibility

In the first part of this exploration, we traced democracy’s ancient foundations, from Athenian assemblies to Pacific governance systems, from Confucian virtue politics to the collision between Indigenous sovereignty and European colonial states. We observed how different societies addressed the fundamental question of political authority in radically distinct ways.

But the story doesn’t end with colonial contact. The 19th and 20th centuries brought new challenges to democratic thought, new critiques of state power, and ultimately, new possibilities for what democratic governance might become.

The collision between different constitutional traditions didn’t result in a simple victory for one side. Instead, it created ongoing tensions that continue to shape contemporary political life. As we’ll see, the question “What is democracy?” becomes even more complex and more urgent in the modern era.

Mill and the Educated Electorate (Mid-19th Century)

By the time John Stuart Mill wrote, democracy had gained momentum, but it still intimidated the elite. What if the masses made bad choices? What if they voted selfishly? Mill attempted to address this by redefining democracy as a moral project.

He argued that participation in public life would improve people: that democracy should make citizens more thoughtful, rational, and tolerant (Mill, 1861/1991). Education wasn’t just a prerequisite for voting; it was the purpose of voting.

The state, for Mill, was a kind of national school, not just an enforcer of laws, but a developer of character. But like Locke, Mill believed not everyone should have the same influence. He suggested plural voting: more votes for the educated, fewer for the rest.

So again, we see a restricted democracy: open in form, stratified in function.

And we see the modern liberal state emerging as a tutor, not just a referee.

Marx and the State as Class Power

Then Karl Marx walks in and tears up the syllabus.

He didn’t see the state as a moral institution. He saw it as an apparatus of domination. For Marx, the liberal state was a mask worn by the ruling class: a structure that claimed neutrality but upheld exploitation (Marx, 1844/2000).

Elections didn’t fool him. Rights didn’t impress him. What mattered was ownership of the means of production. Until that changed, democracy was theatre.

While Mill saw the state as a tool for uplift, Marx viewed it as a tool for repression.

This is where democracy fractures. One path leads to reformist gradualism: votes, rights, schools. The other to revolutionary rupture: strikes, expropriation, collapse.

Weber and the Iron Cage

If Marx exposed the state’s economic foundations, Max Weber exposed its operating system.

Weber accepted that modern states had won the right to rule. However, he worried about how they had done it. For him, the defining feature of the modern state was its bureaucracy, characterised by rule by rational–legal authority, extensive paperwork, hierarchy, and procedure (Weber, 1919/2004).

Democracy in the world was increasingly reduced to elections every few years, while the real decisions were made by unelected administrators, experts, and systems.

Weber called this the “iron cage”: a world governed not by kings or gods, but by forms and processes no one could escape.

The state became a machine, and citizens became files.

Arendt and the Return to Action

Then Hannah Arendt offered a counterweight.

She argued that politics isn’t administration. It’s not the economy or the law. It’s the space between people, where we speak, act, and begin again, and whether that acting is moral and ethical (Arendt, 1958/1998).

The state, in Arendt’s view, is always in danger of smothering politics: of replacing action with procedure, and spontaneity with order. She defended revolutionary councils and citizen assemblies as sites of real democratic life. Voting wasn’t enough. Presence and engagement mattered.

Where Weber saw the state as a structure, Arendt saw it as a stage, or perhaps, as a trap.

Rawls and the Architecture of Fairness (1970s)

After the wars, after the terror, after the bureaucracies, John Rawls stepped forward with a clean model.

Imagine, he said, that we don’t know who we’ll be: our class, gender, race, ability, position. From behind this veil of ignorance, what kind of political system would we choose?

His answer: a constitutional democracy based on fairness. One that guarantees equal liberty, secures the greatest benefit for the least advantaged, and offers every citizen a fair chance (Rawls, 1971/1999).

The state, in Rawls’s model, is the architect of justice. It sets the rules, protects the floor, and ensures that no one falls too far behind.

It’s elegant. It’s hopeful.

But it’s also imagined outside of history.

Colonialism is absent. Enclosure is absent. The Treaty is absent. Whiteness is unmarked. Power is presumed to be fixable, not entangled.

What Rawls gave us was a democracy that works, but only if you forget how the world got here.

Feminist and Decolonial Cracks

That forgetting didn’t last long.

Iris Marion Young called out the lie of equal citizenship. Real justice, she argued, required not sameness but recognition of difference, of structural inequality, of social position (Young, 1990).

Carol Pateman showed that the so-called social contract had always rested on a sexual contract: subordinating women through marriage, family, and exclusion from public life (Pateman, 1988).

James Tully revealed that liberal constitutionalism was never universal. It was a system built to manage diversity, not embrace it. Indigenous peoples, he argued, were coerced into agreements written in a language not their own (Tully, 1995).

These thinkers didn’t just revise Rawls. They refused his starting point.

They reminded us that democracy, as practised in the West, was never neutral. It was never universal. And the state, far from being an impartial architect, was a structure of ongoing colonisation, gendered control, and epistemic dominance.

O’Neill and the Ethics of Justification

Onora O’Neill took that challenge seriously.

Instead of abstract consent, she focused on real legitimacy. For a state to be just, she argued, it must act in ways that people can reasonably accept—even if they disagree. That means justification, transparency, and above all, trustworthiness (O’Neill, 2002).

The state is no longer justified by force (Hobbes), by property (Locke), or even by consensus (Rawls). It must be answerable.

Democracy, in O’Neill’s framing, isn’t about designing the perfect system. It’s about being able to ask, why this rule? Who benefits? Who decides?

And then expecting a good answer.

Mouffe, Honig, and the Agonistic Turn

By the 2000s, even justification wasn’t enough.

Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig both argue that democracy is not about consensus. It’s about permanent disagreement.

Mouffe calls this agonistic pluralism: a system where conflict is inevitable, and where democratic institutions exist not to eliminate it but to contain and channel it without violence (Mouffe, 2000).

Honig, meanwhile, says democratic life is always haunted by the “foreign founder”: the outsider, the excluded, the figure whose presence destabilises the story (Honig, 1993). That’s not a flaw. It’s the very condition of politics.

In this model, the state is no longer neutral. It’s a site of struggle.

Democracy isn’t a tidy table. It’s a noisy room where no one gets the last word.

Back to the Pacific

And while these debates circled in the West, the great houses of the Pacific continued to stand.

Rangatiratanga was never about majority rule. It was never about procedural fairness. It was, and is, about relationships, accountability, presence, and consent grounded in whakapapa. It is neither a remnant nor a revival; it is a living constitutional tradition.

Māori democracy, and Pacific governance more broadly, are not add-ons. They are parallel systems of legitimacy, suppressed but not broken. Their resurgence is not a return to tradition. Rather, it is a reassertion of constitutional order that predates the colonial state.

The Treaty of Waitangi wasn’t just a historical document. It was an attempt to create a constitutional framework that could hold space for both Indigenous sovereignty and settler governance. That it was systematically undermined by colonial policy doesn’t negate its constitutional significance: it reveals the ongoing tension between different models of political authority.

Today, as Māori political movements reassert tino rangatiratanga, they’re not asking to be included in someone else’s democracy. They’re asserting their own democratic traditions and demanding recognition of parallel sovereignty.

This isn’t separatism. It’s constitutional pluralism. Said differently, the recognition that multiple systems of legitimate authority can coexist within the same territory.

So What Is Democracy? And What Is the State?

They are not settled. They are not fixed. They are contested spaces of meaning and structure.

Democracy is not just a method. It is a question: How should we rule ourselves? And that question has no single answer.

The state is not just a machine. It is an argument made material: about whose voices count, whose histories are remembered, and who decides.

We are still in that argument.

The conversation I had that triggered this exploration, about what counts as “participatory democracy”, wasn’t really about institutional design. It was about deeper questions of political authority, cultural recognition, and constitutional legitimacy.

When someone calls representative government with consultation “participatory democracy,” they’re not just mislabeling. They’re revealing an assumption that democracy has a settled form, that participation can be managed and contained, that the state is neutral ground where different interests compete on equal terms.

But as we’ve seen across this historical survey, none of that is true.

Democracy has always been plural. The state has always been contested. And participation has always been about more than voting: it’s about presence, relationship, accountability, and the ongoing negotiation of collective life.

In Aotearoa today, we’re living through a moment of constitutional reckoning.

The question isn’t whether we’ll have democracy: it’s what kind of democracy we’ll have, and whose constitutional traditions will be recognised as legitimate.

The Pacific offers us models of governance based on relationship rather than representation, on presence rather than procedure, on accountability to place and people rather than abstract rights and universal principles.

These aren’t romantic alternatives to modern politics. They’re sophisticated constitutional systems that have governed complex societies for centuries. They offer practical wisdom on how to make collective decisions, hold leaders accountable, and maintain political legitimacy across generations.

The future of democracy, here and elsewhere, may depend on our ability to learn from these traditions, to create hybrid systems that honour multiple constitutional logics, and to resist the flattening that reduces all political life to elections and expertise.

Democracy is not a destination. It’s a practice. And like all practices, it can be done well or badly, with wisdom or foolishness, with inclusion or exclusion.

The question is not what democracy is. The question is what democracy could become if we work together on it.

And that question remains beautifully, urgently, open.

References:

Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1958)

Honig, B. (1993). Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Cornell University Press.

Marx, K. (2000). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 75–112). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1844)

Mill, J. S. (1991). Considerations on representative government. In J. Gray (Ed.), On Liberty and Other Essays (pp. 203–467). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1861)

Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. Verso.

O’Neill, O. (2002). Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics. Cambridge University Press.

Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press.

Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Rev. ed.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1971)

Tully, J. (1995). Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge University Press.

Weber, M. (2004). Politics as a vocation. In D. Owen & T. Strong (Eds.), The Vocation Lectures (pp. 32–94). Hackett Publishing. (Original lecture 1919)

Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press.