Caution: A long article and not light reading......It was not always so. The greatest philosophers of antiquity—Plato and Aristotle—both considered democracy a rather inferior form of political life. Plato has Socrates claim that democratic citizens are dominated by licentious passion rather than reason: “they call insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage”? (Republic 560e). He says that it is the sort of regime favoured by children and women—i.e. those in whom reason is weak (Republic 557c). Aristotle distinguishes between good forms of government, in which the rulers have the common good of the whole city as their goal, and bad ones, in which they rule for their own private interests. He gives the name “democracy”? to one of the bad regimes: that in which the poor rule for the private advantage of their own class (Politics 1279a-b). In the Christian Middle Ages monarchy rather than democracy was the most common form of government, and to many medieval thinkers this seemed perfectly reasonable.[1]
http://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/ ... nostalgia/