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...across Europe, forms of government representing radical challenges to the status quo emerged. Leading thinkers lent their support to fascism and communism, in part because these new forms promised to solve economic and social problems that parliamentary governments could not.
But with World War II the range of political legitimacy began to narrow dramatically. Fascism was defeated on the battlefield and also discredited as morally respectable form of politics. The subsequent founding of the United Nations initiated the development of universal norms of governance. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specified that "the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government" and that "this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage." For the first time in history, the nations of the world officially endorsed republicanism as the sole source of political legitimacy.
To be sure, this norm has often served to cloak authoritarian regimes--some oxymoronic (e.g., Indonesian President Sukarno's "guided democracy"), others almost laughably hypocritical (e.g., the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"). Nonetheless, these examples show that governments, however repressive, now feel compelled to justify themselves in republican terms.
It is not surprising then that this development changed political theory as well. At one time, theorists had weighed the relative merits of government by the One, Few, or Many--or, in more contemporary terms, the rule of the Leader or the vanguard party versus democratic elections. But after World War II, debates about political theory focused increasingly instead on differences among forms of democracy--elitist versus populist, representative versus direct, consensus driven versus agonistic, deliberative versus bargaining based, substantive versus procedural.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also made it clear that legitimate governments are not only democratic in form but also limited in scope. Not...
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On history in the twentieth century.(Letter to the editor), June 22, 2006
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