The Arguments Against Democracy

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Rana Mitter and guests discuss the arguments against democracy. Churchill famously commented that 'democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. Yet China has grown to be the world's second biggest economy under a non-democratic system, and until just a few decades ago, even the liberal west put heavy restrictions on who could vote. Plato opposed it, and his arguments begin a long tradition of principled objection to the idea of rule by the people, advanced by philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt. Do thinkers like these make a case that could prompt us to return to first principles and rethink whether democracy really works? And should democracy be able to find space in the public sphere for those who argue against it? We test Free Thinking to its limits by looking at the alternatives to our own political system.