The socialist dimensions of democracy --with comments on the myth of the bourgeoisie and democratic politics

Barrington Moore＇s ＂No bourgeoisie, no democracy＂ made democracy a monopoly of the bourgeoisie. Today, this has evolved into Huntington＇s thesis that the middle class has brought with it democracy. Proceeding from the relationship between the history of the socialist movement and comparative institutional change, we find that democracy has experienced a process of development involving the combination of positive and negative, from its original purpose of realizing majority rule in which everyone is equal to a tool for protecting the property rights of the minority, viz. the bourgeoisie, and thence to a tool for the mass of the people to realize equal rights today. In the course of its development, the main contribution of the bourgeoisie has been constitution-building and elite democracy, while the advent of mass democracy should be attributed to the workers＇ movement with the lower classes as its main force and to the struggles of other non-bourgeois strata. To gain a renewed awareness of the socialist attribute of democracy on the basis of an examination of the historical course of democracy helps us question the universality of a social science shaped by particular experiences.