An Analysis of Henry David Thoreau’s Ideas About Democracy

Abstract

Democracy, in the context of political science and political sociology, is one of the most widely talked about and discussed topics in the academia and in general public. In the contemporary world, democracy went far beyond being a political system and became the criterion for the evaluation of political systems. Such a broad standing of it differentiated expectations from democracy. Even though democracy constitutes the dominant political discourse of the contemporary world, criticisms towards it continue exist in the historical process. While some of these criticisms claim to carry democracy to a more mature level, others attacked democracy asserting that it is a system which produces injustices because of its internal dynamics. This study aims to analyze in the context of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau, who prioritizes all these new quests and interrogations in terms of democracy in terms of the time period he lived and brought criticism against representative democracy.