'This is not a democracy,' Antonio Garc'a-Trevijano denounces in the first pages of this book. To confront the great lie that Europe does have democratic regimes, a lie rooted in people's confounding of the liberties they enjoy with the political freedom that they lack, the author builds a realistic theory of democracy to end the false idea that corruption, state crime, and public immorality are democracy's (undesirable) products and not the natural and inevitable fruits of oligarchic regimes. Thanks to a superb review of the events that mark the history of democracy, the author reveals the obstacles that, from the 17th century English revolution, the United States' War of Independence, and the French Revolution, opposed political freedom, deviating old Europe's democratic possibilities toward the current parties' state. There exist important theories of the state and of constitution, but none that can be called a theory of democracy. Antonio Garc'a-Trevijano's original theory, a modern synthesis of Rousseau's pure democracy and Montesquieu's political freedom, responds to European need for a theory of democracy as a real alternative to the corrupted parties' regime that was engendered by Western pragmatism during the Cold War.

"The significance of this account should be clear. If, as economists frequently assert, proper diagnosis of the disease is a crucial prerequisite to treatment, then the design of appropriate democratic institutions depends critically on a coherent analysis of the way the electoral process works and the perversities to which it is prone. The claim is that the interest-based account incorrectly diagnoses the disease. Accordingly, this book ends with an account of the institutional protections that go with expressive voting."--BOOK JACKET.

The author builds a realistic theory of democracy to end the false idea that corruption, state crime, and public immorality are democracy's (undesirable) products, not the natural and inevitable fruits of oligarchic regimes. Important theories of the state and constitution exist, but none can be called a theory of democracy.

In this concluding volume in the trilogy that begins with On Power and moves to Sovereignty, Bertrand de Jouvenel proposes to remedy a serious deficiency in political science, namely: the lack of agreement on first principles, or 'elements'. The author's concern is with political processes as they actually exist, not as they are conjectured to be in hypothetical models.