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Carl Becker Essay

Satisfactory Essays

Carl Becker
“Ideal Democracy”
QUESTIONS FOR CRITICAL READING
1. Becker says freedom of thought and the competition of diverse opinions will reveal the truth. How important is such freedom of thought and diversity for the survival of a democracy?
When stating “freedom of thought”, Becker implies that the citizens will use their own thoughts to make rational decisions based on what they feel is right. Citizens are known for being able to be herded like cattle, basing their most important decisions on popular societal sway. Independent thought encourages the people to think for themselves. When Becker says that “the competition of diverse opinions will reveal the truth”, I believe that he means that because so many times we spend so much …show more content…

Democracy, like liberty or science or progress, is a word with which we are all so familiar tht we rarely take the trouble to ask what we mean by it.” “In the contrary, it is a word which connotes different things to different people, a kind of conceptual Gladstone bag which, with a little manipulation, can be made to accommodate almost any collection of social facts we may wish to carry about in it.”
It brings democracy into question because if define the part we understand as a government “for the people, by the people” but do not understand anything further than that, how are we to bring the concept of democracy to life?
5. In paragraph 3, Becker talks about “varieties” of democracies, includ¬ing fascist Germany and the Soviet “regime of Stalin.” These gov¬ernments seem to have been supported by a majority of their citizens. Were they then true democracies?
In a sense they were if you define democracy as merely “a government for the people, by the people.” In this context, then I do believe that they were, indeed, democracies because they supported the wishes of the citizens. It is when the governments begin to support their own agendas over those of their peoples, that they begin to convert themselves into another form of government.
6. How true is it that “virtually all forms of government are democratic, since virtually all

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