Abstract
The text is a review essay on the book Models and Theories of Democracy by political scientist Marián Sekerák (CDK, 2021). It praises the book for its comprehensive yet readable analysis of theoretical insights into democracy, particularly from the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century.
The essay sees the book as having two main halves. Its opening and closing chapters deal with the basic definition of the concept of democracy and with the prerequisites, crises and contemporary challenges of democracy.
The middle part of the book is then a coherent presentation of the different major models of democracy: procedural, participatory, deliberative, epistemic and radical. Based on a reading of particular chapters of the book, the essay speculates about whether political theory is overly optimistic in its view of the future of democracy.
Indeed, as we can see from a more sociological perspective, the very prerequisites of democracy are in crisis: equality (threatened by oligarchization) or rationality (threatened nowadays mainly by social acceleration). In the context of the major crises of our time (economic, climatic), the essay notes the strengthening of material elements of the rule of law as opposed to formal democracy.
It sees the conflict between the demands of popular sovereignty and citizen participation on the one hand and the demands of "expert authorities of responsibility" on the other as the fundamental conflict of the future.