In Erasmus's native Europe, meanwhile, assertive Muslim minorities are straining, though not so far exhausting, the capacity of democracy to deal with new social realities.
Doubts about the capacity of democracy to deliver on its promises have deepened as technology has enabled people everywhere to see what others have and they do not, feeding dissatisfaction and fueling anger.
Those veterinarians' minds are the excess capacity of democracy.
Indeed, this fact makes it such that the principles of democratic self-rule and the criteria of public agreement cannot be asserted simply as the proper norms for all social and political institutions, and this seems ideally suited to understanding how globalization limits the capacity of democracy to entrench itself.
Your article (Human rights groups feel chill as country after country clamps down on their work, 27 August) reports that one factor weakening the capacity of western democracies like the UK to support human rights NGOs abroad is our own anti-terrorist measures.
Like tech innovators in Silicon Valley, citizens who want to help build a 21st Congress can start by thinking about how technology can tap the excess capacity of our democracy.
As Ferris recognizes, the seemingly irresistible spread of modern principles of liberty derives in large measure from the capacity of modern industrial democracies to deliver the goods in terms of general prosperity, health and diversion.
Colleges and universities need to replenish their capacity to defend the intellectual life of democracies.
The outcomes of democracies, namely the capacity to produce decisions, depend on the kind of institutions and procedures that encapsulate the struggle for power between competing elites.
In his essay "The Original Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule" (Constellations 2008) Ober analyzes the roots of "democracy," demos, whole people, and kratia, power.
