Comment on Møller: The Importance of Equality

In: Journal of democracy, Band 26, Heft 3, S. 124-128

Abstract

According to Jørgen Møller, democracy was not a latecomer on the European scene; it emerged in parallel with rule of law in a way that makes European development very different from that of Russia or China, but also from the vast majority of contemporary developing countries. Yet the crucial ingredient that permitted the evolution of medieval estates into the modern institutions of representative democracy was the spread of the idea of human equality in the seventeenth century.