Centre for Applied Philosophy Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)
3rd Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference

What's the Big Deal about Democracy? 

Monday 8th - Wednesday 10th September 2008 

It is widely assumed that it is simply self-evident that democracy is the best system of government that anyone has yet devised: admittedly imperfect, but better than anything else. But why? What exactly does democracy have to recommend it? What are the assumptions that lie behind democracy? And what sort of democracy are we talking about?

Is representative democracy the ideal form of democracy? Is it the best guarantor of freedom? How does democracy understand freedom? Are there any plausible alternatives either to democracy itself or to representative democracy? And what might thinking about alternatives suggest about the sort of politics into which we might organise ourselves? Does the state remain the zenith of political organisation? And what might the implications be for the organisation of political life, and for democracy in particular, of the growth of corporate power and of corporate forms of organisation?