Abstract
This chapter examines essential paradoxes of contemporary democratic theories to overcome the present impasse of politics, such as populism, pseudo-democracy, and neo-authoritarianism. As simple democratic theory is impossible to deal with the dilemma, there is various “qualified democracy,” including participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, discursive democracy, radical democracy, agonistic democracy, contestatory democracy, and associative democracy. However, these attempts and related political philosophies contain the following tensions: (1) Deliberative democracy vs. Radial democracy, (2) Associative democracy vs. French-type Republicanism, (3) Liberalism vs. Democracy, (4) Communitarianism vs. Democracy, (5) Republicanism vs. Democracy. In order to cope with these dilemmas, this chapter will propose a new political theory, developing a democratic theory by Masao Maruyama, the most influential post-war Japanese political theorist. His idea of a “perpetual revolution of democracy” is based on the dilemma between many/individual or parts/whole along the horizontal/vertical dimension within sovereign people. This chapter will re-formulate this idea as a multi-dimensional neo-dialectical democratic theory for perpetual revolution.
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