Evolutionary Basic Democracy

Democracy, despite its pervasiveness in global political rhetoric, still remains as an unknown entity. Although hundreds of democracy types, theories, concepts, practices and their nuances have definitions and are often well described by the literature, it, democracy itself, has no definition. To uncover its raw essence or most basic traits, we need to think about democracy in a substantively different way. In its current epistemological manifestation across a number of languages, the only given certainty (Dunn, 2013) is that the word itself has existed for some time. This paper, based off the introduction to the book entitled ‘Evolutionary Basic Democracy’(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), will present a new model of democracy capable of describing the complexity of the discourse across planetary space and human time. It is argued that this model will eventually permit researchers to deploy reproducible studies to determine what democracy's most shared common characteristics are. The resultant positivist post-foundation is argued to be able to fully de-legitimize false claims to democracy and to shift power increasingly into the hands of citizens, practitioners and experts. It will, possibly for the first time, give non-parochial scientific persuasion to democracy so as to unlock a new ethos of politics globally.