Abstract
Liberalism has provided both a necessary basis for modern democracy and also a constraint upon it. This duality makes a democratic critique of liberalism both imperative and also problematical, in so far as it threatens the conditions of liberal democracy itself. Two of these conditions are examined – the institution of representation and the principle of the limited state – to discover what limits they might impose on the justifiable ambitions of democratizers, to extend political participation on the one hand, and the social agenda for democratization on the other.
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