The weakness of exsisting democracias are thus all too evidente to Italian observers, andhave contriubted to what Bobbio

calls the broken promises of democracy. Democracy has not lived up to the expectations of its early proponents, and failed to elimitate the additional influence in decsion making afforded to certain individuals due to inequalities of wealth, power and knowledge, or even to inclucate a heightened political awarenesss and/or increase of civic virtue amoung the newly enfranchised masses. As a result, Bobbio retains a healthy scepticism about regarding democracy pure and simple as the penacea of all political ills. Radicals, however, often argue as if these diffculties could be solved simply by extending democracy to cover practially all decision making. We have already noted some of the draw backs of this idea, such as the almost limitless inflation of political activity and the problem of insuffient knowledge amoungst the electorate. Bobbio points out two defects to this approach. First, unless one beleives absolutly in the educative nature of political participation, then the mere extension of democracy in this way will not necessarily produce any better results. After all, even on small committees intense minorities can be consistenlty denied an effective voice by the majority. Second, advocate of this devolved from of particiation asser that its strenghtens the links between the individual and national poltics, that particiaption at the local level prepares citizens for informedi nvolvement outside this sphere. Bobbio presented his paper The future of democracy at the International Conference The Future has already begun in Mayo 1984, depicting the summary of transformations of democracy in terms of broken promises, that is, in terms of the gap between the ideal democracy as it was initially concieved and the reality of democracy as we know it, wiuth varying degrees of participation on a day to day basis. Bobbio states that in none of these cirsumnstances is it appropriate to speak of the degeneration of emocracy. Its better instead to speak in terms of the natural consequence of adaptingabstract principals to reaility Bobbio follows such theorists such as Shumpeter, Dahl and Sartori in arguning that these reuirements are best satisfied by the competative model of diffrent parties vying for the peoples vote rather than by the classical model of participatory democracy. The difficulty of knowing the future also derives from the fact that all of us project our own aspriations and anxieties into it, while history folows its course blithely indiffrent to our concern, a course shaped by millions and millions of little, minute, human acts which no intellect, howerver powerful, has ever been capable of of snythezising into a synoptic view which is not too abstract to be credible. For this reason the forecasts made by the masters of thought on the course of the world have in the even turned out to be almost always wront, not least the predicition ofthe person whom a section of humanity beleived and still believed to be the founder of a new and infallible science of society: Karl Marx.

The objective of this paper is purly and simply to make some observations on the current state of democratic regimes, and, to echo Hegel, we have our work cut out doing this. If, on the basis of these observations, it were then possible to extrapolate a trend with regard to the progress (or regress) of these regimes, and thus to attempt a cautious prognosis of their future, so much the better. In other words and liberal state is unlikely to ensure the proper workings of democracy, and conversely n undemocratic state is unlikely to be be able to safeguard basic liberties. The historical proof of this interdependance is provided by the fact that when both liberal and democratic states fall they fall together. 1. The birth of the pluralist society: democracy was born on an individualistic conception of society, at variance with the organix conception which prevailed in classical times and in the intervening period and according to which the whole has primacy over its parts. Political society, an artificial product formed by the will of individuals. The emergance of the individualist conception of society and that state and the decline of the organic conception can be accounted for by the interaction of three events in the history of ideas which are characteristic of social philosphy in the modern age. The renwed vigour of particular interests: The principle on which political representation is based is the exact antithesis of the one underlying the representation of particular interests, where the representative, having to support the cause of the person represented is subjected to a binding mandate. 3. The third unfullied promise of democracy concern its failure to put an end of pligarchical power. I have no need to dwell on this point becuase te subject has been extensivly dealt with an is uncontroversial, at least since the end of the last century: Gaetano Moscas political theory of the political class has been known as the theory of elites.