The River and the Stream: The Democratic Idea in Israel

The democratic idea finds its origin in ancient Greece, in the Athenian polis. Back then, it meant the right of every citizen to vote for the presiding officials. Although it is common to think that the original idea meant the right of everyone to participate in the elections, in fact in ancient Athens, only a small part of the population were considered full citizens. Women, slaves, Helots, and freed slaves were not considered citizens and were not entitled to participate in the electoral process. However, in the twentieth century the idea was transformed to include notions originating in both the liberal and the socialist traditions, and we see the flowering of such terms as participant-democracy (Tolbert et al. 2003; Roelofs 1998), liberal democracy (Riker 1982; Talmon 1960), and even totalitarian democracy (Talmon 1960).