Español The concept of democracy in the political thought of Julián Marías Aguilera

Abstract

This article analyses the conception of democracy in the thought of Julián Marías Aguilera, who recreated a vision of democracy that transcends its merely political character. He argued that authentic democracy is not only a system of government, but a form of civic coexistence that demands the active and responsible participation of informed and committed citizens in decision-making for the common good. The defence of individual and political freedom is
central to his vision of this concept. Marías’s observations are not merely abstract rhetoric, as
he links them to his historical and personal experience, particularly in relation to Spanish history. Three conceptual-contextualist theoretical-methodological frameworks have been kept in mind: those proposed by Koselleck, Skinner and Pocock. The central axis from which the work has been developed has been the content of the lecture ‘The Intellectual Foundations of Democracy’ (1995), as well as a series of press articles published between 1977 and 1998, inserted in the general work of the writer-philosopher. The main hypothesis put forward is that
the concept of democracy put forward by Julián Marías is indebted to the famous Orteguian proposal of ‘morbid democracy’ formulated in 1917, focusing on the risks that democracy can represent outside certain acceptable limits. To this initial approach he adds four of his own conceptions: the value of suffrage as a social leveller; the vision of present-day democracy as a function of a historical process that began in the Modern Age; democracy as the main guarantor of freedom; and the identification of two great enemies of democratic societies: demagogy and populism.