Governing the Futures: Dream or Survival Societies?

Abstract

Constitutional representative government, often mistakenly called “democracy”, was one of the greatest inventions of the eighteenth century. It rivals other eighteenth century inventions such as the sextant, the steam engine, the cotton gin, smallpox vaccination—and the guillotine—all of which changed the world in important ways. But all of them also have been superseded by vastly more powerful inventions, while constitutional representative government persists as a strange relic from the past, in more or less the same form, and certainly on the basis of the same mindset from which it originally emerged.