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In a footnote to Chapter 7 of 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' Karl Popper describes what he calls the 'Paradox of Democracy': the possibility that a majority decides for a tyrant to rule.1This is the lesser known paradox of the three to which he pays attention, the other two being the 'paradox of freedom' - total freedom leads to suppression of the weak by the strong - and the 'paradox of tolerance' - unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance.
Popper's paradoxes are of course closely related. When taken to their extremes, freedom, tolerance and democracy carry their own negation within them. Absolute freedom leads to oppression, complete tolerance to intolerance, pure democracy to tyranny. Should we then - regarding democracy - simply draw the conclusion that it is in the nature of democracy that it can abolish itself? Or, as Hans Kelsen puts it: 'eine Demokratie, die sich gegen den Willen der Mehrheit zu behaupten, gar mit Gewalt sich zu behaupten versucht, hat aufgehört, Demokratie zu sein'.2
Popper is not willing to draw that conclusion, although his arguments for not doing so are rather unsatisfactory. Basically he says: there can be no democracy for the anti-democrats, just as there can be no tolerance for the intolerant and, so he reminds us: a system with some form of majority rule is the best, but not infallible, form of government control.3Popper thus presents us with a rather pragmatic solution to...