Analysis On Barber's Strong Democracy

With the popularity of neo-liberalism nowadays, as a political concept, liberal democracy has exclusive right to speak in the theoretical areas. Meanwhile, it achieves unprecedented success in the organizational areas. However, the inherent drawbacks of liberal democracy become more and more obvious, and they bring a series of negative impacts to the practice of democracy .These shortcomings and negative impacts have aroused the concern of the society and the reflections of political field. Political theories such as communitarianism, deliberation and participant democratic theory have criticized liberalism profoundly. Benjamin Barber's strong democracy has attracted the western academia for its bright characters.Barber defines liberal democracy as thin democracy. He thinks that the thin democracy has a serious of shortcomings in building theory, epistemology and the awareness of the existence of human. The thin democracy pays more attention to the promotion of personal freedom, rather than the protection of public justice. It concerns of the promotion of interests, rather than looking for good . It separates people from safety instead of bringing them together. As a result, thin democracy unable to face with the internal and external challenges. Barber puts forward strong democracy. The strong democracy, as a contemporary theory of participant democracy, absorbs the nutrients from classical republicanism and the reasonable factors from the community, deliberation and the contemporary theory of participant democracy. The strong democracy takes the expand of the people's right to political participation as the core, and it also takes the "citizen", "participation" and other ideas as the characteristic to make up for the defects of the thin democracy from the philosophical level and political level .The strong democracy try to promote the political participation of people, and enhance the sense of political responsibility of people, and weaken the sense of alienation to the power center, and cultivate the public attention to the collective problem. At the end, it will lead the liberal democracy to the political community of citizen participation.Generally, the strong democracy expresses the trend of the western democratic theories and plays an important and promoting role in the development of western democratic theories. It means great significance to reconsider about the status of"participation"in the democratic theory, the process of democracy, the concept of the politics and the relationship between freedom and democracy.