Western Concept Of Democracy In The 20th Century

In the 20th century, the occidental democratic ideas and systems of theories are extremely numerous. All sorts of schools of thought cannot be taken in all by the eye and new representatives for those schools emerge in an endless stream.By the recall to the origin and the developing process of the occidental democratic ideas, the paper points out that although the occidental definitions of democracy differ in thousands of ways, the definitions have the following characteristics fundamentally: democracy was the dominion of "the people" ; the ancient Greece was the sole origin of democracy and committing attacks to communism.By the combing of democratic ideas and theories of the modern Occident such as new liberalism, new conservatism, heroism, pluralism, democratic socialism and participating-in democratic ideas, and summarizing respectively the inner inheritable relations with the democratic ideas and the theories of traditional liberalism, conservatism, the people' s democratic ideas, monistic democratic ideas, political democratic ideas and the democratic ideas of the representative system, the paper tries to make the origin and development of the modern occidental democratic ideas and theories clear and revealed their own logic of growth and development.It is the fundamental starting point and ways to study occidental political ideas for the paper to survey and appraise the occidental democratic ideas and theories from point of view of Marxism. The occidental democracy, cultivated from the unique soil of the occidental society, was the special and historical political phenomenon. The occidental democracy has its historical and social limitation and it hasn' t universal application. In the developing process of contemporary politics, the paper holds the idea that, instead of copying the occidental democratic system and axiological ideas, we must set up scientific and correct democratic ideas. In point of view of methodology, we must persist in class stand, historical idea, comprehensive idea and process idea and only by that, it can genuinely be conductive to pushing forward the development of the social democracy of Chinese feature.