Democracy and the Divine: The Phenomenon of Political Romanticism

Advancing the thesis that a contract between the political members of a community must lead to the highest form of social inclusion, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) has provided the groundwork for democracies around the world. Yet, Hobbes also states that this contract can only be upheld by a strong sovereign whose authority is derived from God. How can a democracy be defined, then, as truly inclusive when it essentially grows out of a theocracy that thinks about human beings in terms of “...