Sociology a Means to Democracy

Abstract

EVENTS OF the past decade have challenged the validity of our former naive faith in democracy. The Axis Powers seek to subjugate democracy and to establish the supremacy of the superman and the super-race. This has forced a new interpretation of our concept of democracy, and the search for its true meaning has resulted in an extensive literature, comparable to that of the late eighteenth century. We have come to see that it is a much broader concept than political freedom, universal suffrage and parliamentary government; that it is not a matter of mere social structure which can ever be perfectly attained, but that it must be conceived as a process toward an ideal relationship which will evolve in the future as it has in the past; that it rests primarily upon our attitudes toward others, and is fundamentally a faith in a desirable system of human relationships.