DEMOCRACY AND DECISIONAL LIMITS

Rezumat

If the majority rule, as decisional instrument of legitimating the different resolutions intended for the public space and of revealing the demos sovereignty has - or has not – inaccessible decisional spheres, submitted to some philosophical, ideological or juridical restraints, is one of the important questions from the theory of democracy. A negative answer may be given on the line of encouraging direct democracy, of sustaining its specific demands and participative mechanisms, towards which cannot be accepted pre-imposed limits. At the same time, the analysis of the political practices may show that, although these practices seem to be subordinated to some restrictive frames, they remain attached, as regards the issues of maximal importance, to certain decisional wills, of majoritarian type. An affirmative answer may be formulated either by the help of some strategies of foundationalist kind, specific to classical liberal thought, or through the agency of an ethical-philosophical discourse of interpretative type. There is also the possibility to answer by the attempt of delegitimating the question and by arguing that the political practices are the fruit of the historical contingency, so that the preeminence of democracy towards the theory makes the research of some subjects useless.