Democratic states have historically been fouded upon the exclusion of Essay

Democratic states have historically been fouded upon the exclusion of women. What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of democracy as a system of g - Essay Example This remains the case even today, if the discourses on democracy are not restricted to the mere exercise of the right to vote or to hold an office. The idea of democracy dates back to the ancient Greek and Roman forms of governance and a prototype of the modern democratic government were perhaps found in India, in the 6th Century BC. However, the ideological elements of a democratic state are still in the developing stage, as the concerns of various minority sects emerge every day. In all the ancient forms of democracy, the right to participate in the governance and policy decisions was restricted to certain privileged sects, mostly men. In ancient Greece and Rome, women and slaves were excluded from the running of the government of the people, where the idea of ‘people’ was attributed solely to free men. In ancient India, though women were given ample opportunity for education and participation in the theoretical aspects of governance, they were prohibited from the actual material aspects of it, thereby denying them any agency in the system. The Middle Ages focused on the limited participation of people in the gov ernance, where the traditional hegemonic structure of nations was mainly decided by the clergy. Even in the 18th and 19th Century when the United States emerged as a liberal democracy, the ostensibly democratic rights reserved for the white adult male citizens left out various ethnic minorities and women from active participation in the system. The historically exclusive nature of democratic ideals had even been transformed to strong and open dictatorships in the early part of Twentieth Century, but the Second World War led to a lot of introspective analyses that brought back the idea of democracy both a system of government and as an ideology that reflects the general quality of life in every sphere. The nature of democracy, in its Aristotelian and historically developed terms, relates to the participation of people