Western political theory began with ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle in the 4th and 5th centuries BCE. Aristotle argued that we must begin by looking at the community as a whole. The political whole (polis) comes into being as a cooperative whole not simply to attain “the minimum needs of life” but “for the reason of the good life.” The bond that unites persons in the polis, he asserted, was the principle of political order in society known as “justice.” Justice could operate as “retributive” or “distributive” in different ways, but for a community to be a whole, it must necessarily be united by such a principle of political order. Today, we need such a principle for our global political order.

Ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote for us the famous funeral speech of Pericles that describes Athenian democracy (at the close of the 5th century BCE) as a society based on merit, as involving the spirit of toleration for diversity of opinions, and a society in which decisions are made on the force of the better argument, not on greed, violence, or arbitrary political authority. Democratic theory was born at that time but was far from complete.

In Europe, during the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of thinkers such as Johannes Althusius, Duplessis Mornay, and Geoge Buchanan argued that the political authority should be responsible to the common good of the people and that such authority arose from the people. It was not, therefore, an arbitrary right of kingship conferred on the monarch by God.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, in the work of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, the idea developed that individual human beings had God-given natural rights that included, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the US Declaration of Independence, the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For Kant, all human beings have a moral duty to live under a “republican government” that protects their freedom and quality before the law, for such freedom alone makes moral living possible.

Kant’s thought developed the idea that each person inherits an inviolable human dignity. His fundamental moral principle stated: “Always treat every person, whether in oneself or others, as an end in themselves and never merely as a means.” This principle is based on a distinction between persons (who have “dignity”) and things (that have only “price”). Human beings are inviolable “ends in themselves” and can never simply be treated as things (that may be used “merely as a means” for whatever purpose).

Notice that there is an evolution taking place. Human beings are developing a progressively more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of who and what we are. By the 20th century we had understood several fundamental ideas that were not available to Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. (1) Evolution. We have understood that all things in the universe evolve and develop over time according to what some theorists call “the law of complexity-consciousness” and that human beings have evolved as a single species (homo sapiens) according to this same process. This includes the fact that human consciousness has evolved from a magical to a mythical consciousness and then, beyond that, to our present level of self-awareness—and that the democratic ideal can be seen as pointing to a higher level of mutual recognition, understanding, and respect.

(2) Moral Growth. We have understood that individual human beings also grow and develop during their lifetimes. In our day there is a vast literature on the psychology of cognitive and moral development. (3) Holism. We have understood that individuals are social creatures and are necessarily members of a network of communities progressing from the family to their larger societies to humanity as a whole. (4) Common Good. Because of these factors, we have learned that the individual good is intrinsically connected with the common good of the evolving whole, and the whole is clearly planetary.

In his 1795 essay on “Perpetual Peace,” Kant wrote “because a (narrower or wider) community widely prevails among the Earth’s peoples, a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt “everywhere.” At that time very few people could even begin to comprehend such a statement. Today, many people the world over can understand it. Understanding such a statement requires a person to have grown out of their youthful egoism, and beyond identification with their local language and culture (ethnocentrism) to a world-centric and even cosmocentric moral awareness.

Simply put, any mature person today understands that it is wrong for children to be starving in Africa, or for women to be denied their rights in Saudi Arabia, or for military dictatorship to be persecuting minorities in Myanmar. It is also wrong for wars to be destroying lives in the Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, or Somalia. These insights form the moral essence of democracy. Democracy is the moral framework that allows human beings to work together for the common good of all without violence, intimidation, manipulation, or deception.

This is the insight that ranges from Thucydides in Ancient Greece to Mahatma Gandhi in India to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the USA. This insight can only be truly actualized, as both Kant and Gandhi maintained, through a planetary federation of nations under a global democratic constitution. Why has this not happened? Why has humanity not grown to a world-centric level of maturity? The answer is twofold. There are two dominant institutions that control our planet that go back centuries to a more immature and ego-centered level of thought: global capitalism and the system of sovereign nation-states.

These are economic and political systems that arose from immature, early-modern ideas and, since they continue to dominate our entire world system, serve to prevent most human beings from growing to world-centric and cosmocentric levels of maturity. Capitalism cultivates such incredibly egoistic and immature dominators as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The mechanized system of investment directed toward the limitless accumulation of private wealth emphasizes the egoism of wealth and power and certainly not growth toward world-centric compassion and mutual understanding.

Similarly, the system of sovereign nation-states divides the world into some 193 independent territorial entities that (as sovereign) officially recognize no binding laws above themselves. They can only agree on “treaties” that can be broken at any time in this anarchic world in which these entities struggle for survival, wealth, power, and hegemony. They therefore feel the need to militarize themselves for “security” in an ever more dangerous world of wars, intrigues, economic rivalry, and ethnocentric competition.

Again, like capitalism, this system cultivates immature ethnocentrism and tends to place immature leaders into power to promote this ethnocentric madness at the expense of the whole of humanity and future generations. Populations expect their leaders to promote “national interests” and to protect them against foreign interference, sabotage, or invasion. As with the competition of thousands of capitalist enterprises for the accumulation of private wealth (at the expense of nature and people) so nation-states see themselves as atomistic centers independent of the good of the whole.

Nevertheless, as many mature thinkers (from Albert Einstein to Albert Camus to Mahatma Gandhi) have understood, the common good clearly became global in 1945 when the first atomic bombs were detonated. Human life has lived on the edge of total destruction since that time and the well-being of every human being depends on our getting rid of these insane weapons permanently and by enforceable law. Book after book has appeared detailing the threat to our common human good posed by these weapons, but the big powers (in an immature system run by immature leaders) have doubled down on their production and deployment.

As if this were not enough to raise democracy to the global level, by the 1960s the world was hit with the growing evidence of climate destruction and eventual collapse of our planetary ecosystem that sustains human life on the Earth. Mature people immediately understood that everywhere on Earth we must begin working together to prevent, mitigate and restore our planetary ecosystem as much as possible. As with nuclear weapons, the evidence has been mounting since the 1960s to become overwhelmingly credible and scientifically grounded. Human beings have no credible future on this planet without a planetary constitutional democracy predicated on individual flourishing within our common human good.

The democratic ideal is the ideal emanating from human growth, maturity, and wisdom. 20th century Japanese philosopher Masao Abe writes in his essay “Sovereignty Rests with Mankind” that we need a world system “wherein the dignity and freedom of the individual are guaranteed. The age of nation-states must proclaim its end, and the age of mankind must begin.” American thinker David Ray Griffin writes in his 2021 book: “Until these partial, competitive, shortsighted national interests are trumped by a government whose leaders are mandated to represent the long-term common good, our planet will be headed toward ecocide. Global democracy is necessary if human civilization is not to be destroyed.”

Democratic theory is inseparable from the psychology of human growth and maturity. The democratic ideal is very much an ideal of a society of free and equal people living in peace and justice with one another within a constitutional framework fostering the common good of all. In the 18th century, John Locke and others identified certain political rights such as freedom of speech, press, assembly, and political participation. Nevertheless, because of the immense abuses of capitalism, the 19th century involved a struggle for a new set of social and economic rights such as a living wage, worker safety conditions, housing, health-care, social security, the right to unionize, etc. In addition, as my recent book Human Dignity and World Order: Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy points out, the 20th century brought us “third generation rights” such as the universal right to world peace and the right to a protected planetary environment. These are planetary rights because human dignity is clearly planetary, and our common good is also clearly planetary. The present world -system directly violates these rights.

Recent “Communication Theory” of thinkers like Jürgen Habermas has also pointed out that democracy is a theory of moral human relationships applicable on all levels from the local to the global. It is a theory of non-violent and non-manipulative communication in which people work together on behalf of their own well-being within the framework of the common good. However, as in any holistic system (such as one humanity living within one planetary ecosystem) local arrangements are impacted by the greater wholes of which they are part.

Democracy in any city will not be possible if the larger context of the city is undemocratic, in which undemocratic economic and political forces impact that city. And no nation can be fully democratic if there is a larger framework of sovereign militarized nation-states that impact that nation and its ability to govern its own affairs. Hence, any violable democracy within communities on our planet will be disrupted by non-democratic capitalist powers and by other militarized sovereign nation-state powers.

That is why democratic theory is inseparable from the psychology of human growth. Democracy cannot be simply about voting as, for example, when the egoist-ethnocentric Donald Trump is elected by a slight majority of egoistic-ethnocentric, angry, and vengeful persons in the USA who are as immature as he is. All those who understand the stages of human growth and development must be finding ways to institutionalize growth and development into democratic institutions and the democratic process.

As American philosopher Ken Wilber repeatedly points out, the egoistic and ethnocentric stages must not be repudiated because we all go through these stages in our development. As young people, we are typically egocentric as we begin to discover our personal sense of identity. We may then learn to care about our community or nation or religion and become passionately ethnocentric to the exclusion of other nations, communities, or religions. But continued growth allows us to begin more and more to be able to see the world from the point of view of others. This is the process of maturity, learning to understand the ways others see the world and then engaging in dialogue with them for the common flourishing and good of all.

Democracy, which was supposed to be “leading the world” in much of Europe and in North America, is failing in these places because the theory was reduced to a “one person-one vote” mechanism that was unable to control or even deal with the anti-democratic forces of global capitalism, the system of militarized sovereign nation-states, or with the need to institutionalize domestic growth-related policies. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as an 18th century philosopher of democracy, distinguished “the will of all” from what he called “the general will” in democracy.

The will of all can be anything, he said. The majority can vote for really stupid things. Hitler, like Donald Trump, was elected by a popular vote. The “general will,” on the other hand, represents the moral dimension of democracy that arises from the human dignity of each and every citizen. This general will, he said, “can never be wrong.”

Rousseau understood that democracy arises from the moral dimension within each of us, a moral dimension requiring growth toward ever greater maturity, compassion, wisdom, understanding, and love. This undoubtedly is the kind of maturity Jesus was talking about when he affirmed the “great commandment” to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Such love is not simply a choice that I can make as an immature egoistic person.

Can we even imagine Donald Trump loving anyone else besides himself? Democratic theory must simultaneously be a theory of human moral growth. And the endpoint of such growth is necessarily one planetary democracy of unity in diversity that includes multiple systems and methodologies for promoting human moral growth. Humanity is one; our planetary ecosystem is one; and our self-governance on the Earth must necessarily be one planetary democracy. World-centric, compassionate people everywhere on Earth must unite in our common human quest for planetary democracy, as, for example, at the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament scheduled for December 2025.

In sum, therefore, democracy is (1) An ideal for human life in which human dignity and mutuality provide the foundations for the equitable rule of law protecting freedom and equality for all human beings within the framework of their common good. It requires an institutionalized commitment to moral growth. (2) Democracy is incompatible with laws that allow for the unlimited accumulation of private wealth. (3) Democracy is incompatible with a system of “sovereign” nation-states who refuse to recognize that a law-based respect for human dignity must be universal to humanity. (4) Democracy is summed up in many ways by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which opens with the affirmation that “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”