Liberalism (or the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution) regards democracy as desirable that only what the majority accepts should in fact be law, but it does not believe that this is therefore necessarily good law. Its aim, indeed, is to persuade the majority to observe certain principles.

Democracy (i.e. majority rule) a means, not an end

While the dogmatic democrat regards it as desirable that as many issues as possible be decided by majority vote, the liberal believes that there are definite limits to the range of questions which should be thus decided.

The crucial conception of the doctrinaire democrat is that of popular sovereignty. This means to him that majority rule is unlimited and unlimitable. The ideal of democracy, originally intended to prevent all arbitrary power, thus becomes the justification for a new arbitrary power.

A group of men normally become a society not by giving themselves laws but by obeying the same rules of conduct. This means that the power of the majority is limited by those commonly held principles and that there is no legitimate power beyond them.

There can clearly be no moral justification for any majority granting its members privileges by laying down rules which discriminate in their favor.

Democracy is, above all, a process of forming opinion. Its chief advantage lies not in its method of selecting those who govern but in the fact that, because a great part of the population takes an active part in the formation of opinion, a correspondingly wide range of persons is available from which to select.

The argument for democracy presupposes that any minority opinion may become a majority one.

Advance consists in the few convincing the many. New views must appear somewhere before they can become majority views. There is no experience of society which is not first the experience of a few individuals.

Nor is the process of forming majority opinion entirely, or even chiefly, a matter of discussion, as the overintellectualized conception would have it. . . . Though discussion is essential, it is not the main process by which people learn. Their views and desires are formed by individuals acting according to their own designs; and they profit from what others have learned in their individual experience. Unless some people know more than the rest and are in a better position to convince the rest, there would be little progress in opinion.

Friedrich Hayek

*The words in parentheses are Hayek’s explanations of the meanings of the words provided on different pages.