Democracy and Complexity

Zolo argues that the increasing complexity of modern societies represents a fundamental challenge to the basic assumptions of the western democratic tradition and calls for a reformulation of some of the key questions of political theory. The author maintains that, as modern societies become more complex and more involved in the "information revolution", they are subjected to new and unprecedented forms of evolutionary stress - as manifested, for instance, in the growing autonomy and power of political parties and in new kinds of political communication which create and sustain the fiction of consensus. These forms of stress have become so serious that they threaten to undermine some of the values traditionally associated with democracy, such as the rationality and autonomy of the individual and the visibility and accountability of power.