Since the word democratic is apt to mean different things depending on who is using it, I suppose I should try to explain what I think I mean by it.

A democratic society is one in which institutions exist that enable the exercise of a small number of positive freedoms (freedom to…), and protect a small number of negative freedoms (freedom from…) from erosion or obliteration.

The most important of the positive freedoms is the freedom to pursue ends that are at odds with other people’s ends, to dissent from majority opinion and inclination and to express that dissent in word and deed. This freedom would not need to exist in a perfect society, because a perfect society would provide for the perfect satisfaction of the various ends of all of its participants. However, the perfect satisfaction of a diverse set of ends is possible only if those ends are commensurable; that is, if it is possible for them all to be satisfied at the same time.

Thus, while a perfect society can accommodate diversity, it cannot accommodate incommensurability. A perfect society can only exist if one somehow reforms or gets rid of all the awkward people whose ends cannot by any means be squared with the general Gleichschaltung engineered by whatever perfect mechanisms the perfect society employs.

A democratic society is an imperfect society in which it is possible to get away with being awkward. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.

The most important of the negative freedoms is freedom from coercion and co-optation: freedom from being roped into things against one’s will, from being included in other people’s plans. Putting it in this way creates the potential for a misunderstanding, which I should like to avoid. Because we are social creatures, we will in fact want to be included much of the time; it is largely preferable to being ostracised. The price of such desired inclusion will probably be a certain amount of give-and-take: we will be roped into things we don’t really want to do, but consent to do anyway because we recognise that other people by whom we wish to be liked will be pleased if we do them. The freedom I am talking about is not therefore freedom from this sort of social negotiation, which is an unavoidable consequence of our general condition of interdependency. I am not demanding that one should be able to expect to be loved unconditionally by one’s peers.

What is essential is that one should be free to withhold one’s consent, to risk everybody’s disappointed ire by doing so, and that one should not be coerced in spite of this refusal into doing what others would have one do and being what they would have one be. If such coercion should occur, then one will have ceased to be recognised as having ends of ones own in addition to being a means for the realisation of others’ ends. In a democracy, one will often be in the position of being a means; but one should never be in the position of being solely a means.

Addendum - obviously I have said nothing about freedom from want, or indeed the staving off of any of the other giants named by Beveridge. Neither have I mentioned the rule of law. You cannot have the above democratic freedoms in a society in which people are desperately impoverished or routinely terrorized by their neighbours. Democratic freedoms are only possible if lawlessness and poverty are controlled. However, it is possible to imagine an undemocratic society in which no-one is left to starve and the rule of law is vigorously upheld.