Introduction
Constructing – and even reconstructing – a redeeming conception of democracy as “self-government” is one of the main contributions of Ronald Dworkin’s integrated legal, moral, and political philosophy, namely, the “partnership conception of democracy” (Flores 2010, 2015). It is worth to mention that Dworkin originally characterized it as the “constitutional conception of democracy” in the “Introduction” to Freedom’s Law (1996, 1–38), but later on in a comment to Frank I. Michelman (1998), re-characterized it as the “partnership conception of democracy.” According to Dworkin, “Its central hypothesis is that the citizens of a political community govern themselves, in a special but valuable sense of self-government, when political action is appropriately seen as collective action by a partnership in which all citizens participate as free and equal partners, rather than as a contest for political power between groups of citizens” (1998, 453). It is worth mentioning that...
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Flores, I.B. (2021). Dworkin, Ronald: Partnership Conception of Democracy. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_6-1
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