Debate is never finished; it can't be, lest democracy be no longer democratic and society be stripped of or forfeit its autonomy. Democracy means that the citizen's task is never complete. Democracy exists through persevering and unyielding citizens' concern. Once that concern is put to sleep, democracy expires. And so there is no, and cannot be, a democracy, an autonomous society, without autonomous citizens - that is, citizens endowed with individual liberty and individual responsibility for the ways they use it. That liberty is another value - though unthinkable in separation from the value of democracy. Democracy rests on the freedom of its citizens, and citizens rest their confidence of being free and the courage to be free on the democracy of their polis. The two make each other and are made in the process of that making.

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About Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was a 20th-century Polish sociologist and philosopher. Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish–British sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. Read more on Wikipedia →

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