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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Politics > Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Schumpeter attacked conventional ideas about democracy. He attacked that such concepts as:

• The Common Good - This means different things to different people. Following Weber, there is an irreconcilable conflict of values, because values can not be determined rationally, and are fundamentally diverse.
• The Will of the People - The people are no a single collective entity. Normally divided on many issues, "the people" may even vote for different reasons for the same thing.
• The Will of any Individual - People may not necessarily have a clearly defined set of values, but rather have a set of vague desires and ideas. Furthermore, following Le Bon, if they participate in groups then they will be affected by group dynamics, which will influence their "will".

He also argued that the individual will be fairly disconnected from the political process. Given that the size of the state diminishes the importance of the individual and makes things seem distant, unimportant and "unreal", the the political will of the individual will not amount to much. Because he is so disconnected and the events in politics have such little importance, the individual drops down to an almost infantile level of cognition when compared to that level of cognition that he would carry out in his daily life.

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