Will, Democracy, Empowerment

For Spinoza, Democracy is empowering, because, as an adequate idea, behavior in accordance with it can only be active. The framing of the U. S. Constitution was empowering, because, in the process, its framers were authoring their own lives. Dewey's notion of a Democracy as an ongoing process of Reconstruction attempts to refresh that original empowerment. In contrast, the notion of the Constitution as sacrosanct reduces Power to an abstraction, bestowed by the document, and passively received by subsequent citizens. Here, Democracy is not merely empowering, but a potentially maximally empowering form of government. For. interaction with others is a potential occasion for extending Will, i. e. to learn from others, so the latitude in experience enjoyed by each citizen is potentially beneficial to every other one.