Democracy and conflict: democracy as a historical movement

Abstract

This article has the objective to understand democracy and democratization as a conflictive process that requires a historical and agency-based approach to be analyzed. It states that this perspective is currently missing in significant part of sociological, political science and economic analysis. Some of these analyses are briefly reviewed in the text, along with considering its gaps and contributions, and some of its methodological and epistemological assumptions on the topic. Finally, the article intends to make a contribution to the analysis, by trying to understand democracy as a historical movement, exploring the use of the concept of “political modernity”, and some of the theoretical tools that two important authors have given us. Those are, Axel Honneth with his analysis on the “struggle for recognition”, and E.P. Thompson with his historical approach and his concept of “moral economy of multitude”.