This is true, and it’s why what you say in the other thread is technically inaccurate. “Democracy” in its original meaning referred to direct democracy only, while “Republic” referred to a state in which the people’s authority was exercised through representatives. These days, however, little distinction is drawn between them, as a quick glance at dictionary.com will attest:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=democracy

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=republic

Bubba has given us the widely accepted, though sadly mistaken, definition of republic, due to one unfortunate line by Madison in the Federalist. What defines a republic is NOT representation. The world’s first republic, in Rome, had no representation. All citizens sat in the people’s assembly. What defines a republic is, to put it very simply, is that it is not a monarchy. A monarchy locates rule in ONE person, ONE office. A republic distributes rule in a plurality of persons, offices, and bodies, all of them broadly representative of the various parts of the society, hence the public thing, the republic. It is separation of powers and checks and balances that define a republic, not representation.

Representation can and does play a republican role, by separating legislative deliberation from popular passions. But it is not central to the definition of republic.

If you accept Madison’s unfortunate definition, then a universal franchise-based, unicameral legislature, with no separation of powers, no independent courts, no independent executive, and no limits on its powers, is a “republic.” But what would be the practical difference between such an absolutist representative assembly and an absolutist democratic assembly in which the people themselves were members?

If a republic distributes rule in a plurality of persons and a democracy likewise distributes rule in a plurality of persons, what is the difference between them? The difference is in *who* the rule is distributed between.

I’ll grant you your “representation” point: republican “representatives” need not be chosen by the people, as you say. Nevertheless, they are not the whole people themselves, as they are in a true democracy. Moreover, you’re abusing the term “separation of powers.” Separation of powers refers to the separation of the three distinct natural offices of government: that of making the law, that of administering the law, and that of judging when the law is broken. It does not refer to the separation of, for instance, the election power among many citizens rather than one. That is not a separation between powers. That is merely distributing responsibility within one power.

In re your last paragraph, I’m not sure I’m grasping your argument. My answer, on the face of it, would be that the difference between the two assemblies is that one assembly is composed of representatives and one is composed of the whole body of the people, but that seems so obvious that I’m not sure I’m understanding the question.

“Republics decline into democracies, and democracies degenerate into despotisms” - Aristotle

Oh, but we do have a democracy. This is undeniable. Even Alexis de Tocqueville called the northern states democratic in 1830. You should read his famous work _Democracy in America_ (just read the title if you don’t think America is a democracy): http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html

America is at the very least a de facto democracy, as Book viii and ix of Plato’s Republic would tell us as well. America’s Crusaders for democracy are simply promoting who they are and what they have.

Bubba has misunderstood me on several points. I did not say that what defines a republic is merely that it “distributes rule in a plurality of persons,” as in the plurality of persons in a single legislative body, but that it distributes rule in a plurality of separate offices and bodies, such as existed in the Roman republic.

When I said that representation plays “a republican role, by separating legislative deliberation from popular passions,” I did not mean that in the strict sense of “separation of powers” (Bubba is correct in his definition of that term), but in the sense of the removal of legislative deliberation from immediate popular passions.

Regarding a unicameral elected body exercising all powers, I did not mean that that would be identical to a body of all the citizens, but that the two would be the same in regard to the quality of all power being located in a single body.

As for Alcibiades’s point, sure, there are definitions of democracy by which we could call America a democracy. But what I am trying to do here is restore an understanding of the essential meaning and importance of republicanism, which has been lost by our unfortunate reliance on the word democracy. When Toqueville used “democracy,” he was not speaking of a form of government so much as of a form of society, namely a society in which there were not legally divided classes, a society in which there was a general equality of condition of all citizens. For example, in America, a man of privileged background might ride in a public conveyance with a man of working class background, and they would talk freely together with no class lines preventing their intercourse. That did not exist in Europe. That’s an example of what Toqueville meant by democracy.