On Gosar's Criticism of Parlimentary Democracy

Abstract

The author of the following article presents the deliberations of Dr. Andrej Gosar about the crisis of contemporary democracy, published in 1926 in the Čas Catholic magazine. Gosar's work has already caught the attention of social sciences experts and historians, but it has not yet been analysed in detail. In his discussion Gosar distanced himself notably from the mainstream Catholic views of democratic movements and parliamentary democracy, since he established that democratic ideas were permanent achievements without any real alternatives, while he reproached the contemporary parliamentarianism with reducing the equality of citizens to the political aspect, which led to the discrepancy between the "democratic parliament" and the social structure due to rapid economic development. According to Gosar, the "democratic idea" therefore had to be supplemented with the "social principle of autonomism and self-management". The following article underlines Gosar's notions of "autonomy and self-management" and also his opinions of classes and strata, which have already been discussed in the relevant sociological literature. As the author mentions, Gosar based his deliberations on certain well-known legal and political theoreticians of the 1920s, whom he did not always agree with.