Individualita a Řád : K Masarykovu a Fischerovu pojetí demokracie

Czechoslovak republic was founded and grew as a parliamentary demo¬cracy whose theoretical ideological conception was Masaryk’s idea of democracy. Masaryk was convinced that democracy, expressing the meaning of modern Western humanity, could not find itself in a crisis as such. Only democrats could fail. However, the factual development of the Czechoslovak state in the 1920’s and 1930’s manifested signs of a crisis. The question thus became one of sustainability of Masaryk’s ideas. One of the serious attempts at their critical reflection is the structurally functionalist conception of crisis of democracy offered by Josef Ludvík Fischer, a sociologist and a philosopher, who saw the root of the problem in a structural pathology, not an individual failure. The crisis can be resolved, according to Fischer, by constituting a “composable society” which respects the order of reality. Masaryk and Fisher agree that democracy needs be built on a global understanding of what there is as a whole.