A Review of Western Democracy with an Emphasis on Imam Khomeini's Political Thought

Author

Assistant Professor and Member of Scientific Board, Islamic Ma'aref Department of University of Qom.

Abstract

The current article is in charge of reflecting roots of western view of synonymity of a system's legality with the vote of
the majority. This view is accepted by political and legal thinkers of west and has been considered as a peerless
model for political systems. With a critic view on the verbal meaning of democracy, this article tries to find the meaning
which is common among the different approaches toward this term, to retrieve historical ups and downs of democracy
in the occident and to study reasons why it has been at the center of attention in recent centuries; then along with
consolidating Imam Khomeini's view on western democracy and adding the critic view on the synonymity of
legality with people's acceptance, we have revealed that the theory of western democracy fails to assume a stable
mechanism for the roots of sovereignty, a defendable ground for the origins of power, a standing structure to
control the rulers and a trustable process to delegate power to the agents.

Keywords