Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Early_Liberals_Fear_of_Populists

He wrote in his Philosophy of Right (1820): “Popular sovereignty, taken as the opposite of the sovereignty of the monarch, is the usual way in which one has begun to talk about popular sovereignty – as such, popular sovereignty belongs to the confused ideas, which are based on the chaotic conception of people. [...] Stupid as may be the average elector, he can see the propriety of such regulations as shall prevent men from murdering and robbing; 7 he can understand the fitness of laws which enforce the payment of debts; he can perceive the need of measures to prevent the strong from tyrannizing the weak; and he can feel the rectitude of a judicial system that is the same for rich and poor.” (18) Therefore, he. [...] Bismarck, who was himself responsible for the introduction of universal male suffrage in Germany, warned in his memoirs for the “social democratic follies … the attraction of which lies 11 in the fact that the intelligence of the masses is so stupid and underdeveloped that - led by its own cupidity - it lets itself be fooled by the rhetoric of able and ambitious leaders. [...] Because the fact that the best and the most brilliant are not elected to govern the country is not attributed here to the intellectual deficiency of the electorate, but to a quite different factor: jealousy. [...] The abolition of property qualifications in the older states and the admission of new states with universal manhood suffrage boosted to well over 50 percent the proportion of white males actually voting in the 1828 presidential election.” (Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave – Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p.