Democracy as consensus? The case of artificial consensus

Abstract

We consider here how democracy cannot be reduced to consensus and majorityvoting without taking in count contextual systemic social properties. We intend Democracy as context-sensitive, emergent property of social systems. We consider possible empirical confirmatory approaches to be used in case of strategic decisions as in thecase of the Brexit. We present the example of medical practice where no physician would decide a medical treatment on the base of a diagnosis having little more than fifty percent of probabilities to be true (neither a judge would condemn a defendant in court). In the post-industrial, knowledge societies we must face the end of the identity between universal suffrage and democracy.