I will not talk so much about democracy in the way it is mostly addressed in contemporary political science today which is a formal understanding of democracy as a constitutional system of political participation. Looking back at the eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft it immediately becomes clear that political thought in the eighteenth century worked differently from today. The main reference of the two political pamphlets – Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France and Wollstonecrafts answer to Burke in an open letter that bears the title A vindication of the rights of men – is the notion of human nature. For Burke, it is by nature, that men are unable to live in a well-functioning system of social equality not least because social equality will always mean the discrimination of the exceptionally great and talented ones at the cost of mediocrity. For Burke, democratic government leads to an unholy coalition of a coordinator class of state bureaucrats and the majority of the people who vote in favour of their economic and social security. “You wish!”, one could say today. For Burke, democracy denies the ancient constitution which is the rule of the few who are able to rule. Burke is often compared to Hobbes because they share the fear of majority rule as a bad government, but the big difference between them is that Hobbes actually takes people to be naturally equal. The problem for Hobbes is that men are just too evil to let them rule themselves. They always strife to dominate others and democracy in Hobbes is portrayed as a public chaos of different voices longing to take control of the state. “A little more accurate today”, one could say. Burke in contrast does not believe in natural equality at all. On the contrary, he emphasizes the naturalness of the ancient Aristotelian distinction between those who have the ability to lead and those who should be obliged to follow. The republican intervention against this central claim of a natural aristocracy was back in antiquity and early modernity the same: to describe society as a social continuum of first to be governed – the state of childhood – then to learn how to govern yourself – the state of adolescence or growing-up – and finally of being oneself in the position to govern others. The modern paradox of Wollstonecraft picking up the republican continuum of growing up while being governed – to in the end govern oneself the next generation – is, that in antiquity, it is strongly allied to patriarchy. The roman republic was in its heyday the rule of the wise and old statesmen whom the roman plebs respected for their personal experience and prudence. Modern capitalism therefore has always been in a strong contradiction to classic republicanism but also to classic partriarchal ways of society. Because capitalism is always re-newing its ways of economic production, but also social reproduction, the young generation gets a lot more to say in contrast to older forms of society. The so-called “ancient constitution” that Burke is defending, he sees as the last order of a society that tried to conserve and perpetuate the dominant role of tradition and in this sense he also defends patriarchalism as claiming the pre- dominant role of the old and therefore wise generation as against the young and therefore clueless one. In social reality, this was not true. Already the society of eighteenth century Britain that Burke 1