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Messianic democracy is a neologism originally used by Jacob Talmon is his book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951) to describe the "democracy by force" doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and its philosophical descendants, as an effective tyranny that demotes democratic principle to rhetorical use only. Variants include totalitarian democracy and Jacobin democracy.
- Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists. - J. L. Talmon [1]
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