This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton and me, David Edmunds.

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In many ways the world is in a better place politically than ever before. After all, more

people live in democracies than ever before. But democracies are under strain. Political

partisanship in the United States, for example, has become so extreme that some fear democracy

there is in danger of collapse. So how can democracy function and survive?

Josiah Ober believed democracy boils down to one essential factor, the acceptance of a kind

of bargain. A bargain that requires a special kind of friendship between political opponents.

Josiah Ober, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thanks so much, Nigel. The topic we're going to focus

on is the civic bargain. Now, what is that?

The civic bargain is at least in my view the answer to how to have democracy survive over time.

It basically means that in order to be a citizen and live without a boss, that's the basic

definition I use of democracy. You have to be willing to make bargains with your fellow citizens.

Before we go into how that might play out, perhaps it's worth separating out democracy from a voting

process. Exactly right. Democracy is one of these essentially contested terms that is endlessly

debated. My worry is that if we add too much to democracy, if we say that everything that we

like about good government or liberalism or the best way to live together under conditions of

justice gets lumped into democracy, then we really lose the central feature of democracy,

and that is collective self-government by a body of citizens.

Collective self-government can occur in many ways, and I think what I was trying to get at

is that for many people, democracy is just synonymous with how you get to elect representatives.

...