How does democracy flourish and decline? Democratic dialogue with freedom, legality, truth or demagogic lawlessness, lawlessness and falsehood?

Active democratic citizens must be constantly vigilant. Demagoguery strips democracy of every intellectual value and undermines it.

Freedom, legality, and truth are fundamental values, the oxygen of democracy. In an era of rapid change, constant intellectual and democratic vigilance is required.

The essays have been published in newspapers and magazines, in print and online, during the period of the Greek economic and political crisis after 2010. The reflection refers not only to Greek issues but also to the issues that concern all modern democracies. The book is structured in two parts.

The first part examines how demagoguery as a political pathology leads to the decline of democratic regimes through the abuse of political freedom and the tangible disregard for democratic institutions.

In the second part, political issues such as democratic pluralism and tyrannical monism, the 20th century of ideological extremes, Mikhail Gorbachev, and democratic change in Russia are analyzed.