# 1

Democracy is the idea that the state responds to what the people want. But as the demos grows accustomed to receiving substantial benefits from the state, subjects begin to conceive of the state not as an instrument of their own will, but as an independent source of benefits. The abstraction of rights is a powerful and sometimes useful idea, but like all abstractions, it can turn reality upside down. And as a right expands beyond signifying a freedom and begins to signify an entitlement to some substantial benefit—sliding, that is to say, from live conceived of as a game to life conceived of as a collective endeavor to satisfy the needs of human beings—it begins to turn into the blueprint for a static state.

Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind. How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (Encounter Books, 2012), 72-73.