{"id":180973,"date":"2025-08-27T13:31:42","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T11:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=180973"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:27:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:27:53","slug":"de-democratie-van-het-kippenhok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2025\/08\/27\/de-democratie-van-het-kippenhok\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicken coop democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the years before World War II, confidence in parliamentary democracy was low in the Netherlands. By the 1930s, the influence of fascism and Nazism had grown in our country. Among many academics, this did not lead to more support for democracy, but mostly to more criticism. Criticism of a parliamentary system where there was a lot of talking and little decision-making.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLevien Willemse<\/a>, \t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPauline Wiersema<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>

One exception was Philip Kohnstamm, the philosopher and physicist who advocated for parliamentary democracy in the 1930s. Kohnstamm, a thinker of German-Jewish descent, was a professor of pedagogy. To him, the arguments he heard against democracy applied even more to dictatorship; if anything, the advantages people mentioned of dictatorship he saw as the advantages of democracy.<\/p>\n

Summer is the perfect time to write and finish books. This time it was a summary of philosophy in our country over the past thousand years \u2013 which I also get to lecture on later this year. It is interesting to see how philosophers in our country dealt with similar questions over the centuries, such as those regarding freedom and tolerance. They were thinkers who always fought for people\u2019s freedom to think for themselves, while always asking how these different people could nonetheless live together peacefully. Philosophers who constantly tested the limits of what was accepted in society, holding up a mirror to tolerance. And thinkers who threw themselves into the breach when that freedom was threatened.<\/p>\n\n\t

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