Democracy arises when the organic unity of the people's will disintegrates, when society atomizes, when the popular beliefs that united the people into a single whole perish. The ideology that recognizes the supremacy and autocracy of the people's will arises when the people's will no longer exists. Democracy is the ideology of a critical, not organic epoch in the life of human societies. Democracy aims to gather the disintegrated popular will. But the human person is for it an abstract atom, equal to any other, and the task of reuniting people is a mechanical task. Democracy is only able to mechanically summarize the will of all, but the common will, the organic will of the people is not obtained from this. The organic will of the people cannot be arithmetically expressed, it is undetectable by any counting of votes. This will is found in the whole historical life of the people, in the whole stock of its culture, and above all and most of all it finds expression in the religious life of the people. Outside the organic religious soil, outside the unity of religious beliefs, there is no unified, common will of the people. When the people's will falls, the people disintegrate into atoms. And from atoms no unity, no commonality can be recreated. Only the mechanical sum of majority and minority remains. There is a struggle of parties, a struggle of social classes and groups, and an equilibrium is formed in this struggle. Democracy is the arena of struggle, the clash of interests and directions. In it everything is fragile, everything is not firm, there is no unity and stability. It is an eternal transitional state. Democracy creates a parliament, the most inorganic of formations, an organ of dictatorship of political parties. Everything is short-lived in a democratic society, everything is aspired to something beyond democracy itself. Genuine ontological life is beyond democracy. Democracy lingers too long on the formally insubstantial moment of freedom of choice. ... Democracy recognizes the people as sovereign and autocratic, but the people it does not know, there is no people in democracies. That detached human generation of a very brief passage of historical time, an exceptionally modern generation, not even all of it, but some part of it, which fancies itself the master of historical destinies, cannot be called a people.

— Nikolai Berdyaev