Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the foremost influential political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for creating a utopian exaggeration of the facility of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility.

Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions. it's distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory. This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on four distinct issues in recent work. First, it outlines some different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally desirable in the least . Second, it explores the question of what it's reasonable to expect from citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories as we'll see.