I am actually at presdent writing a paper that deals with this, defending my view that (as Rorty puts it) democracy is prior to philosophy... Justin
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Please post it, or send off list.
In any event, I was looking for the reference that Matt Capri asked for in Hegel. But I think it applies here. From the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of the Right, which was also posted by Chris Brooke (13p, trans Knox, Oxford, 1942):
``One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give to it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.''