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Messianic democracy is a neologism originally used by Jacob Talmon is his book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951) to describe the "democracy by force" doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and its philosophical descendants, as an effective tyranny that demotes democratic principle to rhetorical use only. Variants include totalitarian democracy and Jacobin democracy.

Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists. - J. L. Talmon [1]