The article examines some aspects related to democratic phenomenon from the perspective of the history of political thought. It is demonstrated that democracy is a complex phenomenon, the analysis of which has provoked fierce debates between thinkers and researchers over time. If political philosophers attempted to propose ideal models of democracy, and historians analyzed its development, ascension, or decline, the political scientists sought to provide theoretical and empirical answers and explanations regarding the fundamentals of democracy assertion, functioning and expansion. Hence the democracy is not a product of modernity, but one "invented" during the classical Athens, the article highlights some relevant issues raised by ancient, renaissance, illuminative and modern thinkers about the democratic phenomenon. It turns out that they, as supporters or critics of the established political desirable political order, have also proposed solutions to this order. Today, democracy functionally provides a legitimacy to political life as a whole, and has become a critical exercise in political reason, an eternal theme in political theory and a topical issue in the democratic practice of contemporary society. The author concludes that in the issue of the historical development of democracy we can observe a logical succession of distinct stages with certain approaches: ancient democracy, modern democracy and the democracy of the future