Kenneth Megill is an American philosopher, trade unionist, political activist, and records and knowledge manager. Philosopher Megill's primary philosophical contribution is the development of a democratic theory in the tradition of Democratic Marxism. Megill defined democracy as a political and social order where people control where they live and work. In 1961-1962 he studied with Karl-Otto Apel who introduced him to the works of Karl Marx, Charles Sanders Peirce, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1964-1965 he studied at the Free University of Berlin where he worked with manuscripts by Marx that had only recently been made available. The Free University was one of the main scenes of the German student movement of 1968. The events of the 1968 movement provided the impulse for more openness, equality, and democracy in German society. Megill participated in several seminars that were attended by students who went on to be active in the student movement in Germany and France in 1968. In addition to attending seminars in West Berlin, he commuted through the Berlin Wall and was enrolled at the Humboldt University of Berlin in an advanced graduate seminar in Dialectical Materialism taught by the head of the philosophy department in the German Democratic Republic. Megill received his masters (1964) and doctoral (1966) degrees with a dissertation on "The Community as a Democratic Principle in Marx's Philosophy" at Yale University. Richard Bernstein was his adviser. During 1968 he was a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences organized by George Markus, an associate of the Hungarian philosopher and political leader Georg Lukacs. Megill met regularly with Lukacs and the members of what became known as the Budapest School. He visited philosophers and political activists in Poland and Czechoslovakia and attended the Korcula Summer School sponsored by the Praxis Group in Yugoslavia. which was the major gathering for European Democratic Marxists from both East and West Europe. The theme of the conference, especially appropriate in 1968, was "Marx and Revolution". During the conference, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and brought an end to the Prague Spring and began a period of repression that led to the Budapest School losing their positions. Megill published more than a dozen articles in philosophical academic journals. In 1970 Free Press/Macmillan published his book "The New Democratic Theory" in which he argued that liberal democracy and dialectical materialism had both failed and that a