A marked feature of some studies that have been made on cooperative democracy over the past few decades is that they pointed out how important it is to organize the movement calling for the restoration of democracy when the top management carried on the decision-making in cooperative business independent of the democratic control. They did not consider the question in relation to other factors, for instance, the problem intrinsic in democracy, an aspect of co-partners' choice and the aim in democracy. My purpose in this paper is to show the uniqueness of the understanding of democracy by Prof. Seiichi Tobata through presenting a comprehensive vision of his analysis. The main results are as follows:
(1) Considering cooperative democracy as liberty given priority over equality, he arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to prevent the abuse of top management's liberty. Furthermore,he emphasized repeatedly that cooperatism (which was the Japanese thought on the eve of World War II that cooperatives would prevaile throughout the country) would never be brought to realization because of the conflict between liberty and equality.
(2) If a co-partner makes a choice of liberty having priority over equality, it follows that his cooperative theory shows one type of cooperative democracy. This understanding gives meaning to the traditional studies: first, we not only aim at the actualization of democracy, but understand the negative side of democracy that there is a possibility of co-partners' liberty conflicting with each other; second, we can think about the goal of a cooperative in terms of the values among which co-partners choose; and third, democracy is regarded as a field in which some values are chosen, because we cannot determine a priori what kind of values should take priority.

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