Theory & Event

This symposium reprises a roundtable on democracy that took place at the 2009 American Political Science Association meetings in Toronto, Canada. Here is the rubric that governed that occasion: Democracy today experiences historically unparalleled global popularity, including among political theorists. Yet, in practice, democracy has never been more conceptually footloose, substantively thin or semiotically manipulated for undemocratic domestic and foreign exploits. What accounts for this schism? And what are the specific difficulties for democracy in a world contoured by civilizational conflict, eroding nation-state sovereignty, settler colonialism by “democracies,” unprecedentedly large mergers of state and capital, ascending neoliberal rationality, and invasions and occupations conducted in the name of democratization? What possibilities are there, in theory and practice, for resurrecting or rehabilitating the radical promise and potential of democracy? Alternatively, given the disrepair and misuse into which it has fallen, ought democracy to be abandoned for other visions and practices of popular justice and shared power?

The contributors to this symposium question whether there is actually existing democracy today and also shed the common tendency among self-anointed “democratic theorists” to treat democracy as, on the one hand, a concept to be stipulated, refined, internally balanced or theorized in relation to other political values, or, on the other, a historically protean term varying across epochs, locations and canonical thinkers. Indeed, the symposium panelists approach democracy cautiously, curiously, even skeptically, asking whether the constituent features and conceits of European modernity have ever permitted us to understand or practice it. They ask after its content and its entailments; they question whether it can take shape as a form and query the cultural, social, economic, political and even intellectual conditions that would nurture or erode it. The authors also resist certain conventional modern assumptions about democracy, especially its presumed conviviality with universality, inclusion, secularism, representation, liberalism and the market. As such, they ask what many democratic theorists would surely consider heretical questions: Might democracy consort with the Divine? Might democracy inherently entail exclusions? Does democracy entail drawing lines of enmity? Is democracy fundamentally uninstitutionalizable? Might it be necessarily and only aspirational? Could it be impossible today; if so, what then?

What follows are not comprehensive answers to these questions, if such were even possible. Rather, each contributor to this symposium makes a foray into the contemporary problematic of democracy, and plumbs diverse and sometimes surprising historical- geographical-intellectual referents for that purpose. These resources and referents include ancient Islam, modern European political theory, contemporary Israel, ancient Greece, the European Union, antebellum America, political economy and contemporary Continental philosophy. Rubbed together, these differences sparked something magical at the roundtable, as was evident from the rich and exciting conversation piqued among the audience participants by the combined presentations. Indeed, while we are pleased and honored to publish these reflections in Theory & Event, we regret not being able to capture the event in its entirety for readers. If democratized political power is today but a wisp on the horizon, perhaps there is minor solace in that afternoon’s evidence that imaginative and robust democratic theoretical conversation yet persists.