Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

IV. Challenges for Radical Democracy
 
If social movements can be viewed as innovators of democratic practice – if, in other 
words, they are where radical democrats should look for inspiration – then this leads to a basic 
problem. What happens to every social movement? Where, for example, are Occupy and the 
Indignados
today? In short, they have largely disappeared. Social movements do not last. Thus, 
if we think of social movements as the core of democracy, the unhappy conclusion seems to be 
that democracy itself cannot last. This is the challenge posed by Wolin’s (2008, 254) concept of 
“fugitive democracy” and it raises challenging questions about the viability of radical 
democracy. In this section, I address two concerns about the potential for radical democracy to 
function as an ongoing project of self-governance in the contemporary world; the first challenge 

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focuses on the issue of “fugitivity,” while the second challenge raises issues of scale, complexity 
and pluralism. 
Fugitivity
For the radical democrat, as I have already argued, democracy is not really a form of 
government at all, but rather a political practice of citizens in which they organize themselves 
and exert collective power – often opposed to the government. According to Wolin (1996, 31), a 
prominent advocate of this view, democracy concerns citizens’ “possibilities for becoming 
political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of actions for 
realizing them.” Understood in this way, democracy occurs in those moments when people act 
together – democracy is in the protest, in the march, in the occupation, in the public assembly.
But this raises a question: if democracy occurs only in momentary outbursts of popular 
participation, then democracy is always fleeting, always on the run. In fact, this is precisely what 
Wolin theorizes: democracy is fugitive and momentary.
Institutionalization marks the attenuation of democracy
: leaders begin to appear; 
hierarchies develop; experts of one kind or another cluster around the centers of 
decision; order, procedure, and precedent displace a more spontaneous 
politics…Democracy thus seems destined to be a moment rather than form (
ibid
., 
39; emphasis added). 
We cannot expect democracy to last and attempts to institutionalize it are bound to fail. 
Moreover, democracy under this conceptualization appears as primarily reactive and 
defensive; it aims, in Wolin’s (2008, 258) words, to “recover lost ground.” If democracy only 
occurs as a response to exclusion or oppression or domination, then democracy, perversely, 
seems to require its antithesis in order to appear.
1
Beyond that – since “government is a full-
time, continuous activity” and democratic “politics is inevitably episodic, born of necessity, 
improvisational rather than institutionalized” (Wolin 2008, 255) – we can expect the exclusions, 
1
As I discuss in Chapter III, a similar view is implied by Ranciere’s division between “politics” and “police.” 

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oppressions, and dominations that characterize the non-democracy of statist politics to reappear 
once the democratic moment dies down. Even worse, on Wolin’s account, it seems we cannot 
avoid this conclusion because democracy itself cannot handle the necessary tasks of governance.
Thus, Wolin’s (1996, 42) pessimistic conclusion: “Democracy in the late modern world cannot 
be a complete political system, and…it ought not be hoped or striven for.” 
On the one hand, I understand and sympathize with Wolin’s pessimism. His conclusion 
seems a perfectly reasonable and well-justified response to the actual history of social 
movements and democratic governance over the past 50 years, if not over the past several 
hundred. Moreover, I cannot claim to present a compelling vision for a “complete political 
system” capable of resolving either our timeless political quandaries (e.g. balancing liberty and 
equality) or timely political problems (e.g. climate change or corporate power). On the other 
hand, I cannot resist the optimism, creativity and energy that animate the radically democratic 
practices of contemporary social movements. Certainly these actors think that transforming and 
recreating democratic self-governance on a long-term basis is a goal worth hoping for and 
working toward. I feel compelled, therefore, to ask: Might there be a way to conceptualize 
radical democracy as a political practice that can exist on its own terms? Can democracy, as a 
way for people to organize themselves, function on a more continuous basis? I return to this 
possibility in Chapter III, where I develop the practice of direct action as a mode of civic 
engagement that can potentially transcend a “fugitive” status, and in Chapter IV, where I develop 
the idea of networks as an organizational form that enable coordination, cooperation and, 
ultimately, self-governance. Though I sympathize with Wolin’s concerns, I contend that he is 
overly pessimistic about the positive, constructive and transformative potentials embedded in 
many social movement practices. In short, I propose to take seriously the claim that “This is 

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what democracy looks like!” by considering the potential for direct action and networked 
organization to function as core practices for ongoing experiments in radically democratic self-
governance.