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

 
Justificatory Democracy: Democracy as a Method for Legitimating Rules and Rulers 
Second, democracy is invoked as a way of legitimating rules and rulers. According to 
this conceptualization, democracy provides a justification for some to rule over others through 
the use of either aggregative procedures such as proportional or majoritarian elections, or 
deliberative procedures designed to produce consensus. Differences between aggregative and 
deliberative democrats notwithstanding (Young 2002), thinking about democracy as a way of 
legitimating rulers is dominant within much of democratic political theory. An important task of 
these theories is to solve the “legitimation problem.” Such theories ask, ‘How can a rule or ruler 
– each with coercive implications for citizens – be legitimated through democratic procedures?’ 
Habermas (1996) has famously tried to solve the legitimation problem in contemporary 
democracies by theorizing how citizens might discursively participate in the polity, even though 
politics is too complex and citizens too diverse to “rule” in the more traditional sense. “The 
democratic process
bears the entire burden of legitimation” (Habermas 1996, 450). However, 
insofar as we understand democracy to mean “rule by the people,” democracy is not best 
conceptualized primarily as a way of legitimating the rule of some over others. Consider 
Lummis’ quote in the epigraph: “‘Democracy’ was once a word of the people, a critical word, a 

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revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add 
legitimacy to their rule. While there may well be forms of representation or delegation that are 
compatible with democracy, to reduce democracy to a justification for some to rule over others is 
to abandon the notion that “the people” might actually “rule” themselves. Though elections may 
be democratic, they are not the same as democracy. Many of the Egyptian revolutionaries, who I 
think were clearly motivated by the democratic ideal, opposed early elections in their country 
because they knew they would be manipulated by the main powerhouses in the country: the 
Army and the Muslim Brotherhood (and they were right). I – and, based on the survey data 
noted above, I suspect many of my fellow citizens, too – have wondered if a similar dynamic is 
in play in the U.S. context: elections are controlled by powerful elites. Wolin (2008, 47), for 
example, has argued that the U.S. should be regarded not as a “full” or “consolidated” 
democracy, but rather as a “‘managed democracy,’ a political form in which governments are 
legitimated by elections they have learned to control.” Fundamentally, I reject justificatory 
invocation of democracy, because democracy’s function is not to legitimate rulers, but to enable 
self-rule. Democracy’s task is not to authorize some to govern others, but to authorize all of us 
to govern ourselves. 
Radical Democracy: Democracy as an Ideal 
Third, democracy is conceptualized as a radical ideal. I mean radical in two distinct, but 
related, senses: 1) going to the root meaning of a concept, and 2) as advocating fundamental 
change. In the first place, to advocate for radical democracy entails an effort to recover and 
reaffirm the root meaning of the word. Democracy is the conjoining of 
demos
(people) with 
kratia
(power or rule).
Standard definitions slip away from this primary idea. The 
Oxford English 
Dictionary 
tells us that democracy means “government by the people”…The 

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trouble starts…when ‘power’ is replaced by ‘government.’ If ‘government’ means 
governance – the process of governing – then it means about the same as power, 
and there is no difficulty. But if it means ‘a government’ – the political 
institutions existing in a society – then we have to an entirely different category of 
proposition…What we have now is no longer a definition but a hypothesis. The 
hypothesis is that the way to get power to the people is to put them in charge of 
‘the government,’ that is, the state apparatus (Lummis 1996, 23). 
Hence, democracy, at its core, means rule by the people, or a condition in which people have 
power – 
nothing more, nothing less
. As Lummis (
ibid
. 22) puts it:
[D]emocracy is not the name of any particular arrangement of political or 
economic institutions. Rather, it is a situation that political or economic 
institutions may or may not help to bring about. It describes an ideal, not a 
method for achieving it. It is not a kind of government, but an end of 
government; not a historically existing institution, but historical project. 
At its core, then, democracy is about people having political power. More than that, it is 
premised on the notion of political equality, that people have roughly equal power to shape 
common affairs. And, to say that people share power, or share in ruling themselves is, to use 
Arendt’s language in describing the ancient Athenian polis, fundamentally a situation in which 
there is, in fact, “no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled” (Arendt 1963, 20). Rather 
than being ruled, democracy entails people ruling themselves. Rather than authorizing someone 
else’s power, democracy occurs when people mobilize their own power. Rather than being 
governed, democracy is about governing ourselves. Democracy as a radical ideal, therefore, is 
about self-governance, and entails a vision of a truly free and egalitarian political order to be 
perpetually strived for, if never fully achieved.
I do not just mean radical in the etymological sense, however, but also in the political 
sense. Here, radical is juxtaposed to reform. While the reformist wishes to change certain 
policies or tinker around the edges, the radical wishes to change the basic structure of society – 
its basic organization of power and patterns of ownership. Hence, the “radical” in radical 

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democracy means not only holding tight to democracy’s root meaning, but also viewing it as 
something that is politically radically, in the sense of being subversive of, and seeking to 
transform, all society’s basic power structure. Indeed, the former implies the latter. If 
democracy means a situation in which people have power, then democracy is subversive of any 
situation in which power is concentrated away from people rather than dispersed among them.
“[R]adical democracy is subversive everywhere. It is subversive not only in military 
dictatorships but also in countries that are called democratic…It is subversive not only inside big 
corporations but also inside big unions” (Lummis 1996, 25). Perhaps the most concentrated 
form of power in the world is the modern state. Following Weber, I define the state as the entity 
in society (or a territory) that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. It is safe 
to say that such an entity – all the more so given modern technologies of surveillance and 
violence – possesses enormous coercive power. From my perspective, then, I see radical 
democracy as, at a minimum, in tension with the state and, perhaps, as essentially incompatible 
with the state. It is worth pausing for a moment to appreciate how divergent this 
conceptualization of democracy is from the prior two. Whereas the institutional approach 
defines
democracy as a set of state institutions and justificatory approach views democracy as a 
way of 
legitimating
state institutions, the radical approach sees the democratic state as, in a 
sense, an oxymoron. Radical democracy is something that occurs outside of, and often in 
opposition to, the democratic state.