Book Review: Democracy in What State?

Abstract

As Wendy Brown, one of the contributors of this timely book points out, today everyone seems to want to be seen as a 'democrat'. And, in the West, very few would object to the idea of democracy, at least in its vague sense. As Jacques Rancière, another contributor to the book notes, the idea of democracy as 'the power of the people' is opposed by many. Nevertheless, despite its continuous invocations (from Western leaders calling for 'democracy promotion' to movements denouncing the lack of it), democracy continues to remain a challenging and elusive concept. From Greek philosophy to contemporary theorists, the question of democracy has never found a complete resolution, with different authors providing different explanations of the term. This book is no different. It does not resolve 'the question of democracy', instead it explores its theoretical limits and potentials. Democracy in What State? is a thought-provoking book, which, as its title suggests, questions the commonly accepted view of democracy as simply identifiable with the State and insists on its conflictual, anarchic logic and inherent contradictions. As explained in the Foreword by the French publisher, the contributors were asked to address the questions: Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And, if so, how do you interpret the word? As well as these, other questions run through the different essays. What is it about democracy that makes it such an appealing but at the same time problematic concept? And what can be done to render democracy truly democratic? In actual fact, the book does not provide readers with specific strategic means on how to transform democracy -although notably the question of strategy is central to Bensaïd's enquiryand this could be seen as a limit of it. Nor does it present a single, overarching thesis. What it does offer is an impressive collection of essays, whose English translation is certainly welcome, and whose value rests, to put it in Rancière's terms, on its theorizing 'the scandalous' nature of democracy. A scandalous nature, however, that far from being understood only in negative terms, according to many of the book's contributors, provides democracy with its universal potentials. Because of the eclectic nature of this