New Democratic Theory?

[This is the introductory chapter to my second book, Democratic Theorists in Conversation: Turns in Contemporary Thought, published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan. It, as the chapter title suggests, offers an inquiry into whether the field of democracy studies/democratic theory is entering new ground. This line of inquiry is the most commented upon theme in reviews of this book: some found it a distraction, others under-explored, and others yet a vitalizing essence carried through the book on the whole. What’s your impression, I wonder?]

Introduction

Something is happening to democracy. A change has occurred. An entire
discourse has been transformed as a result of recent logical and moral shifts in the methods of research and the ontologies of theory. Democracy is now a body of knowledge unlike that we have seen before. By democracy I mean the entirety of human knowledge about the subject – the way we think about it as a whole and the way we institutionalize or measure what we think are its most basic tenets. Today democracy is, for example, being described differently to the way that Dahl (1956), Mayo (1960), Sartori (1957), Schumpeter (1942), Macpherson (1977) and Dewey (1916) described it in their own works and in their own times.

The genealogy of democracy has changed; ancient Greece is a child of democracy’s much older parents. Democracy’s historiography has been broadened; secret and forgotten democratic societies are increasingly cropping up across research into the past. Research methods for democracy
have become more capacious; there is an observable shift in the type and amount of data used in the econometrics of democratic polities and behaviours. The theory of democracy has become increasingly comparative – especially between disparate societies. And all of this is still happening. Once people thought everything to be said about democracy had been said – but a new world of democracy is now upon us.

A portal has been created. This new door has recently been permitting scholars of democracy to explore an oppressed, secret and forgotten area of the discourse on democracy. Novel and celebrated works on democracy are increasing, possibly as a consequence of Martin Bernal’s importantly controversial Black Athena (1987, 1991, and 2006) books. These types of books, chapters and articles are appearing across disciplinary boundaries – from history, anthropology, philosophy, biology, international relations and archaeology amongst others. And they are all arguing the same theme: democracy is not what many thought and still think it to be. Democracy is being found in unexpected places and times. We have broken the boundaries of an entire discourse.

Democracy as a discourse has been a body of knowledge colonized. Before the turn to new democratic theory, as a consequence of transdisciplinary
post foundational and post universal impacts, the study of democracy and its praxis were inescapably European. Its origins were Greek, its developments and most important moments were English, French and US-American. Contributions to theory and praxis were later made by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and other mostly Western states. Democracy was not a product of anywhere but the West. Its genealogy said so. Its historiography said so. And its practices said so. Democracy was, ironically, often reviled by the bygone oligarchs of Eurocentric places until it became popular. Oligarchs now often sing in praise of this thing called ‘democracy’ whilst still working in the shadows to bring certain ‘bastions of democracy’ like Australia, the EU or the USA, to its knees.

Democracy surely had existed over thousands of years in many complex
different forms we have yet to fully understand across certain parts of mostly southern, northern and western Europe. But it is not the product of these places. The history, theory, genealogy and practice of democracy had, as a result of empire and power, become colonized by European thinking. Once the discourse formed, the doors were closed, the boundaries cemented, and the blinders installed.

It is difficult to define when this happened. Indeed, it is improbable to give the exact moment of this ‘discourse colonization’. It is something that happened gradually and unintentionally over time. It was and is the product of the success of first modernity, as Ulrich Beck might say. For more than five hundred years much of western Europe held power over substantive parts of the globe. The social value of universities as many individuals understand them today grew therein. Literate individuals
formed literate societies. Religion and ideologies were strong. It was an age of certainty. It was a time where the clichés of today were then normative and guiding tropes: ‘might is right’, ‘the white man’s burden’, ‘the modesty of women’, and ‘a man’s place [unstained honour] among peerage’ are some examples.

For many European individuals in this type of meta-society, the indigenous, African, Arab, and Asian were backwards: their histories, politics, social practices and normative passions were heathenish. They were objects of mirth, curiosity and fear. Entire human systems were trinkets and glaringly patronized or considered dangerous and viciously destroyed. The dominance of imperial Europe degraded much less powerful human societies and formed, as it were, the club that everyone wanted to join. Some wanted to get in to learn the ways of power so as to use them for later subversions of imperial Europe. Others wanted to join their dominators so as to be able to sit themselves on the thrones of narcissism, idiocy, myth, violence and mistake.

The portal to the new discourse of democracy was created by the individuals across time and space that identified this colonization. It was
and is the people that could name this condition, build the concerns about it, and then make the recommendations for how to proceed in response to it that we owe our thanks. For me the list of these individuals is not lengthy and is mostly composed of people still living today. Each of the individuals interviewed in the coming chapters of this book contributes to this de-colonization of the discourse. New democratic theory recontextualizes Eurocentric democracy – often confused as representing democracy itself – as an important part of the discourse, not the domineering owner of it.

But there are problems. This is a new ontology. And there are debates around it. Some think that this portal that I am identifying does not exist. Some are reserved and legitimately cautious: claims to the ‘new’ are often straw people. We have been led astray before. It is best to entertain the plausibility, to keep a sharp eye, and to see how this supposedly ‘new’ ontology plays out. Will it form a global turn and change the foundations of an entire system of thought and practice? Or will it fizzle and pop? Is there or is there not a ‘new democratic theory’?

These positions and their respective shades in between come gradually
through each conversation in this book. As thinkers draw from
their past and current works, experiences and future outlooks we gain
insight into how certain cutting edges of democratic theory seem to be
shaped. As we read through these candid moments we gain the ability
to start forming a multi-dimensional object in our minds – an object
that represents one of the cutting edges in the contemporary study of
democracy. And as will be seen in the Conclusion to this book there are
a few objects of this type present within these pages. We see the worries
about where we are heading. We see the recontextualizations of the past.
And we see serious debates about what the most valuable emphases of
democracy should be.

There is in here too the answer we are after. Does new democratic
theory exist and is this a describable phenomenon? As will come to be seen in this book I think that the answer is yes. Recent publications and arguments at international conferences are, for example, identifying
irreversible changes to democracy. These are changes that come about
in response to post foundational and post universal turns in human
knowledge – not just in the social sciences.

‘Post foundational’ and ‘post universal’ are, to me, synonymous.
They are used in this book to signify the underlying reality of the content
being discussed. Arguments are made from positions affected by, but not limited to: cosmopolitanism, the global risk society or ‘age of uncertainty’, the recognition of the ‘other’, the global human roots of knowledge, and the transdisciplinary reality of discourses. Together, these items break apart previous foundations or claims to the universal. We are now in the business of picking up these shards of previous erroneous foundations and building them differently with new materials.

A critical review of the literature

We would do well to stop now and set out the details of the changes established in the paragraphs above. The claims made are significant ones. They need to be carefully described. One justification for doing this review is that new democratic theory is a recent phenomenon – hence the ‘new’ about it. The ontology built in this book is not widely known outside of democratic theory. It is not widely known within democratic theory either. Another justification for this pause to look at the literature is that it affords us a good opportunity to seriously discuss one major aspect from each forthcoming conversation in this book.

As described in the Preface, the conversations (chapters) are organized into thematic groups. The first group is history and genealogy. The second is theory. The third and last group is normative and practical outlooks. The turns in the literature around these themes are also, together, some of the main components of new democratic theory. Several conversations addressed more than one of these themes so the conversations are sorted around what I thought were their greatest thematic focus. It is these main themes that will be discussed in this literature review.

History and genealogy

The first theme of this book looks to the past. It looks to the way that democracy as a whole has evolved. In other words, it looks to the genealogy
and historiography of democracy. The turn, as I and others see it, has happened on two fronts. One front is that democracy’s genealogy has been seriously challenged. The works of Keane (2009), Schemeil (2000), Isakhan (2012), Memel-Fotê (1991), Stockwell (2011, 2013), Muhlberger (2011), and Paine (2011), have, for instance, given evidence of democracy pre-dating Herodotus’ (1996 [460 bce]) first use of the word ‘democracy’. Keane argues that evidence in support of a rhetoric of democracy, in Linear B script, is present in Mycenaean stone tablets. Isakhan argues that ancient religious epics from Babylon and Assyria show evidence of assembly and representative democracy. Paine describes how indigenous peoples in North America had their own collective governance mechanisms independent of Greek or European influence. And Stockwell gives detailed evidence of democratic behaviour from ancient Judea and Phoenicia which, for example, pre-date democratic Athens.

I too have had a role to play in this challenge to genealogy. In my book Evolutionary Basic Democracy (2013) I describe that nonhumans offer a bounty of evidence on how to govern collectively through ways we as humans consider arguably democratic. I show in my own way, but similarly to Isakhan’s and Bernal’s heuristics, that democracy’s genealogy has been erroneously and speciously tied to Greece, Great Britain, imperial France and the USA. If it was not tied to these supposed safeguards and bastions of democracy across time and space then democracy was preserved by ancient Rome and Italian city-state republics or Swiss Cantons. Yet as I showed in Evolutionary Basic Democracy these are false narratives. The Republic of Rome is, for example, not today considered to have been a ‘democratic’ place (Matyszak 2013) and the ‘barbarians’ (Gauls, Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths and Saracens among others) that sacked Rome are increasingly looking to have made their decisions through assembly and possibly representative forms of democratic governance (Isakhan and Stockwell 2013).

One particularly effective way of summarizing the turn that has happened
in the genealogy of democracy comes from Schemeil (2000). His work looks at ‘democracy before democracy’. This type of work fractures and breaks apart the Greek foundations that numerous democratic theorists, like Sartori (1957, 2012), Dahl (1956: 8), and Crick (2002) had thought democracy to be built on. The vast majority, if not entirety, of democracy’s discourse had placed Greece as the founder and inventor of democracy. If not Greece then its foundations were French or US-American. This is no longer the case.

This turn in the genealogy of democracy can be taken further. Indeed, this challenge to older foundations of democracy can cut across the entire discourse. And John Dunn is the one who sets this out in this book. He argues that any aspect of democracy that we think we know – its history, genealogical narrative, practices, institutions and theories are entirely lacking in evidence. Backing his claim are classicists like Asmonti (2006) or Sissa (2012). These classicists are rehashing dated foundations and uncovering new primary data about the nature of democracy in ancient Athens or ancient Persia respectively. They are part of the corps of thinkers showing that nothing is definite regarding the democracy of the ancients. Nothing is certain. There is such a poverty of evidence to work from that we simply cannot, should not, be making the claims that many democratic theorists have made over past generations. So paltry is this evidence that Dunn argues we need to step away from this thing ‘democracy’ and to entirely reconsider it. We need to uncover the global truth about democracy’s history and genealogy. We need, I think, to actually start understanding it in a way that meets the rigour of contemporary scientific thinking.

Francis Fukuyama has similar positions. He would probably agree with Dunn that the evidence on any type of government or governance in times predating 10,000 BCE makes it difficult to uncover the contemporaneous
details of politics back then. Fukuyama places democracy as mostly the product of first modernity (French and US-American developments) and he also argues that the genealogy has changed. Democracy for Fukuyama developed gradually and over long periods of time across the entire human-populated parts of the planet. It started as egalitarian governance where the individual was sublimated by the group. It was effectively a global race to a liberal, individualistic, constitutional, multiparty and human rights finish which ‘the people’ of the USA ostensibly reached first. Although the telos of his narrative is for me debatable, it is predicated on the post foundational starting point of democracy. That starting point is the entire human animal evolving its own democratic practices along with nonhumans. Thus the starting point of Fukuyama’s democratic theory matches the genealogical turn despite his reluctance to say that these were ‘democratic’ times.

History, or the historiography, of democracy is closely related to the turn in genealogy. Historiography is the work that happens in a mostly horizontal capacity. For example, if one were to look at the Visigoths in the 4th century CE, the process of working contemporaneously with evidence from or of the 4th century and pushing hard against anachronism to uncover the delicate details of these historic peoples would be a historiographic act. In other words, it is about broadening and deepening our quality of knowledge of historical peoples and places. In this book historiography is not so much about describing the historical narrative of democracy, that is genealogy, but rather about the work that is ongoing about better understanding historic periods that are claimed to have founded democracy. That is historiography – a horizontal expansion of knowledge for a particular period of time in space. It improves the quality of knowledge on historic things. It is the other front.

The turn in historiography is that each foundational period of democracy is gaining more detailed clarity. Held’s arguments in this book are integral to understanding this process. Scholars are re-examining the historical foundations of democracy because claims to the universal ownership of democracy from those periods are appearing increasingly specious. Held uses cosmopolitan theory as a means to broaden any particular history through the recognition of ‘the other’. He looks to build more capacious starting points for his preferred model of democracy by breaking out of the imperial ownerships of democracy. To offer one example, thinkers like Dryzek (2006), Keane (2003), and Chomsky (2006) look at the USA’s flaunted style of democratic governance. They examine its underlying concepts, working institutions and teleological outlooks. In it they see that the USA’s model is not the winner of a race to democracy. It is but rather another polity in serious trouble – another polity facing the decline of its democratic form. Its claims to being the democracy for the globe are untenable. US democracy is built on the history and thinking of other times and places. It is limited by old historiography. James Madison for example drew heavily from evidence of democratic Hellas. So did most, if not all, thinkers on democracy during the ‘representative era’ (circa sixteenth to twentieth centuries CE). Maybe US democracy will be rejuvenated by this broadening and deepening of the democratic places from times past.

Albert Weale is helpful here. The conversation in this book helps to illuminate how the history of democracy has been changing. He argues
that there is what Isakhan called a ‘standard narrative of democracy’.
It is a very limited story of democracy’s places in history and an explanation for how it came through, survived some say, into our present
times. But as argued here in this Introduction, and as Weale argues in this book, this narrative is erroneous. Troubling is the fact that it is the most commonly taught narrative. This story of democracy’s history is perfidious. It is ethically wrong. It has colonized an entire discourse. But it is falling to pieces due in part to the turns in the two fronts discussed above.

Theory

The turn towards the ‘new’ in theory is predicated on a constellation of social and political theories and methods. Despite the arguments between the thinkers involved in that constellation their methods and ontologies are interrelated. Second Modernity (Beck and Grande, 2010), cosmopolitan theory (Held, 1995), the world risk society (Beck, 1999), the age of uncertainty (Bauman, 2007), pluriversality (Keane, 2009), post foundationalism and post universalism are, together, quite helpful. They
help us pick apart the façade of old theory. And a number of thinkers have been actively picking. This old theory of democracy lies in pieces. It is being rebuilt via the rules of these new methods and ontologies.

Some of the methods and ontologies cited in the paragraph above may be unfamiliar. A few of the terms used deserve descriptive attention. Second Modernity is a term with many siblings: liquid modernity, next modernity and new modernity are some of them. And it is a term belonging not only to Ulrich Beck. Wheeler (1999) for example uses it. So do others. As Beck shares in his interview, he follows others and others follow him. The goal of Second Modernity is similar, if not the same, as the goal of new democratic theory. It is to clearly demonstrate that a rupture, or separation, has occurred between one older period of modernity and one newer period of modernity – or one older period of democratic theory and one newer period. Thus Second Modernity argues that the world as a result of cosmopolitanism, globalization and the age of uncertainty or risk society is different to the world that existed before these phenomena took centre stage.

Cosmopolitanism is inseparable from globalization. It depends on the phenomena beholden to the ‘global age’. They are observable, empirically testable realities like transnational capital, transborder relations between citizenries, and shared concerns over the environmental fate of distant lands or the planet itself. It is fed by globalization and in turn feeds the growth of ‘the global’.

Cosmopolitanism is a widely used term and one not without its core debates. In this book we see two different usages. Beck depends on cosmopolitan methods and theory in his description of the separation between modernities. Held, contrastingly, agrees with Beck only in part. He sees cosmopolitan praxes as fundamental to the reflexive modernization of democracy or global governance, but not as a tool that can be used to argue a real, empirical, separation of modernities.

Keane plays his own part in this understanding of cosmopolitanism. I will explain it through a term that Keane has used: pluriversality. This term is used to describe the complex network of relations between bodies of governance and government. Hundreds of different, fluid, and changing institutions, individuals, movements and surprises form the pluriverse. It is not bounded to the borders of states. It is not sublimated by the dominance of a given majority of citizens. It is a confluence of assembly and representative actions bearing the purpose of monitoring power. Keane’s pluriverse is cosmopolitan. It is global. It is the nervous system of a third democratic age – the age of monitory democracy. It depends on the internet, social media, mobile phones and satellites which Keane collectively identifies as the technologies permitting a proliferation of the ‘age of communicative abundance’.

I agree with Keane. But I use his path-breaking observations and heuristics to establish my own grounds. The ‘technological revolution’ brought to life primarily by the internet is descriptive of new democratic theory. It is key to separating first and second modernities. It is undeniably vital for the success of cosmopolitanism’s growth. Thus the pluriverse, cosmopolitan theory and Second Modernity together share a dependence on the internet. They share dependence on the global risk society, the fast moving uncertainty of both domestic and global affairs, and they have together built post foundationalism or post universality. They are the parents of new democratic theory.

To be clear, this birth of a new discourse for democracy is rife with the same theoretical problems its older self was struggling with. A dramatic
foundational change has occurred; not the resolution of complicated, difficult and damningly ubiquitous problems. I hope, however, that this new foundation will help unlock our capacity to resolve these challenges.
Recalling for instance what I shared about Ramin Jahanbegloo in the Preface, he gives us two serious challenges to overcome. They are the underlying threat of violence backing any democratic polity and the drop off of the public from democratic life – from the politics of democracy. The inability for previous theories of democracy to respond to apathy and to justify the underlying violence of states and the international order is a ceiling for Jahanbegloo. Democracy cannot progress without resolving these long-standing issues. Maybe democracy cannot exist if its underwriter is violence and its people are uninterested.

The literature on apathy and violence in democracy is vast. Descriptive and analytic works on apathy are, for example, plentiful (Hay, 2007; Mindich, 2005; Stoneman, 2008). Although Mindich (2005) does offer suggested reforms to children’s television (more news content), tougher university entry requirements (in depth knowledge of political affairs), and reforms for the professional practices of journalism itself, it is the normative, prescriptive, works on how we might come to resolve apathy that are less common. This is probably why Jahanbegloo depends on the democratic theory of Hannah Arendt. There is no widely agreed upon response in democratic theory to this apathy issue. A deserving question is why there is a dearth of theory for responding to apathy? Is it due to the difficulty of determining what democracy’s actual nature is?

For violence the bounty of evidence is on showing that democracies have mostly been dependent on controlled militarism (Diamond and Plattner, 1996; Brown et al., 2011) but that they are today less prone to waging war than non-democracies (Everts, 2002). Much less attention has been paid to developing the praxis of achieving democracy and making enforceable democratic decisions without the threat of violence. As asked more candidly in the Preface, is this actually possible? Did for example the abandonment of Gandhian non-violence, Buddhist non-violence or Judaic non-violence as possible models for the governance of societies and states happen because they are impractical?

Another difficulty for new democratic theory to resolve comes from
Rosanvallon’s interview. It is related to apathy. How can governments reengage citizens in democratic politics? And how can citizens give a unified voice to their governments that there exists a weary but strong trust
between the two bodies? And that existing governance is legitimate, and that the state has by way of trust and legitimacy a strong authority to rule cooperatively with citizens for a period of time? Rosanvallon reexamines
clichés in democratic theory: people in general avoid politics, people are indeterminate, but democracy depends on a people’s consent. If the last sentence models reality, the situation today for democratic governments is worse than trying to catch slippery fish with one’s bare hands. Rosanvallon builds through his theory of ‘counter-democracy’ the underlying constellation of democratic citizenship necessary to overcome the causes of political apathy. Rosanvallon’s argument here is one possible response to Jahanbegloo’s concerns over apathy.

The conversations in this book raise significant problems for the theory of democracy in a way that is novel and different from previous engagements. It is not only that new problems are emerging and that there are new demands upon democratic theory – but that longstanding problems are being looked at differently. We are innovating new responses to old problems. As Beck and Jahanbegloo might for instance argue, a new era of democracy is upon us. This is happening across its history, genealogy and theory. It is also happening across its observable practices. Shifts and changes are occurring to democracy as a result of the methods and theories outlined in the paragraphs above.

Normative and practical outlooks

We now look to the last section of this book. It is, thematically, the
smallest. Although normative points are made in every conversation, there are only three conversations which are arguably in majority targeting what we should be doing. From the literature, there are numerous examples of turns towards the new. Turns that reflect the new theory or that demand new theory to emerge. One example is the observed emergence of transnational constellations of citizenries (Edwards and Gaventa, 2001; Münch, 2001). These are forming ‘global civil society’. Although historians have shown that transnational ties have existed for centuries (Eckstein and Terpstra, 2010), these ties have not existed in the way they do today. Citizens are increasingly bound to other citizens through a pluriverse of social, political and economic ties. This is facilitated by the age of communicative abundance. The internet, mobile phones and social media are facilitating the formation of rapidly forming and often indeterminate constellations of citizens from countries around the world. That is novel.

Chomsky, for example, discusses the practice of citizens from different states forming transnational groups of affected citizenries. Although I see this as the formation of transnational demoi (so too does Bohman, 2007) others seem to favour calling them international allegiances between citizenries (Aligica, 2008). Regardless of preferred heuristics, there is an observable growth in the practices of democratic governance between citizens of different countries. These practices are affecting domestic and international politics. For Chomsky it is imperative that citizens continue to form effective groups or institutions of governance for self-regulation. Citizens need to do this to defy brutish corporations and other evils of this world that are predators to democracy. What Chomsky discusses is a shift from the practising behaviour of individual citizens. It is again a phenomenon wholly dependent on cosmopolitanism, pluriversality and Second Modernity.

The practice of global democratic governance is also in contestation. There is no definite agreement that the US-American, liberal constitutional variety of democracy has won the day. Dryzek argues that the democratic governance of the world has to come, as a model, from the world itself. Using a model endemic to a specific place and from specific histories and thinking excludes ‘the other’. No matter how hard some thinkers shut their eyes and believe in the Washington Consensus as the path to global democratic governance – there are many millions of individuals in this world that simply refuse to do democracy in that way. This is in part why Dryzek argues for a more capacious and deliberative approach between competing models of global democratic governance. The argument that the victorious democracy of first modernity (i.e. the USA) is the logical scion for global democratic governance is unethical. And given the arguments that we have so far covered from Dunn, Weale, Keane, Beck and Held, this claim to democratic supremacy over others is fallacious. Potemkin lives again – only in the hallways of Washington (one could equally say Beijing or Moscow).

Another unusual and new normative standpoint for democracy comes from outside the traditional boundaries of democracy as a field of study. Biologists are, for example, increasingly arguing that nonhumans practice
their own forms of democracy. I surveyed this research by biologists at length in a previous work (Gagnon, 2013: 45–6). Boehm (2012), Korb (2008), Reuvan and Eldar (2011), and Smukalla et al. (2008) each argue a different species to have different democratic practices. These nonhumans exist through doing things democratically. In other words, democracy is their mechanism for survival and propagation. Boehm makes the case for democracy in other primates, Korb for termites, Reuvan and Eldar for bacteria, and Smukalla et al. (2008) for yeast. For some readers the fact that observations of democracy in nonhumans are being made may be astounding. What interests me is that some biologists are arguing that humans have much to learn about democracy from nonhumans. Seeley makes this case the most emphatically. He argues why humans should observe the impressive decision making system honeybees have evolved.

Tying it together

The three normative points that we have looked at in this Introduction are novel. They are different from the ‘shoulds’ of democracy from times predating the technological revolution described earlier. We have reached the point that I am now comfortable with the statement that the turns we have looked at in this Introduction produce, together, at least some foundations of new democratic theory. There may be others unbeknownst to me. There is a separation between past and present – between old and new. There are new methods, new theories and new observed phenomena that support this claim to separation. Democracy has forever changed. We are pioneering a new discourse.

This book is the sum of the eleven conversations described along the literature review given above and in the Preface. It not only offers valuable candid insights into the works of these leading thinkers, it also raises many of our current cutting edges in the study of democracy. There is more to this. The main research focused intention of this book was to first see how eleven different democratic theorists would come to define democracy. But it was also to see what their reactions would be to the ontology of ‘new democratic theory’.

The result is striking. There is still doubt about how true this turn to the new in democratic theory is. We still have a long way to go to powerfully demonstrate that this ontology is not the specious clothes of a straw woman – but that it is something much more. Keane argues that events are happening today in the realms of democracy for which we have no words, and no concepts to make sense of them. Beck argues similarly. Weale and Dunn see the history of democracy as spilling over their previous colonial boundaries. The history of democracy is irrevocably attached to the post foundational history of the world, the human animal and our nonhuman relatives. Seeley takes us in that direction by demonstrating that there are many nonhumans which have, even if not practiced (especially for the high apes), their own evolved democratic systems.

The following chapters contain consistent examples of the kinds of challenges to colonized democratic theory that were touched on in the
paragraph above. The thinkers in this book have rejuvenated and revitalized the study of democratic theory. We now turn to John Dunn and
one of the biggest challenges democratic theory has to face.

Articulations of democracy Boundaries of democracy Breeds of democracy Characterizations of democracy Classifications of democracy Collections of democracy Conceptions of democracy Concepts of democracy Conceptualisations of democracy Conceptualizations of democracy Constructions of democracy Contours of democracy definitions of democracy Delineations of democracy Demarcations of democracy democracy democrat democratic Democratic design Democratic innovation Democratic innovations Democratic Theories democratic theory Democratical democratization descriptions of democracy Designs of democracy Details of democracy Determinations of democracy Divisions of democracy Elucidations of democracy Exemplifications of democracy Explanations of democracy Explications of democracy Expositions of democracy Families of democracy Figures of democracy Formalisations of democracy Formalizations of democracy forms of democracy Frames of democracy Groups of democracy Ideals of democracy Ideas of democracy Ideations of democracy Interpretations of democracy kinds of democracy meanings of democracy Models of democracy Modes of democracy Molds of democracy Moulds of democracy Number of democracy Numbers of democracy Orders of democracy Outlines of democracy Patterns of democracy Profiles of democracy Representations of democracy Schemes of democracy Sets of democracy Sorts of democracy Species of democracy Structures of democracy Styles of democracy Themes of democracy theories of democracy