Review Essay: Romancing Sovereignty: Democracy and Its Enthusiasts

• Date: 01 October 2010
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591710372866
• Published date: 01 October 2010
• Subject Matter: Articles

Review Essays

Political Theory

38(5) 712 –722

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Romancing

Sovereignty:

Democracy and

Its Enthusiasts

Twenty Theses on Politics, by Enrique Dussel (Translated by George Ciccariello-

Maher). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 160 pp.

Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah

Arendt, by Andreas Kalyvas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 326 pp.

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, by Nikolas Kompridis.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. 337 pp.

Reviewed by: James M. Glass, Department of Government and Politics, University

of Maryland, College Park

DOI: 10.1177/0090591710372866

The fundamental question in these texts is how might political thought reju-

venate the theory of democracy and its practice. The argument for democracy

however moves through curious theorists; with Kalyvas, it’s Max Weber, Carl

Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (primarily her work in On Revolution); with

Kompridis, Heidegger (by way of critique of Habermas), though with occa-

sional reference to Cavell, Dewey, and Emerson, and with Dussel an amalgam

of theorists from Marx to Castoriadis to green theory. It’s not the practical

recommendations for democratic practice that distinguishes these narratives,

but the interrogation of some surprising political and social theorists for inspi-

ration in rethinking the foundations of democratic theory.

All three are impressive scholarly achievements, particularly in pointing

to the importance of concepts like founding, the extraordinary, disclosure,

natality, utopia, transgression, phantasy, and receptivity—concepts one

would not ordinarily associate with democratic practice. Yet they all share

common enemies: procedural liberalism, possessive individualism, the nor-

mal, the habitual, the bureaucratic, and most importantly, the politics of the

ordinary. And all idealize the sovereignty of the people as the major focus of

democratic theory.