Gutmann and Thompson summarize the most widely accepted view of democratic legitimacy, synthesizing decades of work by John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas. Although disagreements among democratic theorists remain, which Gutmann and Thompson rehearse in detail, the general idea is that democracy is properly conceived not in terms of the collective will of the people but in terms of the quality of collective will formation. Democracy, then, does not rely on a simple identity between government and the governed, sovereign and subject, but consists in a mediated relation between the two. Democracy is a matter of the proper procedures. Political theorists don't install these procedures and get them to work They establish what the proper procedures should be if democracy is to hold.
But is the matter of missing democracy really so simple? Does it make sense to render each of the three cases in terms of democracy to come? As a missing utopia? Vhat if, instead, we think of each case in terms of the presence or realization of democracy, as what real existing democracy looks like? When we do, we see that the protestors invoke a democracy imagined as resistance. They appeal to pract�ce� of constitutionally protected questioning and c:ritique. The organizers showing the AI J azeera film are democratically engaged, active citizens. Like the protestors, Bush; too, is following and invoking a democratic script. He is carrying out his democratic mandate. He is executing a decision ·which, while necessarily in excess of the complex string of reasons and knowledge bearing upon it, takes place nonetheless within a space of power opened up and guaranteed by democratic procedures. And here, Gutmann and Thompson return as providers of insight into the knowledge of democracy. They don't decide to go to war or contest the decision to go to war. Rather they set out the procedures through which decisions should be made. And from their perspective, from the perspective of the neutral knowledge of the university) democracy is proceeding apace. This is what democracy looks like.
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