It is impossible not to be struck by the present sad state of democratic theory. I mean by democratic theory the quest for a social and political order that would give to citizens the greatest possible control of their fate — a formula obviously broad enough to be compatible with a vast variety of institutional experiments. This sad slate is the result of three facts : the demise of past democratic theory, i.e.. liberal theory ; the tragedy of socialist theory, which aimed at unmasking the fallacies and remedying the vices of liberalism ; the current decline of political philosophy. I will briefly examine the first fact below. As for the second, since my purpose in this note is not to review past theories but to try to understand why the dominant one went wrong and to suggest a few starting points for reconstruction, let me say simply that socialist theory seems split between perversion and impotence. There is perversion insofar as its Marxist-Leninist version has led to less, not more democracy, through the establishment not of classless societies, but of dictatorships over classes in the name of future liberation, to a ruthless suppression or denial of political liberties, and to the imposition of formidable sacrifices on individuals (justified by the « construction of socialism ») without their consent And there is impotence insofar as the social-democratic version, which defines socialism as the extension of political democracy to economic concentrations of power, i.e., the application of democratic procedures to all common enterprises, whether economic or political, has seemed incapable of achieving its goal, by contrast with liberal theory which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had succeeded in inspiring and mobilizing enough of a coalition of political and social forces to overthrow authoritarian and feudal regimes in a number of countries. (There is therefore an essential difference between the demise of liberal theory and the impotence of social democracy : the former results from developments subsequent to, indeed partly provoked by, the success of liberalism, the latter results from the inability to overcome the trends that have undermined reigning liberalism).
After the Critique of Rights: For a Radical Democratic Theory and Practice of Human Rights