Why Democracy Is Oppositional

John Medearis takes the best of contemporary political theory and brings it face to face with the lived experience of real politics. The result is a fresh, new approach to democratic theory.
-- Marc Stears, University of Oxford

Medearis argues that democratic practices and movements always produce unintended impediments to democracy, which in turn spur and sustain other movements and practices against those impediments, and so on. This is not an argument for a kind of political stasis. The struggle with the alienated products of our activity is simply a condition of our existence that, in this case, also signifies a relentless desire for equality and freedom. This formulation means that the institutional results of any movement at any time are provisional rather than enduring and that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between democracy as an ideal and as a practice. Clearly written and carefully argued, this book upends deliberative and elite democratic theories and lays the groundwork for a necessary advance over existing participatory and agonistic theories of democracy.
-- Nicholas Xenos, University of Massachusetts, Amherst