In this paper, I argue that Chantal Mouffe's agonistic project fails to yield an effective model of radical democracy. This failure, I contend, is a product of the way her radical model stipulates a determinate curbing of democratic contestation and contestability. To explain how Mouffe falls...

The rights and liberty of people are often considered the keystone to freedom and democracy. Discerning the scope and limits of those same rights have been the controversy for which judicial systems were designed. The arbitrary, and sometimes systematic, discrimination derived from these...

Should the failure of European multiculturalism and Rawlsian political liberalism to answer the challenge of illiberal religion be a cause for dismay for liberals today? Or does liberalism, especially in its American variety, posses theoretical and practical resources that are not exhausted by...

Alexis de Tocqueville views the early to middle of the 19th century as a period of great revolutionary transition from age of aristocracy to the democratic era. In Democracy In America, Tocqueville's project, in turn, was to conceptualize the democratic institutional and cultural factors that...

Theorists as distinct as Giorgio Agamben and Robert Cover have emphasized the paradox at the center of democratic legal authority, viz. that it cannot be self-derived but must ultimately rest on some extra-legal phenomenon, usually an act of exclusion. It has not been generally recognized that...

In this paper I reclaim Susan Okin's provocative essay, 'Multiculturalism Bad for Women' (1999) for feminist democratic theory. The motivating question for feminist democratic theory in this case is what place women residing in minority cultural communities should have in the democratic process....