Abstract

Beginning from the apparently simple definition of democracy as "the rule of the people," my dissertation argues that democratic practice depends upon the questionable status of all political and legal foundations, to such an extent that it renders uncertain democracy's own definition and ground. ;In the opening chapter on Rousseau, I demonstrate how "the rule of the people" is necessarily torn between a process of establishing a particular definition of "the people" in a community's laws and institutions and the freedom of the people to revise themselves at will. I go on to argue that because the people must produce their own ground, and call themselves into being, they can never exactly give themselves their own law. It is never the people "themselves" who rule but, instead, some part of the community and some particular vision of the people ruling in the name of all. ;Torn between a principle of openness and closure, and without any way of knowing who "the people" are, democratic legitimacy is essentially resistant to theoretical attempts to determine with certainty what either democracy, or legitimacy, means. The paradoxes and dilemmas of democratic freedom are such that no theory, or definition, of democracy, can ever be an adequate guide to any particular "democratic" action. ;In the chapters that follow I explore whether the theoretical knowledge and public acceptance of the questionable nature of democratic foundations offers any resources for the construction of a particular form of democratic political practice--one that explicitly values the openness and contestability of its own decisions, institutions, and forms of identity. While each of the theorists I discuss--Claude Lefort, Hannah Arendt, Ronald Dworkin, Roberto Unger, Stanley Fish, Drucilla Cornell, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe--offers important insight into the openness at the foundation of democratic law and politics, I argue that they nonetheless each resist accepting the full extent of the challenge that the paradoxes of democratic legitimacy pose to theorization. I conclude that theories that identify the law of democracy with its openness to contest and revision can offer no theoretical answers to the paradoxes that plague democratic political practice, but, at best, procedures, or strategies, for negotiating the risks and possibilities its questions pose