ABSTRACT
Today there is an increasing urgency about the many attempts currently under way to revisit fundamental problems of democratic and state theory. Advocacy of the democratization of the state appears increasingly anemic in the face of the cooptation of legal systems, the expansion of policing agencies, and the brutalization of whole populations by military and financial means that are the common coin of the present. If there is an adequate political response to these initiatives of the wealthy and the powerful, it cannot only consist of the democratization of existing state structures; rather, these very structures need to be reconsidered for their efficacy in realizing emancipatory and egalitarian goals. But neither can these state structures be simply swept away-even if this were possible. The options of a truly liberal democracy and a thoroughly libertarian anarchy seem equally foreclosed for the present. If democracy is then to be usefully radicalized in service to emancipation and equality, its meaning must be reexamined in relation to other more fundamental political norms that can provide the ineradicable context for such radicalization.
