ABSTRACT
Contemporary democratic theory, in both its deliberative and agonistic variants, fixes its attention on the interactions of people and groups and the conditions under which their voices can be heard, agreements can be reached, decisions made, and violent conflicts of ideas and values averted or channelled into desirable forms. The enlarged mentality is too easily subsumed to the genre of political philosophy that concentrates on the negotiation of individual and collective interests and desires; the style of political thinking exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attempts to distinguish the general will from the aggregate of particular wills. Political judgement is responsible to the world only if it is open to a plurality of stories that are world-revealing in that they do not indulge in any of the various forms of anaesthesia – methods of escape from facing up to the way things are in the world.
