ABSTRACT
Democracy has become an exemplary case of the loss of the power to signify: representing both supreme political virtue and the only means of achieving the common good. This chapter sketches contemporary cases that are implicated in any possible account of the status and potential of democracy in Europe. Democracy is an open concept as well as an open question, and those who claim expertise in definitions of what democracy must be risk authoritarian tendencies when they try to make their definitions stick. To root a discussion of democracy in fairly remote, classical and other, historical sources would be to see that the name has referred to a great diversity of ambitions, many of them at odds with more recent conventions. The chapter argues the obsessive focus of political and social theory on the internal claims of states. It shows that the regulative ideals of state law, as of international law, are encompassed on a Gauss curve of normal distribution.
