ABSTRACT
My aim in this chapter will be to forge a perspective on the radicalisation and institutionalisation of democracy as one possible way of conceiving what it might mean to enable the crossing of fantasy and thus the avoidance of extreme utopianism with all its catastrophic consequences, discussed and exposed in the previous chapter. Such a perspective can only be an ethicopolitical one. The ethical dimension is crucial here; this is what our current experience shows. It is certainly one of the dimensions through which aporia surfaces within our current political and theoretical setting. Consider, for example, the contemporary crisis of democracy: the increasing hegemony of the dominant democratic model—both in theory and in practice—instead of generating optimism has reinforced the disappointment produced by the experience of democracy. In fact, it is one of the paradoxes of our age that the ‘success’ of democracy in Eastern Europe and South Africa is coupled by grave disappointment in Western Europe, the ‘birthplace’ of modern democracies. It is true, of course, that modern democracy is based on a constitutive tension, it has an ambiguous character. For example, as William Connolly has pointed out, both individualists and communalists are disappointed because democratic theory and practice entails the ambiguity of simultaneously differentiating and ‘harmonising’ individuality and commonality. This disappointment, however, stems from the belief of both sides that ‘this is an ambiguity to be resolved rather than acknowledged and expressed in the institutional life’ (Connolly, 1987:5– 6). John Dunn has also pointed out the intersection of ‘two incompatible rationalities’ that reveal another facet of the ambiguity of democracy: the need for a least badly controlled mode of government and the principle of human fulfilment and liberty (Dunn, 1979). It seems that democracy entails, of necessity, the attempt to combine apparently contradictory demands: the rule of law with the representation of particular interests—ensuring respect 123for human freedom and at the same time organising society in a way the majority considers just (Touraine, 1994:2–5).
