ABSTRACT
As a form of government, democracy exists only in imaginations and wishes for a society that is no place. Democracy holds the promise of free and equal citizenship with the opportunity for participating in the just distribution of power. As a political orientation, however, democracy resists power and, unlike democratic governance, power is everywhere. Indeed, power’s ruthless ubiquity has banished democracy to utopia, only to appear in moments of resistance to it. Still, over the last fifteen years, as more nations held open elections for the first time, democracy was labeled the “unfinished project.” With its suggestion of a completion date, this claim is wrong. Democracy, at most, inhabits our praxis as an open-ended, “unfinishable” process of experience without resolution or stasis; when it occurs, democracy is a momentary, incomplete realization of an ideal. A fleeting experience and profound longing, democracy is a working toward, never a destination. We may wish for a home in democracy, but we live with democracy as with a dream.1
