ABSTRACT
The things that we care about include justice but also love, strategic advantage but also grief. We do not stop caring in such ways when we step into the political arena or when we attempt to speak the truth to power. Yet, a good deal of who we are finds little place within political discourse and within accounts of protests and dissent. An exception is the experience of the dissident, which does seem to bring political agents face-to-face with human frailties, with our need for truth and with our sense of loss in the face of political defeat. We find this, for example, in Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. Dissent within liberal democracies is not, for the most part, like this. Its limitations are considered in this chapter through a contrast with the risky.
