A Decisionist Approach to Democratic Political Order
The two most noteworthy ideas of Bonnie Honig’s article are, to my mind, (1) her shift away from deliberative democracy to ‘democratic politics in medias res’ (p. 118) and (2) the paradox of politics, discovered in Rousseau’s Social contract, determined as the undecidability between volonté générale and volonté de tous or, in general, between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the real’ (p. 124). In other words, what democracy is and what it should be are matters dif­ ficult to separate. Normative concepts of democracy are inseparable from democratic politics itself: how can there be an outsider position from which ‘true’ democracy becomes visible? In her view, the ongoing debate between decisionists and deliberativists disregards the