How Democracies Create their own Voters

Democracy is not an abstract principle. It is an actually existing process, and it follows (often poorly-)defined procedures.

There is no such thing as the ‘collective will’, already automatically existing and ready to express itself. The procedures are needed to construct any sense of a collective subject, and the details of those procedures affect what sort of collective subject is constructed.

To appropriate Thatcher: there is no such thing as society. There are people, who might want things, individually. The ability to want things collectively, the ability to be collective, does not precede the act and structure of being aggregated together.

Saying that you are pro-democracy is nearly meaningless, unless you specify what you think of as being ‘the real democracy’. This, again, raises the question of what is ‘real’ democracy.

The ancient Greeks thought that sortition (the practice of picking the representative[s] of a constituency through lottery, rather than through election) was the only democratic form of government. They actually regarded elections as aristocratic — because they knew that such a method would naturally favor…