Between reason and will: On Christopher Meckstroth’s The Struggle for Democracy
| Author | Carlo Invernizzi Accetti |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116652827 |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Review Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2017, Vol. 16(4) 490–499
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116652827
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Review Article
Between reason and will: On
Christopher Meckstroth’s
The Struggle for Democracy
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti
City College of New York, USA
Abstract
Christopher Meckstroth’s book The Struggle for Democracy poses and attempts to solve
a central problem of democratic theory: what he calls the ‘paradox of authorization’,
whereby the very activity of spelling out the political content of democracy is said to
potentially contradict its object, since the democratic theorist may end up substituting
himself or herself for ‘the people’ in deciding what this form government amounts to in
practice. In order to avoid this problem, Meckstroth suggests that the political content
of democracy ought to be extrapolated out of concrete political struggles, by submitting
competing claims to represent the people’s will to a rational scrutiny that tests them for
internal coherence. While pointing out the intrinsic interest and originality of this
approach, the review also advances some reservations concerning the posited criter-
ion’s capacity to perform all the work Meckstroth assigns it. In the end, the proposed
solution to the ‘paradox of authorization’ may fall prey to it too, since on its own terms
the criterion of internal coherence is insufficient to specify any determinate outcomes.
This leaves it up to the theorist applying it to (arbitrarily) decide which concrete
proposals best satisfy the test.
Keywords
Democratic theory, history and politics, constitutionalism, agonistic democracy, critical
theory
Christopher Meckstroth’s The Struggle for Democracy is an ambitious and
thought-provoking book. If only for this ambition, and the lucidity with which it
poses and attempts to solve some of the most fundamental problems raised by
philosophical reflection on the notion of democracy, it deserves to be considered a
major contribution to the field of contemporary democratic theory. Its intellectual
context is defined by what Meckstroth calls the ‘democratic turn’ in normative
Corresponding author:
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, City College of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, New York 10031-9101, NY, USA.
Email: caccetti@ccny.cuny.edu
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