Democratic Theorists in Conversation: Turns in Contemporary Thought.

• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Field, James

Democratic Theorists in Conversation: Turns in Contemporary Thought

Jean-Paul Gagnon

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 196pp.

ISBN 978-1-137-32276-0

$ 106

Jean Paul Gagnon is an enthusiast for new frontiers in democratic theory. Drawing inspiration from the book Democracy in What State?, he has compiled a series of interviews with democratic theorists that range across a wide variety of topics and problems in the discourse of democracy (Agamben 2011). He interviews John Dunn, Albert Weale, Francis Fukuyama, Ramin Jahanbegloo, David Held, Ulrich Beck, John Dryzek, Pierre Rosanvallon, John Keane, Thomas Seeley and Noam Chomsky. Gagnon is not a retiring interviewer who attempts to set the stage for his interviewees to explain their perspectives, but rather positions himself as a theorist amongst theorists, which gives the book a certain egalitarian vitality. At times however this also proves frustrating because Gagnon has his own strong position to articulate concerning what he calls 'new democratic theory' and does so in the context of the interviews, which could legitimately be called 'conversations' on this account. This at times inhibits the depth of the conversations because the theorists who are responding to his questions do not seem to have a clear understanding of Gagnon's position in the way that he does of their work. The centre of gravity of the interviews is located around the questions of how and if the theorists agree with the proposition of a new democratic theory or with its constituent parts, and this leads, on account of their unfamiliarity with the contours of new democratic theory, to exchanges which are occasionally unsatisfying. Readers will have to judge the book on how convincing and interesting the proposition of new democratic theory is, rather than on the strength of the perspectives offered on democracy by the theorists in conversation. But, even those who develop reservations about new democratic theory, such as this reviewer, will find food for thought in the responses of the theorists and a selective but non-trivial representation of some contemporary positions in democratic theory.

The opening question to each of the theorists is 'How do you define democracy?' and consequently there are a variety of partial working definitions of democracy put forward, and enable readers to get a glimpse of the theorists' perspectives on democracy. But Gagnon has a meta-perspective that is at issue in all the...