Untitled

Wild Democracy
H E R E T IC A L T HOU G H T
Series editor: Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Call Your "Mutha'": A Deliberately Dirty-Minded
Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
Jane Caputi
Assembly
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg
Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality
Ann Laura Stoler
Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of
Modernity
Massimiliano Tomba
Wild Democracy
Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law
A N N E N O RT O N
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919036
ISBN 978–0–19–764434–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.001.0001
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Forward ix
T H E SE S F O R D E M O C R AT S
I. Anarchy, courage, democracy 3

1. Anarchy is the shadow and salvation of democracy.
Authoritarianism is democracy’s enemy. 3
2. For anarchy we need the anarchic. 9
3. Democracy is shabby. 14
4. Fear is the enemy of the free. 15
5. If people are to rule themselves, they must
have courage. 19
6. Democrats take risks. 26
II. Free people keep something wild in them 28
7. Rebellion is not only a right, it is a duty. 28
8. Empire is the enemy of the democratic. 29
9. The democratic citizen is both sovereign and subject. 35
10. Free people keep something wild in them. 38
III. Rights are born in the body 43
11. Rights are grounded in the body. 43
12. People have the right to life, to liberty, and to the
pursuit of happiness. 46
13. People have the right to assemble. 47
14. People have the right to speak and to be silent. 50
15. Assembly nurtures the democratic. Assembly preserves
the anarchic. 53
16. People have the right to a place in the world. People
have the right to stay or to leave, to come or to go. 54
17. Rights are born in us. They are above, beyond, and
before the law. 57
18. Rights are inalienable. 58
vi Contents
19. Rights are held in common. 59

20. Rights are above, below, and beyond the law. Rights
undergird the law. Rights elevate the law. 61
IV. Free people rule the law 63
21. Rule law. Do not simply be ruled by it. 63
22. Justice, like democracy, goes beyond the law. 70
23. People should judge. Democracy depends upon
judgment. Democracy hones judgment. 72
24. The people are wise. 76
25. Democracies depend on truth. 78
26. Truth prospers when the people rule. 79
V. Democrats live with open hands 82
27. Democracies are places of wild diversity. 82
28. The democratic disposition is cosmopolitan. 86
29. How free people love their countries. 88
30. Democracy is generative. Democracy is excessive.
Democrats live with open hands. 90
31. Democrats can tolerate the undemocratic. 92
32. All you need for democracy is humanity. 93
33. The strength of the poor is the strength of democracy. 94
VI. Taxes 100
34. Taxes are how people pay for the work they
do together. 100
VII. The problem with liberalism 105
35. Undemocratic governments are unjust, but not all
democracies are just. Democracy is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for justice. 105
36. Liberalism is a problem. 107
37. Populism is a democratic force. 112
38. Institutions alone cannot ensure that the people rule. 115
39. How free people might choose their leaders. 117
40. The people, steering. 119
41. Without free and courageous people, there are no
democratic governments. 120
42. Decentralization protects the ability of people
to rule themselves. 121
Contents vii
43. People can always recall their representatives,

servants, and officials. 125
44. Executive energy belongs to the many
as well as the one. 126
VIII. Force is the enemy of the free 130
45. Military power is a danger to democracy. 130
46. Free people go to war together or not at all. 131
47. Private weapons are offensive to free people. 134
48. Punishment demeans the free. 136
49. Free people are not policed. 137
IX. Unfinished revolutions 138
50. We are not democrats yet. We do not yet
rule ourselves. 138
51. Self-rule is a discipline. 139
52. We are not yet finished with revolution. 141
53. Democracy is not an idyllic state; democracy is a
struggle. 145
54. Democracy is fugitive. 149
X. Canon fodder 150
55. Forget Athens. Forget democratic genealogies. 150
56. The canon of Western political philosophy was
forged against the people. 154
XI. Democratic times 159
57. Democracy is episodic. 159
58. The time of democracy is a time of celebration. 159
59. The time of democracy is a time of danger. 162
60. The time of democracy is a time of creation. 163
61. Democratic time is sacred time. 164
62. Democratic time is before, after, and now. 164
XII. The direction of the democratic 166
63. Democrats are conservative, progressive, and radical. 166
64. Democracy moves upward. 170
65. Democracy moves downward. 171
XIII. Democratic spaces 173
66. People preserve the anarchic and nurture the
democratic when they assemble. 173
viii Contents
67. Democracy lives in the city. 174

68. Democracy lives in the countryside. 175
69. Free people carry the democratic with them.
They carry it into the factory, the shop, the school. 176
70. Democracy cannot be fenced out of the economic
realm or separated from the social. 178
71. The rule of the people lives and is endangered
in each person’s body. 181
XIV. Friends and enemies 183
72. Equality is proper to democracy. 183
73. Inequality corrupts democracy. 184
74. Friendship teaches people to live as democrats. 185
75. Who are the enemies of democracy? What is to
be done with them? 186
XV. Democratic divinity 190
76. In ruling themselves, people become divine. 190
77. The voice of the people is the voice of God. 191
78. The people sing. 195
79. The earth belongs to the living. 196
Appendix of imperatives 199

Acknowledgments 201
Notes 203
Index 217
Forward
There are times when a book has to be written with a precision that can
be achieved only in a technical or scholarly language. This is not that
time. This is not that book. I make no distinction between the writings
of scholars or the writings of rebels, the writings of statesmen or the
writings of dissidents. I go through terrain that is not enclosed, that
remains a commons open to all. This is the democratic wild: unfenced,
unconfined, untamed.
If we are to rule ourselves, this must be our terrain. We need to seek
anarchy. We need to find courage. We need to rule the law.
Anarchy is the nursery and the refuge of the democratic. In anarchy,
one is neither ruler nor ruled. Here people learn to rule themselves.
Here there is, if only for a moment, in a small space, no one to order
or to serve. Here people learn to provide for themselves. They learn
to work together. Anarchy is not the rejection of politics, solidarity, or
cooperation; it is the rejection of any ruler but oneself. Where no one
orders and no one serves, people grow strong. They learn the courage
to face what they must. They win the daring to do what they can.
Courage is the virtue of the democratic. People begin to rule when
they find the courage to think things could be otherwise. They find the
courage to speak freely. Courage fires their uprisings and revolutions.
These fires can fail, but they can be made to burn again. Courage
maintains the work of revolutions. Courage enables people to rule
themselves in great things and in small ones. People who rule them-
selves are steadfast. They face constant uncertainty with equanimity.
They learn when to change and when to endure. They learn to walk
among their enemies unafraid.
Law is ours to judge, to break, to make, to uphold, and to bring
down. If we are citizens, we are ruled by law, but we rule law as law’s
sovereign. If we are democrats, we are law’s rulers. If we are courageous,
x Forward
anarchic, and free, we rule ourselves. People ruling themselves are

people unleashed.
Democracy grows wild, sprouting in the cracks of a parking lot,
stretching across the marshes to the sea. The democratic shows itself in
expansive ambitions and small practices, under the constraints of law
and order and in those anarchic spaces where people are neither rulers
nor ruled. In this wild, anarchic to the root, rights too come out of the
ground. They are born in our flesh, carried in our bodies from birth to
death, grounded in the word and flesh of a human life.
There were dark times when I began this book. They grew darker.
Now, as my writing draws to a close, I see the lights in the darkness.
Perhaps they will blaze like a prairie fire. Perhaps we will need to stir
the ashes once again.
T HESES F OR DE MO CR AT S
I
Anarchy, courage, democracy
1. Anarchy is the shadow and salvation

of democracy. Authoritarianism is
democracy’s enemy.
People defend repression by declaring that to oppose it would lead to

anarchy, a chaos so profound that a decent life cannot be lived within it.
The fear of anarchy fills politics and philosophy. Yet for something that
is so often threatened, anarchy is remarkably hard to find. Politicians
and media commentators point to “anarchy,” but the places they point
to are not anarchic at all. Those supposedly anarchic situations have
warlords and bosses. They are riven by feuds among the ambitious.
They are chaotic, but this is not anarchy; there is not an absence of rule,
there is too much.
If anarchy is hard to find, authoritarianism is difficult to escape.
Long ago a prophet told a people who asked for a king:
This will be the practice of the king who will rule over you. He will
take your sons and appoint them as his charioteers and horsemen,
and they will serve as outrunners for his chariots. He will appoint
them as his chiefs of thousands, and of fifties; or they will have to plow
his fields, reap his harvest, and make his weapons and the equipment
for his chariots. He will take your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and
bakers. He will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves,
and give them to his courtiers. He will take a tenth part of your grain
and vintage and give it to his eunuchs and courtiers. He will take
your male and female slaves, and your choice young men, and your
asses, and put them to work for him. He will take a tenth part of your
flocks and you shall become his slaves. The day will come when you
cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and
the Lord will not answer you on that day. (Nevi’im I Samuel 9:11)
Wild Democracy. Anne Norton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0001
4 Wild Democracy
We are still fools enough to tell children stories of good kings.

Authoritarianism still holds an allure for the fearful.
Every historical epoch gives us its autocrats as evidence. There
are the autocrats most often marked as evil: Caligula and Hitler,
Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler, Stalin and Hitler, Idi Amin
and Pol Pot. There are the autocrats foolish people praise: Alexander
(“the Great”), Alfred (“the Great”), Richard (“the Lion-hearted”),
Cæsar and Justinian, Peter (“the Great”), Catherine (“the Great”),
and Napoléon. There are those who divide people: Luther, Cromwell,
Mao, Nasser, and Perón. There are, moreover, always those ambitious
for authority—unconstrained authority—in the present. Abraham
Lincoln, who knew he carried such ambitions himself, thought
that the more firmly established, the more accepted, democratic
institutions were, the more ambitious men would be tempted to over-
come them.
Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they
should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire
to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presiden-
tial chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of
the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander,
a Caesar, or a Napoleon?—Never! . . . Distinction will be his para-
mount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so,
acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past,
and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set
boldly to the task of pulling down.
It falls to the people to restrain those ambitious to be autocrats. They

must “be united with each other, attached to the government and laws,
and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”1 They
must have souls great enough to see that the “family of the lion, or the
tribe of the eagle” looks more like the family of the jackal and the tribe
of the vulture (though those animals at least have the virtue of cleaning
up after predators.) In order to do this work, the people must have the
courage to oppose those they know are evil. They must have the pride,
the dignity, and the sense of duty to stand against those who are called
“great” and “lion-hearted.”
Anarchy, courage, democracy 5
Authoritarianism is not, however, confined to great men. We have

learned, to our cost, that those most hungry for authority, most avid
for power, can be very small indeed. The harm these do is twofold, for
they do harm out of their ambition and harm from their stupidity.
Indeed, authoritarianism is not confined to men, great or small.
The most astute critiques of modernity have recognized that the desire
for an energetic and unhindered authority comes not only from those
who want to rule but from those who want to be ruled. Conservative
critics of liberalism note how readily people submit to systems or
regimes that claim expertise or promise equality, prosperity, or protec-
tion. Weber famously saw the “iron cage” of bureaucracy imprisoning
modern lives. People are hedged about by rules and regulations. We
are expected to follow laws we don’t know and might not understand
if we did. We are embedded in systems that assess our wealth, tax
obligations, debt, creditworthiness, health, probable longevity, polit-
ical preferences, and a host of other things, by mystical numerology
and without appeal. Critics on both the left and the right have long
observed the tyranny of the “rule of experts.”2 Now we are faced with
the faceless rule of algorithms.
Effective critiques of these impersonal, bureaucratic forms of to-
talitarianism have come from conservatives as well as democrats,
socialists, and anarchists. Edmund Burke distrusted abstract princi-
ples and categories, trusting instead in tradition and custom, knowl
edge collected from many people over many generations. He saw that
seemingly irrational customs often shelter wisdom and reason within
them. He believed that conventions soften change and tame principle
enough to fit it more easily into human lives. The Southern Agrarians,
Wendell Berry, and others like them mourn the loss of a world closer to
nature. They treasure the ties that come when generation after genera-
tion calls a place home. They have faith in the constraints that custom
places on conduct.
These critics recognize popular wisdom. They have respect for the
practices of ordinary people in the course of their lives. They are suspi-
cious of those who rely on reason alone, knowing that human reason is
limited by time and circumstance and distorted by interest, ambition,
perspective, and desire. They recognize the coercive power of many
schemes for the betterment of mankind.
6 Wild Democracy
Radical critics recognize that the drive of governments and govern-

ance, of states and the powers of the economic realm is toward central-
ization and the consolidation of power. Wendy Brown joins Sheldon
Wolin in this: “[T]‌here is no such thing as a democratic state, since
states abduct, institutionalize, and wield ‘surplus power’ generated by
the people; democracy always lives elsewhere from the state, even in
democracies.”3 If we are to be democrats, we must learn, we must prac-
tice, anarchy.
“Anarchy,” Tocqueville wrote, “is not the greatest of the ills to be
feared in democratic times, but the least.”4 Authoritarianism, not
anarchy, is the danger that people should fear. The revolutionaries
who hope to escape imperial rule, depose dictatorships, bring down
monarchs and establish governments in which people rule themselves,
find themselves confronting the ambitions of those who want to rule
the newly or the not yet free. They will face defeat at the hands of the
most ambitious among them. The revolution ends and the generals (or
the colonels) take over. The revolution ends, and the leader called “the
father of his country” comes to believe that it cannot continue without
him. Few can refuse this temptation.
Authoritarianism is rooted in fear. Those who call for a strong hand,
a firm authority, fear that things will change, that the present partial
calm will not endure, that nothing is stable. They fear. Fear, as thinkers
from Xenophon to Arendt have recognized, is at the heart of tyranny.
The tyrant, Xenophon wrote in his dialogue “On Tyranny,” is always
afraid. The tyrant’s fear grows, spreading until each person seems a
threat: “The tyrants, all of them, proceed everywhere as through hos-
tile territory. They themselves think it necessary to go armed and al-
ways to be surrounded by an armed bodyguard.” They are never safe,
Xenophon’s tyrant argues, and least safe when they are at home, for
“tyrants know that when they reach their own city they are then in the
midst of the largest number of their enemies.”5 Every enemy the tyrant
kills, every punishment the tyrant enacts creates more enemies, more
reason for the tyrant to fear.
This is not, as Hannah Arendt saw, simply a pathology of dictator-
ship. Totalitarian regimes do the same. They see dissent in every act;
they fear enemies everywhere. Everyone they kill, every punishment
they exact creates more enemies, more reasons for fear. Their fear spurs
them to find these enemies and prevent dissent. They resort to cen-
sorship, surveillance, and networks of informants who can, perhaps,
prevent the attacks they fear, yet every piece of information they gather
feeds that fear. Fear spreads, as Arendt describes, until each person
fears everyone else. The apparatus of surveillance and punishment
becomes total, enveloping every person within reach. Surveillance
and informing become part of “a method of dealing with his neighbor
which everyone, willingly or unwillingly, is forced to follow.” No one is
free; all are fearful. This is “a system of ubiquitous spying, where eve-
rybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under
constant surveillance.” In the end, because everyone is an enemy to
everyone else, and the state has earned the enmity of all, victims are
“chosen completely at random.” Arendt argued that the “consistent
arbitrariness” of totalitarianism “negates human freedom more effi-
ciently than any tyranny ever could,” for willingly or unwillingly, the
subjects become the eyes and ears and hands of a tyrannical state.6
The tyrant’s fear is a contagion. Fear is the enemy of democracy.
We have every reason to fear authoritarianism, whether it comes to
us in the guise of a man or a state. We have little reason to fear anarchy,
yet the fear of anarchy shadows democracy. Where the people rule,
each person is understood to have standing and freedom. Each has
the right to leave if they choose, rebel if they choose. Each person may
participate, perhaps each person should, but no one can be compelled.
Anarchy is not only a possibility; it is a necessity. Anyone can leave, and
so it is possible that everyone might leave. Anyone can refuse, and so it
is possible that everyone might refuse. That refusal, the right to say no
to rule, is the guarantor of our freedom.
Anarchy is the shadow of democracy in a double sense. Fear of an-
archy shadows democracy. Anarchy is not to be feared; it offers shade,
a place to rest, a place to hide. The shade anarchy offers protects us.
The people who are most free are often not those who govern, but
those who refuse to be governed, not those who join in rule, but those
who refuse to be ruled at all. In America, Patrick Henry argued, the
common man did not want power, still less did he want national glory;
he simply wanted to be let alone: “He enjoys the fruits of his labor,
under his own fig tree, with his wife and children about him, in peace
and security.”7 Jefferson famously wrote that the best government was
8 Wild Democracy
“no government, as among our Indians,” and if he misunderstood the

governance of the indigenous he nevertheless saw in their lives his own
desire to be governed lightly, or not at all. We should be, Whitman
wrote, “men and women who think lightly of the laws.”8
This is not an American desire. This is a human desire. James
Scott’s work on “how not to be governed” echoes a long tradition of
people seeking an escape from power. Behind Scott one can see Eric
Hobsbawm’s brilliant writings on bandits and primitive rebels, and
the work of that cadre of Marxist historians who brought forward the
long history of rebellion and resistance in England and Scotland. Scott
found the desire for an ungoverned life among Burmese peasants and
mountain bandits. Hobsbawm found it in fifteenth-century England,
nineteenth-century Mexico, and twentieth-century India. Christopher
Hill found it in seventeenth-century England and wondered if it had
fled to the Caribbean. Paul Gilroy, researching a diasporic modernity,
found it crossing the Atlantic. Machiavelli wrote that while the privi-
leged “want only to oppress, the people want only not to be oppressed.”
One can find the desire not to be governed in any people, at any time.
The desire not to be ruled is a simple human desire. It is the first and
last defense against domination.9
Most people, in most of their lives, want power to leave them alone.
They believe that they should make their own decisions about how
they live their lives, that they are the best judges of what is good for
them. They know too that there are many decisions they are not able
to make. The best of them—no, most of them—know what they do not
know. They will have the wisdom to withdraw from decisions they are
not competent to make.
If they have the wisdom to withdraw from decisions they cannot
make wisely, they also have the wisdom to know the decisions only
they can make. They know that they have skills and circumstances that
are theirs alone. To live their lives as they think best, they need to have
the freedom to cultivate their abilities, learn what they need, and act as
they decide. Artists and writers are often firm in claiming that freedom.
They know that strong, original, and creative work comes not only
when one learns from others or is guided by others, but also when one
refuses to learn, refuses to be guided. The wisdom of the community is
great, but all communities need, especially in times of crisis, those who
reject established knowledge and old wisdom. Politics, as much as art

or learning, depends on people with independence of mind.
Any people who want to rule themselves must leave space for an-
archy. People capable of ruling themselves will want the freedom to
live their lives as they choose. They may choose to be ruled, lightly, and
never without interruption. Anarchy is democracy’s shadow in this
sense as well. It gives people a space away both from ruling and from
being ruled. For people living in freedom, anarchy is a familiar place.
For free people facing the loss of that freedom, anarchy, not authoritar-
ianism, should be the last ditch.
2. For anarchy we need the anarchic.
Poets, philosophers, and the people have long recognized that bandits,
pirates, outlaws, and rogues are close to democracy. There are many
reasons for this. For some, this is simply another way of casting the
rule of the people as the madness of the crowd, the rule of the Great
Unwashed, the rise of starved beasts who will fatten on the wealthy.
For those who regard the rule of autocrats or elites as the natural order
of things, democracy is simply a theft of power, and people who rule
themselves are no more than criminals.
The popular imagination of bandit democrats sees it otherwise.
Pirates and bandits are admired for what they refuse and what they
choose, for the wrongs they flee and the wrongs they attempt to right.
Those who steal from the rich and give to the poor are honored and
admired. Those who rob the poor or con the elderly, who extort pro-
tection money or amass great wealth through dishonest means are
scorned. Stories of honest bandits are shadowed by stories of the rich
and disreputable. Wealth, these stories remind us, is not a sign of honor
or merit. There are inequalities to be remedied. In honoring outlaws,
people put the justice of the present order in question.
The bandit, the pirate, the outlaw, and the rogue are all outside law
and custom. All defy order for its own sake. Some, like Robin Hood, are
placed outside the law by unjust rulers. They are law’s exiles. Their out-
lawry is a rebuke to the ruler’s claim to justice. Some bandits are driven
out by poverty. They are a rebuke to a country that cannot provide for
10 Wild Democracy
its own. Other bandits, pirates, and looters defy the laws that govern
property and possessions. Where law produces radical inequality, they
refuse it. All refuse order for order’s sake.
When pirates, bandits, and outlaws band together, like the
Zapatistas, Phoolan Devi’s band, or Robin Hood’s Merry Men, they
choose to rule themselves. They consent to rule and to be ruled.
These remembered or imagined outlaws are, as Hobsbawm and
Scott have argued, primitive rebels who are learning—if they have
not yet mastered—“the art of not being governed.”10 They also point
to a central question for all people: What is one’s own? Bandits who
“steal from the rich and give to the poor” demonstrate a democratic
sensibility. In their rough redistribution of ill-gotten gains, they re-
move one of the most serious obstacles to people ruling themselves.
Woody Guthrie put it this way in his ballad of the outlaw Pretty
Boy Floyd:
Many a starvin’ farmer

The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes
. . . as through your life you travel,

Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.11
Pirates too are on the way to the democratic. Pirates elected their
captains for one voyage, agreed to serve under them, and retained
the right to depose them when they chose. Pirates voted on missions
and on the division of plunder. They also instituted social welfare
programs, providing for those who were hurt or maimed or the fami-
lies of those killed in battle. They included people of all races, all sexu-
alities, “villains of all nations.” Like Hobsbawm’s bandits, the pirates
often served, directly and indirectly, in rebellions against oppressive
rule. They sailed into the unknown. They had the courage of people
who consented to ruling and to being ruled, the longing not to rule at
all.12
Outlaws deserve their name and the ambivalence attached to it. They
are outside the law. Frontier outlaws are beyond law’s reach; often they
are political exiles or refugees whose rebellion precedes their outlawry.
All outlaws, of necessity, live and work outside and often in defiance of
the law. Their actions can show the limits, the fragility, or the injustice
of the law. Bands of outlaws, like those of Pancho Villa, raise the possi-
bility of other political orders, outside or against the state. Where the
state is unjust, they can move easily into revolution. All outlaws put the
commanding power of the law in question. They show the limits of the
law’s power. They show the distance between law and justice.
For Jacques Rancière, democracy belongs to the part that has no part,
to the excluded. In A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus
Russell “tells the story of “bad” Americans—drunkards, prostitutes,
“shiftless” slaves and white slackers, criminals, juvenile delinquents,
brazen homosexuals, and others who operated beneath American
society—and shows how they shaped our world, created new pleasures,
and expanded our freedoms.”13 This is, as Russell recognizes, an
American (though not only an American) tradition. These people, the
mad, the bad, the irrepressibly transgressive, mark the boundaries of
sane, moral, and lawful a conduct, putting those boundaries in ques-
tion. They expand dangers as well as possibilities: opening paths and
setting traps. This might be, Russell declares, “history from the gutter
up,” but any look at American culture, at any moment, in any place,
shows people ready to embrace these freedom-loving transgressors.
The antiheros of every genre—videos, novels, comic books, history—
testify to the importance of the rebel to the drive for freedom.
Russell departs from Rancière (or does he?) in seeing the excluded
as alien to democracy. The democratic revolutions turned, he argued,
from external to internal governance. People were called to discipline
themselves. Russell has a keen eye for those forms of coercion that live
in the mind and heart, governing conduct when government is silent—
as well as those formal attempts, even (perhaps especially) by the
partisans of political liberty—to regulate moral conduct. He provides
a detailed account of the “renegades”and their contributions—witting
and unwitting to freedom while recognizing that any world they would
make “would be a living hell.”14 If we are to become democrats, we need
to rule ourselves, but we do well to recognize the cost of the discipline
12 Wild Democracy
democracy demands of the people, and the ways in which it may de-
form us. We need to keep a space for anarchy not only in the world, but
in ourselves. Acts and practices that may seem, at first blush, to be dis-
tant from the political can be salutary political forces.
The rebels, the shiftless, and the transgressive who are suspicious of
power fuel the drive to freedom and the drive to greater justice. They
combat the excesses of those who want to govern too much. They
mock those who have the arrogance to tell others how to pray, how to
dress, what to eat, how to live. They open the possibility of other lives.
Drag queens and voguers changed how people saw and then how they
thought about sexuality, about race, about beauty, about who should be
welcomed when they appeared in the world. Once they were shocking
and outrageous. No more. Now they are ours.
These disobedient ones have served in other ways. Because they dis-
trust power, they may protect others among the powerless. Because
they have the courage of their own judgments, they can stand fast
when rights and the just are under attack.
There is an old poem, written by a man who was a rebel himself,
about those who keep honor safe. Vachel Lindsay’s willfully demo-
cratic and political poetry is out of step with my time but speaks to it
with a directness that pierces the heart:
We slept thro’ wars where Honor could not sleep

We were faint-hearted, Honor was full-valiant
We kept a silence Honor could not keep.
Yet this late day we make a song to praise her.

We codeless will yet vindicate her code.
. . . A battered, rascal guard will rally round her
To keep her safe until the better years.15
The bandit, the outlaw, the rogue, the rascal, the battered, and the
shunned live at the very boundary of the country, in the nation but out-
side the state, of the people but outside the law.
When people believe the law has failed them, they may (they
should) turn to the people as a whole. They will have to ask, “Who are
my people?” They will look for guidance to the living and those yet to
be born, questioning the sins (and perhaps the achievements) of the

past, reconsidering their hopes for the future. When the law fails them,
they look to those the law has failed. They will look to those among the
present people who live abandoned by the law, in defiance of the law,
and to those the law could not reach. When the people falter, they may
find their hopes sheltered in unexpected places. Honor finds a refuge
where reputation is lost.
There is another appeal made here. The bandit, the outlaw, the rene-
gade, and the antihero argue for the possibility of redemption. Flawed
people, people who have done wrong, committed sins against god and
man, done acts of cruelty and failed, over and over again, to be good,
can still find their place. The antihero speaks to those who believe they
have done wrong—that is to say, most of us, for there are few among
us who have no regrets. These stories show a path. People see that they
can overcome their past, their errors, their shortcomings. They can
learn to rule themselves.
The outcast and the exile, the shunned and the rejected have a place
among the people. In this respect, as in many others, the rule of the
people seems to be well understood among the religious (though
they too rarely defend it). People of faith have learned to look among
outcasts and exiles for prophets and saints, for the presence of the di-
vine. For Christians, it is the child born in a barn and killed as a crim-
inal who becomes the Redeemer of Mankind. Jews remember that
those who worked as slaves in Egypt were raised above Pharaoh and
brought to the Promised Land. Islam has such figures at its center: the
outcast Hagar and her child Ishmael, the Prophet forced out of Mecca.
Hinduism shows us Krishna among the Gopis, Rama and Sita sent into
exile. In every time, in every culture, there is the recognition that great-
ness, even divinity, is to be found among refugees and exiles, the aban-
doned and the rebellious.
The recognition that the rule of the people belongs to the bandit
and the outlaw, the pirate and the rogue, is as strong in conservatives as
liberals, in philosophers as in poets. Those who distrust the people are
found more often on the right than on the left, but are present in both.
They anchor their distrust of the democratic in suspicions of the rebel-
lious and the transgressive. Jacques Derrida is understood—and, I be-
lieve, understood himself—as a man of the left. That did not mean that he
14 Wild Democracy
was or wished to be a man of the people. For Derrida, democracy was so

fragile that the people could not be trusted with it. That is a common—the
most common—view of democracy among philosophers. Derrida, how-
ever, distinguished himself by concluding that democracy belonged to
the future (avenir), but a future that was always out of reach. Democracy
was à venir, a future that, although it is to come, never arrives.
Derrida recognized, nevertheless, that there are people who are
close to democracy. Those were the rogue and the shebab, young
Muslims in the street. Where the rogue is, he wrote, democracy is
never far away.16 For the people of the streets, for the people, democ-
racy can never come soon enough. Democracy is shaabi in the Arabic
that frightened Derrida; it belongs to the people, the masses, the crowd,
the shaab hurri: to free people.
3. Democracy is shabby.
The Arabic word shaabi means “of the people,” but democracy is also
“shabby” in the English sense. Democracy is the regime of worn-out
shoes and old clothes, of frayed collars and thrift shops. For Plato, and
many after him, democracy was government of the poor. Democracy
accepts and belongs to those for whom shabbiness is, in Pierre
Bourdieu’s apt phrase, “the choice of necessity.” No one has to dress
up for democracy. Democracy belongs not to special occasions but to
the everyday. Democracy begins not in the halls of government but in
the streets, in bars, and at kitchen tables. You come as you are to dem-
ocratic debates. Politicians who want to signal (as they must) that they
belong to the people take off their suit jackets and roll up their sleeves.
During his 1952 run for the American presidency, Adlai Stevenson
was mocked for having a hole in his shoe. He made it the symbol of
his campaign. The worn-out shoe testified to his hard work and fru-
gality; it marked his efforts to speak to as many people as he could.
The shoe bore witness to his labor. His indifference to the worn shoe
showed an indifference to the marks of wealth and status. That is at the
heart of democratic practice. Every politician who eats a corn dog at a
county fair or sits down at a diner in jeans testifies to the importance of
appearing (at least for the moment) as an equal.
There is nothing new in this. The Scottish poet Robert Burns, who
had proud disdain for show and a deep commitment to the rule of
the people, contrasted their simple dress and manners with those of a
wasteful, empty, and parasitic aristocracy:
What though on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that.17
This democratic shabbiness is welcoming and welcome, but the

name “democracy” is shabby in a more troubling sense. The name “de-
mocracy” has been used so often by autocrats, attached so shamelessly
to dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, appropriated so carelessly by
liberals, that it has ceased to mark places where the people rule.
Even where people affirm their faith in the consent of the governed,
the institutions they call “democratic” are often not democratic at all.
They reflect a profound distrust of the right and the ability of people
to rule themselves. The rule of law, representative assemblies, and
affirmations of rights (especially property rights) are not necessarily
democratic. They are more often used to restrain the people than to
enable them to rule.
Many of us are told we live in a democracy, but we see too few
moments when the people rule. The name “democracy” is worn and
shabby. We need to mend it.
4. Fear is the enemy of the free.
When Oliver Cromwell called himself the Lord Protector he taught

people something about protection. Fear drives people to seek the
protection of the strong. In times of fear, people turn to generals,
dictators, strongmen, and caudillos. They believe that these, because
they are strong, can offer safety from what they fear. They are wrong.
Strongmen are not protectors; they are beasts of prey.
During Egypt’s January 25th Revolution people acted fearlessly.
They overcame their fear of a regime that had imprisoned and tortured
16 Wild Democracy
people with regularity. Secularists discovered, as one told me with sur-

prise, “We can work with the Muslim Brothers.” The religious saw that
secularists could be honorable, ethical people, who stood hand in hand
with them and formed protective rings around them as they prayed.
The Egyptian people took courage from one another. That courage did
not last quite long enough. Before Mohamed Morsi’s term was out,
the same people who had found joy in a common struggle had turned
against each other. They began to fear and fear destroyed them. They
turned away from fearless work with rivals and enemies to the protec-
tion of a military dictator. Perhaps they will find the courage of Tahrir
Square once again.
People flee to the protection of an autocrat when they have aban-
doned faith in their own power and that of their people. They have
abandoned that sense of dignity and daring that belongs to those who
have the courage to rule themselves. They become supplicants and
sycophants. They will be forced to obey. They will find that they have
more to fear from the leader than they had to fear from one another.
Those who are afraid are neither deluded nor (at least not always)
dishonest. There are always reasons for fear. Perfect safety is a fiction,
and a dangerous one.
In the late 1960s, as nuclear weapons transformed from doomsday
bombs to ordinary weaponry in the minds of the people, Sheldon
Wolin wrote of the perverse relation between our weapons and our
fears. He saw that the increasing sophistication of our weapons—
the ability to impose devastating destruction, to fire those world-
destroying weapons from far away, to mark targets—did not make
people feel more secure. Instead it made them increasingly anxious.
Promised complete security, they became sensitive to every intima-
tion of a possible attack. They felt not more secure but less.18 Perhaps
people recognized, consciously or unconsciously, that the weapons
were a threat in themselves. There is always the possibility of accidents
in their production, their storage, and their use. They provoke others
to make weapons of their own. They can drive an arms race. The pres-
ence, even the possession of weapons of mass destruction, makes any
incident a potential pretext for an apocalypse.
We are told that weapons make us strong. We find they make us vul-
nerable. We are told that increased security procedures make us safer.
They fill us with anxiety. We want to be free and brave, but we make
ourselves docile and fearful. We want to protect the people, but we sow
fears that divide them. We teach our people that they are prey.
The perverse effects of enhanced security are evident in other forms
of security as well.
The enhanced security procedures that followed terrorist attacks in
Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States made us less safe
and diminished our courage and our dignity. We were taught to walk
through cattle chutes to X-ray machines and thank the people who
pat us down for the privilege. We are told to enhance surveillance by
serving as watchers ourselves. “If you see something, say something”
might at its best remind us that ordinary people have the capacity for
judgment, but it is more likely to make us see the people around us
as potential terrorists. Worse, we may be tempted, we may have been
instructed, to see some people as more dangerous than others. The
Prevent program in the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first cen-
tury required people to report Muslims in danger of radicalization.
The process of being identified as a danger, reported to the state, and
subjected to a program of deliberate reeducation is unlikely to di-
minish radicalization. At each point it reminds the targeted people that
the state sees them as present dangers and potential enemies. At each
point, it instructs them that the state is deploying its powers to sepa-
rate, censor, and instruct them. At each point, it requires them to see
themselves as apart from and feared by their own people.
Those who are targeted in such programs are not well served by
them, but neither are those considered safe. They are taught to see
themselves as prey, fearing every padded coat and backpack, shying
away from any voice speaking, singing, or praying in another language.
They are taught to see authorities not only as protection but as absolu-
tion. They cannot be wrong to report a neighbor, a friend, a child: they
are doing as they are told. They are keeping us safe, while the category
“us” grows ever smaller, ever narrower. They diminish the country they
claim to preserve. They make their people more divided, more bigoted,
more censorious, more fearful than they were.
Franklin Roosevelt was right to declare to a hungry, impoverished,
and desperate people, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Without
fear, with fear mastered, people can go on to do the work they need to
18 Wild Democracy
do together. They can draw on the skills, the generosity, and the courage
of their neighbors. They find that they have no one to depend on but
themselves, and in that knowledge they find solidarity and fortitude.
Fear is not only a weapon of authoritarian rulers and intrusive
states. Fear lives in neighborhoods. Fear lives in the mind. In the
United States, white women were taught to fear Black men. They were
taught that Black men presented a special danger to them, that they
were more likely to be raped or robbed or attacked by Black men.
Those women had already been robbed by white men. They lived
under laws that gave their fathers, brothers, husbands, and guardians
the right to control how and where and with whom they lived, how or
if they earned money, and any funds they earned or inherited. They
lived under laws and the greater power of customs that permitted their
husbands to rape and beat them at will. They knew those men had
power. They knew that power did not always serve them, had some-
times hurt them, always diminished them. Yet they were taught, from
the time of their birth, to see those men as their protectors. Black men
came to recognize that few things in the world were a greater threat
than white women. A lie, a word, an ambiguous glance could outrage
a bigot and inflame a lynch mob. White women, dependent on white
men, could shift from friend to foe in an instant. White women could
not be trusted.
Those laws, that teaching, drew a sharp line between Black men and
white women. Each was taught to fear the other. Each was taught to see
the other as a site of danger. Each was taught that rescue would come,
if it came at all, from the powerful: from white men with standing and
resources. This was the logic of lynching. It made solidarity between
Black men and white women unimaginable for all but great souls.
Black women, indigenous women, Asian women, any woman
marked as different, any woman alone was prey. Such women may have
developed a sharper sense for footsteps in the dark, knowing that they
had no security in a powerful protector. Some still put their faith in
men: men of their own kind or more powerful men. There were times
when their faith was justified. There are always men, always people,
who act with justice and courage when law or custom teach them to do
otherwise. Wiser women learned to rely on themselves.
You may think the time for those fears is past. I think you are wrong.
There are other fears that operate in this way. When people need
money, they may go to their friends. They may go to their parents,
feeling shame. More often they go to the boss, to the bank, to a pawn
shop or a loan shark. They go knowing that they may be denied,
knowing that they are likely to be exploited. Wherever they go, their
need makes them vulnerable. They go to those who are more powerful,
and their appeal strengthens an already present hierarchy.
In each case, in every case, those who have reason to fear are better
served by solidarity than by the protection of the powerful. If fear
drives them, it should drive them to one another. Courage would serve
them better than fear.
People who want to keep their freedom, their equality, their
courage, and their capacity to rule themselves should refuse fear and
teach themselves courage in its place. There are dangers in courage, to
be sure, but those dangers threaten our bodies, not our souls. Living
with freedom and dignity, great among equals, might require us to take
a few risks.
5. If people are to rule themselves, they must have

courage.
Courage is necessary for democrats. Revolutions require courage. If we

are to rule ourselves, we must be brave enough to live with our ene-
mies. We must be brave enough to go into the unknown. We must be
brave enough to face what will come.
Perhaps this is not yet common knowledge, but it is surely the
knowledge of the commons. When we look for people brave enough to
demand to rule themselves, we see that courage. We see a man dancing
around a water cannon in a back street in Egypt. We see people facing
down tanks in Tahrir Square, Portland, Hong Kong, and Khartoum.
We see a woman standing alone before armed police. We hear Mamie
Till-Mobley insisting that her son’s coffin be opened for her to see the
mutilated body of her child. We hear her demand that it be shown to
all. Courage calls forth courage. That call fires people to wrench open
20 Wild Democracy
closed doors, to tear down fences, to go farther than they had dared to
go before in pursuit of justice.
Aristocrats wore their courage like jewels. For them, courage was an
ornament, a discreetly displayed excess of something everyone (that
is, everyone who is anyone) was expected to have. Courage, for free
people, is not a distinction; it is a necessity. People who choose to rule
themselves need courage to make themselves a people, courage to de-
bate among themselves and find their way forward ungoverned. They
will need, if they choose, courage to form a government, courage to
maintain that government when they are in the minority, courage to
refuse it when they must.
We are a wild diversity of ever-changing people. No one is wholly
visible to another. No one can be wholly known. In practice, democrats
learn that they must be ruled by the will of people alien to their cus-
toms, their preferences, even their morals. They learn that some of
their fellow citizens oppose their way of life, even their presence. They
learn that some of these people work against them, work even for their
expulsion or annihilation. They live with their enemies. They live with
those they fear. For the most part, they do so fearlessly. All decent pol-
ities endeavor to protect the frail and the fearful. A democratic politics
makes people brave.
Democratic ethics demand that one take things lightly, or, more
precisely, that one act as if one did. The opponents of abortion need not
keep silent. They may speak loudly. They may assemble; they may ag-
itate. They may vote their conscience. They may believe, they may say
as loudly as they can that the practice of abortion is routinized murder.
But while they remain among people who believe otherwise they must
discipline themselves. They will not lynch, they will not bomb, they
will not silence others.
Those who argue that the decision to bear a child belongs to the
woman whose body will hold it must also take that lightly. They know
that opponents of abortion claim power over their bodies. They know
that those who oppose the right to abortion claim to govern their
bodies as intimately and as thoroughly as if they were slaves. They
know that they are called murderers. They know that some opponents
of abortion have bombed abortion clinics and murdered doctors. Yet
they must find the courage to walk among their enemies unafraid.
The opponents of capital punishment seek injunctions, pardons, and

commutations. They file briefs and hope to overturn judicial decisions.
They lobby and they hope that their candidates will win election. They
do not stage prison escapes or sabotage the machinery of execution.
So with us all. This is not out of respect for the law. This is out of re-
spect for the people. Until we win the people over, we forebear. This is
the discipline democracy requires. This is one form of the courage that
belongs to democrats, to free people living a common life.
We are all required to act as if the things that matter most to us
matter very little. This bears a family resemblance to the ethic upon
which civil servants and officers of the court pride themselves. There
is no distinction between persons. All come as equals before the law.
All are met without fear or favor. Regimes change, the laws change,
but these servants and officers know that they serve the people, not the
regime.
The civil servant must act as if there were no distinction between
parties, between patrons and rivals, friends and enemies, strangers and
friends in the most fundamental things. They are required—we are all
required—to pretend indifference to our passions and attachments in
matters of rights. We are permitted to have, but not to act upon, our
passionate attachments. I may love with an all-consuming passion,
but I can give my love no greater claim to rights than I would give a
stranger. The stranger, the enemy, has the same rights to speak, to as-
semble, to rule, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free people
would not expect it to be otherwise.
This is not what the philosopher Richard Rorty used to call “taking
things lightly,” though it may—and should—appear to be. This is an
iron discipline. We school ourselves to ignore slights, insults, and
danger. We learn to hold our passionate convictions within us. They
fuel our conduct, but they do not rule it.
We have become so accustomed to civil discussions of policy that we
rarely recognize how much is at stake, how much courage is demanded
of ordinary people in a common democratic life. The woman whose
husband was shot by a mass shooter is expected to listen with grace
and civility to those who advocate unrestrained access to guns. The
man whose unborn child is aborted against his will is expected to show
the same grace and civility to those who have licensed, defended, or
22 Wild Democracy
participated in abortion. There are many issues before us, today and
every day, which make these demands.
The costs these debates exact are not easily seen. They are clear enough
to the woman in chemotherapy whose hair falls on the page as she writes
her congressman on healthcare funding. It may be harder to see the costs
for the man in his seventies who still owes money on his student loans,
or the people who bear the weight of shame and failure because they
make too little money. (Of all things, this is the least shameful and the
most shaming.) Virtually every issue makes grave demands on someone.
Some issues make demands on us all. Every day, all around us, people
face these demands with equanimity. They know the costs of a policy
that will harm them. They know that they may be faced with the defeat of
a cause they honor or the rejection of an ideal they strive for. They know
that the people who threaten these things share their country, their state,
their town. They have the courage to stand fast.
We live with our enemies. Each party longs for the end of its rival.
Right and left, conservative and liberal, we know that the other party
wishes for our defeat. We know they hope to keep us out of power, not
only for this election but for all the elections they can foresee. Our
differences, and our enmities, go far deeper. We know, we democrats,
that there are those who would like to see us dead or exiled, who wish
that we had never been or that we will be no more. A certain kind of
conservative longs for the end, if not of history, at least of the possi-
bility of socialists and socialism, anarchism, radical democracy, and
change altogether. The socialist longs for the end of the capitalist, the
leftist longs for conservatives without power. Many long for the dis-
appearance of the alien and the queer. The Christian fundamentalist
longs for the conversion of the Jew, and the Jew who sees that conver-
sion as a death sees the Christian fundamentalist not as a redeemer but
as an enemy.
We live with our enemies. Where speech is free, they announce
their aims. They seek our annihilation. Perhaps we seek theirs as well.
Perhaps not. Perhaps we are wise enough to see the value of certain
of our enemies. Perhaps we are daring enough to take pride in their
strength. Whether they fall before us or triumph over us, we walk
among our enemies unafraid. This is the courage that belongs to people
who rule themselves.
Courage is required not only to live with our enemies but to live
with one another. Where the people rule, each person lives with uncer-
tainty and change. The people are always changing. People die, people
are born, people are shaped by the people around them. They learn
and they change. People change, and the people changes with them.
Democracies are driven and desiring; they are always changing. The
democrat cannot be certain what the future will bring, cannot even be
certain of the parameters of the present. A democratic life demands
that people face the possibility of change with courage and discipline.
Those changes may compass our annihilation. The practice of democ-
racy is the practice of facing death.
In his Philosophy of History, Hegel gave us a fable. Mankind had its
birth in the East, he wrote. Humanity had its golden youth in Greece,
like the kouroi, beautiful and good, yet it was not yet fully formed.
It was in Europe, in that small center of the world, that it reached its
maturity. Here, humanity grew to wisdom and judgment, finding its
fullest political expression in the state. The fable is wrong, perhaps cor-
rupt, certainly too small to hold us.
This is a European fable. It is an error, but like many fabulous errors,
there is an unexpected, subversive truth in it. The Sun moved reso-
lutely Westward. Asia, with all its grace and antiquity, was left behind.
Africa remained in darkness, “the land of childhood, which lying be-
yond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle
of Night.” Hegel’s account of Africa owes much to European ignorance
and the imaginaries of imperialism, but even in this hostile terrain
there is something to be found. “The Negro,” Hegel writes, “as already
observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and un-
tamed state.”19 In this image racialized enslavement and colonial rule
meet human freedom and are overcome. Hegel’s African promises
more for democrats than does his European. There was no place for the
Antipodes at all. But if the sun moved westward, what of the Americas?
“America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.” This
is “a land of desire.” The Americas, Hegel held, were the Eveningland,
the land of the unknown, “and the dreams to which it may give rise.”20
The Americas posed a problem for Hegel. Was this, as the Egyptians
held, the land of death? If it were, was that land the place of annihilation
24 Wild Democracy
or epiphany, decay or resurrection? Perhaps the European in Hegel

was loath to see the New World as the site of transfiguration. Perhaps
the Christian in him could not easily set aside the promise of a life after
death. Perhaps, as an honorable scholar, he took refuge in the honest
answer. He knew what he did not know. The New World to the west of
Europe was the realm of the future, the land of the unknown. This was
the Eveningland.
The fable is wrong, even corrupt, but light shines through the flaws
in it. Hegel was right to look to the Eveningland. That is the land all
people come to, and it remains unknown. We all go into the West, as
the ancient Egyptians said. We do not know what lies beyond that ho-
rizon. He was right to see the Americas as the land of the future, the
land of the unknown. The New World is a place, as all new worlds are,
of surprise and uncertainty. That uncertainty did not belong to the
Americas alone, but it was in the Americas that Europe confronted
the limits of its knowledge. Columbus, mistaking the islands of the
Caribbean for the East Indies he sought, made the limits of European
knowledge undeniable. He had found a New World, but he had
proved the Old World to be smaller and less knowing. Perhaps, as
Edward Said argued, Europe thought it had already mastered knowl
edge of the Orient. Measured against the mountain of Orientalist
scholarship, knowledge of the Americas would seem tenuous, fragile,
and fallible. Perhaps the failure to see the indigenous as fully human
confronted the European with an empty land. Perhaps, in the effort
to fill that land with Europe, the Europeans encountered the alien
in themselves. Perhaps they feared that the Americas were the place
Europe went to die. In that welter of discovery and conquest, daring
and greed, we can see that mistakes can be productive, that errors
open the way to unimagined knowledge. Errors are a source not only
of shame and self-reproach but of power and pleasure. Error is a gate
to discovery.
Like all good fables, Hegel’s is true and untrue, a myth and a revela-
tion. The willingness to go forward into the unknown is given to us in
our humanity. Each day, each moment is uncertain. We do not know
if we will keep on living; we cannot fully anticipate what any moment
will bring. That willingness to go forward into the unknown calls forth
acts of courage. We honor those who go to sea not knowing what land,
if any, lies ahead. We honor those who go into space, into unmapped
deserts and the deepest trenches of the ocean. Facing the unknown
is what we were born to. Those impelled by that drive answer a high
calling of humanity.
We are, perhaps unknowingly, accustomed to the demands of death.
We are the people of the Eveningland.21 We look toward our own deaths
and we are not afraid. We are Vikings. We sail off into the unknown.
Democracy is the practice of a little death, of many small
annihilations. Democracy requires that at some moment one will
cease to be. You will be ruled. You will be overruled. The people will
decide against what you will. The people will decide against you. Your
voice will be silenced, your hopes defeated, your will lost. In every
election, in each debate, in reports of public opinion, in reading
bumper stickers and yard signs you are brought face to face not only
with the possibility of defeat but with the prospect of your annihila-
tion. The will of the people will wash over your vision, your aims, your
will, your voice like a great sea. You will be lost in it. All that you love
and honor will be lost.
In the face of this devastation, more profound than death and
encountered long before it, you learn courage. You learn to stand for
your ideals when they are mocked or rejected. You learn to speak when
speech is dangerous. You learn to act when success is far away and even
hope is gone. You learn to make your own judgments about right and
wrong. You learn to doubt the wisdom of those whose opinions are
more popular. You learn to doubt your own. You are forced to a life of
choice and refusal, reflection and will. You learn to be thoughtful in the
midst of doubt, brave in the face of enemies, courageous in facing the
always present possibility of loss.
And then, perhaps you rise.
We are taken up and moved with the people as by waves on a sea.
We may will what the people will and move willingly. We may resist,
and the sea will flow over us like water over rocks. We may be moved,
changed in place and time unwillingly. Yet that sea, however great, may
also be changed in its course. We can hold fast. We can go forward on
that sea. We can learn to sail.
26 Wild Democracy
6. Democrats take risks.
People who can rule themselves excel at taking risks. The decision
to set aside the comfort of kings or lord protectors or of leaving the
decisions to the expert few is itself a great risk. People who rule them-
selves go willingly into an uncertain future. The decision to become a
people—not the armed revolution that is so often necessary to affirm
it, not the institutions and governments the people may establish—
is the moment a people is born. They speak themselves into being.
In the long reach of time, this choice has often meant accepting the
need for revolution. People accept revolution with all the danger it
involves. They risk all, “their lives, their fortune, and their sacred
honor.” They may lose their lives or the lives of those they love. They
may be maimed. They may kill or maim others. They may take sin
upon themselves. They may fail. They may end impoverished. They
may be remembered only as traitors. They take the risk. They choose
to go together, to work together, though they know that their aims
may diverge. They know they are working not only with their friends
but with those who may have been, or may prove to be, their enemies.
They take the risk.
People who rule themselves take this risk not only at the moment of
the founding but for the entire time of their existence. They may, they
will, seek to fence risk out with laws and constitutions, with customs
and practices. They may, they will, cultivate a respect for those laws
and constitutions, for precedent, for their forebears, for the past. But
they have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. They know they can rebel.
Day after day, they are confronted by risk. There are the ordinary
risks that nature, perhaps Nature’s God, and certainly other human
beings, pose to any people. There will be earthquakes and hurricanes,
cyclones and tsunamis. There will be forest fires. There will be floods.
The people, not the monarch, not the autocrat, not even the state
they establish, will be expected to deal with catastrophes. They know
that they must demand that the state respond. They know they are to
judge that response. They know they can respond faster than any state.
People can reach further than states or state officials, respond more
quickly and more thoughtfully. They must anticipate other disasters.
They expect themselves to learn.
So it is with the threat of war. People who rule themselves must meet
the threat of war not as states but as people. When they declare war,
when they marshal their defenses, they do so not only as rulers but as
the ruled. They will make the decision and they will bear the costs. The
burden must fall not on the few but upon all.
All the threats—natural disasters, economic catastrophes, war and
the threat of war—are present to democrats, as they are to all people.
The difference is that democrats are obliged to judge, consider, and
respond. They cannot assign that responsibility to others. They are
called—each separately and in common—to judgment and to action.
For people who are ruled, the great risks of war and famine, disease,
disaster, and pogroms are something to fear. Perhaps the powerful and
wealthy can protect themselves. Perhaps states, churches, temples,
and mosques will protect the weak. Perhaps not. For people who rule
themselves, these threats, these risks, these dangers are problems to be
solved, for all, together.
There are other risks. These are risks we choose. When people are
free, their minds and hands are unbound. They will explore, invent,
take up great projects. Not all these ventures will end well. Explorers
will be lost; inventions will have dangerous consequences. Bridges will
collapse; new drugs will have unlooked-for side effects. Projects will
fail. They are worth the risk.
Democrats become good at taking risks: adept at assessing them,
clever at mitigating them, quick to respond to them, and, above all,
unafraid. Courage gives them daring; judgment gives them caution;
practice gives them power.
The greatest risk is the risk we pose to one another. This is the great
risk of a common life. As the unflinching Thomas Hobbes recognized,
“anyone can kill anyone else.” We are always dangerous to one another.
Ruling ourselves requires us to become adept at both friendship and
enmity. We learn to defeat our enemies when we can, work with them
when we cannot. We learn the joy and duties of friendship. We learn
that there will be moments of enmity in friendship. We learn that there
can be moments of friendship between enemies. We face the risks of
a common life not blindly but with our eyes open. We have courage
enough. We can work together and win through to a common life. We
can learn when to work together, when to resist, when to rebel.
II
Free people keep something wild
in them
7. Rebellion is not only a right: it is a duty.
There is a passage in the American Declaration of Independence

that lays out the grounds for establishing governments and, then, the
grounds for rebellion. Part of that passage reads, “when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is
their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards
for their future security.” Rebellion is not just their right. Rebellion is
their duty.
Rebellion is too often thought of as the passionate unleashing of
anger, in which the ordinary restraints that govern conduct—laws
and morals alike—are thrown to the winds. In the Declaration we see
people in the midst of a rebellion, conscious not of their passions but of
their duty. They know how hard it is for people to rebel, how long they
resist, and how much they will suffer before they take that course.
That time of endurance is also a time of thought. People consider the
evil that has been done to them, of course, but they give longer, harder
thought to the costs their people will bear if they rebel. Rebellion is
difficult and dangerous. The costs of rebellion will be borne not just
by the rebel but by the rebel’s family and friends. The chances of vic-
tory are small. Even if victory is won, there is no guarantee that things
will be better than they were. People come to rebellion and revolution
slowly, reluctantly. They do not come full of passion alone. They come
after long thought. They do not come full of rage. They come stoically,
with courage and commitment to a cause they know may fail. They do
not come to satisfy an appetite for revenge. They come to fulfill a duty.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0002
Free people keep something wild in them 29
The idea that one might have a duty to rebel may seem shocking or
perverse. It should not. Those who believe that governments should
be ruled by the people should recognize that any failure to meet that
standard imposes a duty. It is the people’s duty to correct a government
that they, after long endurance and reflection, determine to be irrep-
arable. It is their duty to rebel against a government whose evils they
cannot overcome.That duty requires judgment and self-discipline.
That duty belongs to us all.
We should rebel more often.
8. Empire is the enemy of the democratic.
When Patrick Henry argued against the ratification of the 1787

American Constitution, he spoke, he said, as “a conservative for lib
erty.” He was an old revolutionary, and there were things he missed in
that document. We see (and perhaps he did as well) the stain of slavery
on the Constitution. “I will not, cannot justify it,” he declared. He saw
(we do as well) the absence of an acknowledgment of the rights of the
people. There was no Bill of Rights. Henry saw something else as well.
He saw an arrogation of the sovereignty of the people. “Who gave them
the right to say ‘We, the People’?” Henry asked. He saw the ambition
of Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, the imperialist, the capitalist, and the
colonizer.1 The Federalist Constitution, Henry argued, was not a doc-
ument “to secure these rights” but one that aimed at the creation of “a
splendid Government” at the price of liberty. If their government were
to be established, he argued, “it will be because we like a great splendid
one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we
must have an army, and a navy and a number of things.” The desire for
empire, for splendor, for glory, was antithetical to the love of freedom.
The family, sitting under their fig tree, wanted neither to oppress nor
to be oppressed, neither to be feared nor to fear. They had succeeded
in that aim. “We are not feared by foreigners: we do not make nations
tremble: Would this, Sir, constitute happiness or secure liberty?”2
The partisans of empire had an intimate relation to fear. They were
afraid of foreign wars and domestic insurrections and, of course, of an-
archy. They saw fear as an ally. The ambition for glory was allied to an
30 Wild Democracy
economy of fear. Hamilton had argued that the ambitions of European

empires could be forestalled only if the United States were to become
an empire themselves. The newly free of the New World should fear the
ambitions of the Old. Fear was our surest defense against the ambitions
of others. Fear would prompt Americans to seek their security in a
stronger, more energetic, more authoritarian government, less protec-
tive of their rights. The Federalists aimed, Henry recognized, “to terrify
us into an adoption of this new system.”3 Fear was the friend of empire,
the ally of ambition, and the enemy of liberty.
The logic of the protection racket is at work here. Charles Tilly
dissected it to devastating effect in an article titled “War-making
and State-making as Organized Crime.” “Apologists for particular
governments and for government in general commonly argue,”
Tilly wrote, “that they offer protection from local and external
violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the
costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price
of protection ‘anarchists,’ ‘subversives,’ or both at once.”4 History
suggests, however, that the threat of violence was often due to
actions of the state itself. Worse, the greater the threat, the more
power the state would need. The more power the state gathered, the
greater the threat it would present, not merely to external enemies
but to local critics.
Henry recognized another link in this set of chains. The “great and
splendid” state offered not only protection but glory. There are few
monuments to the exile who has escaped persecution, the immigrant
who abandons home for hope. There are few epic poems on the steel-
worker, the dairy farmer, the administrative assistant, or the waiter.
The small state, protecting the rights of its people, rids itself of titles
and aristocratic display. The glory of empires does not belong to them.
That is their true and honorable greatness.
The desire for glory is intimately allied to fear. Fear makes one long
for the strong hand of the Protector and the power of an Empire. These
offer not only protection. They offer glory. Individuals are taught to
take pride not in lives lived ethically but in lives lived in grandeur: large
houses, expensive cars, yachts, jets, and ever-growing ciphers re-
cording astronomical personal wealth. There is no honor in this. There
should be shame.
Instead shame falls on those who have no reason for shame. Those
who are not wealthy are taught, day by day, that they should want these
possessions. They are taught that they would be better if they had them,
that they are less than those who do have them. They are seduced into
shame. Lacking glory themselves, they may embrace the glory of a race
or nation. As their fear lost them their liberty, their shame costs them
their judgment and their honor.
The United States did not succeed in warding off the allure of glory
or the glamour of evil. There is, as Henry feared, a standing army,
despite constitutional efforts to prevent it.5 The need for military
appropriations to be approved by Congress every two years is a ragged
remnant, the bleached bones of the Constitution’s initial bravery. The
long history of wars of conquest against the indigenous tribes and a
growing ambition to rival the empires of Europe have been justified in
all the languages of fear and ambition. Americans are not yet free of it.
The fearful passion for imperial glory has not gone uncontested.
Washington’s Farewell Address warned against military adventurism
and condemned “overgrown military establishments which, under
any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to
be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”6 Washington
was admirably immune to glory, rebuffing Hamilton’s monarchical
ambitions, refusing a third term, and avoiding the gold braid and
ribbons of military authority that have corrupted so many revolu-
tionary leaders in the Old World and the New. He did not succeed,
however, in preventing the hunger for imperial glory in others.
We have forgotten many of the wars we fought. The expansion of
the United States across the continent was accompanied by Indian
wars and the forced removal of many tribes. Looking back, we honor
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Chief Joseph, not the generals to whom
he surrendered. We have forgotten their names. We remember his
courage, his care for his people, and the hard choices he made to se-
cure them. We know, we Americans, that the Nimiipuu, the Nez Percé,
were wronged. We know they acted honorably and with courage and
judgment. We have come to honor them far more than we honor the
troops the United States set against them. The same could be said of
Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull); Shi- ka-
She (Cochise); Goyaałé
(Geronimo); and the host of tribal leaders we honor and remember.
32 Wild Democracy
The Indian wars (fought from before 1776 into the twentieth century)
are now a source of shame and regret. Yet we are a settler colony. We
have much to learn, much to mourn, much to repent, much to repair,
much to overcome.7
Theirs was not the only blood shed in pursuit of glory.
The Mexican War gave us the porous, ever-shifting borderlands that
Trump and others have sought to divide. It would be hard for anyone
raised in the West—perhaps in any part of the United States—to im-
agine an America without the words, religion, buildings, foods, music,
clothing, and legends of Mexico. The Mormon Wars, more thoroughly
forgotten, followed the assassination of Joseph Smith. Smith’s disciples
were chased from one town to another, pursued by lynchings, harried
ever farther west. Once Mormons were outlaws; now they are senators.
The Church of Latter Day Saints is now an ordinary part of the fabric
of American life.
The pursuit of glory in the American move westward brought us
riches, but they came from the generous hands of those we defeated.
The glory generals won has turned to shame and ashes. The indigenous
people they fought gave us models of freedom and courage. They have
given us works of extraordinary craft and power and ways of seeing
beauty and finding guidance in the natural world. In the shadow of
plutocracy and climate change, the Lakota and their allies have stood
fast in defense of the idea and practice of the commons.8 They have tes-
tified that the desire for profit must give way to the welfare of the land
and the people. They rightly argue that treaties must be honored. They
testify to the sacred.
The turn of the nineteenth century saw the United States embroiled
in foreign wars. Now, when long wars in distant places are more fa-
miliar to us, we may look with more suspicion on the passion for glory.
We have learned that with these we have to bear not only the deaths of
our own soldiers but the deaths of innocents; we have to bear not only
the costs of glory but the shame that is its underside.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the passion for glory was at
its height. Americans entered the Philippines as allies of the Filipino
rebels against Spanish colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 we served as
Spain’s successor in colonial rule. There were those, like Theodore
Roosevelt, who dreamed of empire and hoped for a people hungry for
glory. “If we are to be a really great people we must play a great part in
the world,” he declared. He could conceive of greatness only as war. He
despised, he said, “the man of timid peace” and those “who cant about
liberty and the consent of the governed.” Americans, he hoped, would
be “stern men with empire in their eyes” and “mothers of many healthy
children.”9 In the debates over the American role in the Philippines,
senators like Henry Cabot Lodge called for the United States to “step
forward boldly and take its place at the head of nations.” This was
prompted by a naked desire for power and profit, justified by racial ar-
rogance and religious bigotry.
Conquest, declared Senator Albert Beveridge, was “the mission
of our race, trustee under God of the civilization of the world,” for
“Almighty God” has “marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to
lead in the regeneration of the world.” Indeed, God had gone farther,
determining with divine omniscience that as “most future wars will be
conflicts for commerce,” the nation’s future should be “permanently
anchored at a spot selected by the strategy of Providence” to command
the China trade, for “that power that rules the Pacific is the power that
rules the world.” The language of piety veiled blasphemy. Beveridge saw
God as the servant of merchants. The “American Republic” was treated
with no greater respect. The “world-redeeming work of our imperial
race” required nothing less than the abandonment of the Constitution
and the Declaration of Independence.10
Lodge made that explicit. He argued that that the destruction of
the western tribes had made it clear. In driving the Cherokee off their
lands, in the devastation of tribal peoples, “all questions about the con-
sent of the governed went down into nothingness as they deserved to
go.”11 He shared Roosevelt’s contempt for those “who cant about lib
erty and the consent of the governed.” For Lodge, for Beveridge, for
Roosevelt and all those who shared in the lust for glory, democracy
and republicanism were myths for children. The self-evident truths
of the Declaration were fairy tales that an older and wiser nation—an
empire—would surely reject.
We have forgotten many of those who kept faith with the
Declaration. While Lodge, Beveridge, and Roosevelt boasted of the
virtues of the “Teuton” and the “Anglo-Saxon,” Senator George Hoar
bore witness to “the God who made of one blood all the nations of the
34 Wild Democracy
earth.” The imperialists spoke of themselves as God’s Chosen People.

They saw empire as the “world-redeeming work of our imperial race.”
For Hoar, imperial ambition was a temptation to evil. He condemned
“the wretched glitter and glare of empire which Satan is setting before
us” and cried out in the Senate, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”12 Not
until the civil rights movement would people of faith speak so power-
fully in pursuit of justice.
William Jennings Bryan opposed American imperialism explic-
itly, consistently, and with a great movement accompanying him. Like
Hoar, Bryan saw colonialism as a temptation and a betrayal. The impe-
rial enterprise was a repudiation of
the principles upon which the Nation rests; it can employ force in-
stead of reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer
weaker people; it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property,
and kill their people, but it cannot repeal the moral law, or escape the
punishment decreed for the violation of human rights.
For these religious democrats, the betrayal of democratic principles

was a sin, and as Bryan declared, “the wages of sin is death.” There was
another path to greatness, another conception of honor:
Because our Declaration of Independence was promulgated others

have been promulgated. Because the patriots of 1776 fought for lib
erty others have fought for it. Because our constitution was adopted
other constitutions have been adopted.
The growth of the principle of self- government, planted on
American soil, has been the overshadowing political fact of the nine-
teenth century. It has made this nation conspicuous among the na-
tions. . . . I would not exchange the glory of this Republic for the glory
of all the Empires that have risen and fallen since time began.13
The steadfast opposition of Bryan and the People’s Party speaks pow-
erfully against the contemporary confusion of populism and na-
tionalism. Bryan spoke for the consent of the governed not only in
the United States but in all the world. He spoke against empire. His
opponents spoke of Providential destiny and the nation. Bryan saw
moral duty and the rights of all people. Bryan, Hoar, and their allies
lost. The United States did not extricate itself from war and colonial
rule in the Philippines for forty-seven years. We are still enthralled by
empire. Empire is a betrayal of democracy.
This was, this is an American story of temptation and corruption and
of courage and struggle against imperialism. There are other stories,
other histories, for this is not only an American struggle. The French
revolutionaries fell prey to glory in Napoléon. The proud nation of the
Revolution and the Commune fell into empire, with colonies across
the world. Nation after nation has fallen prey to revolutionaries who,
when the work of revolution seemed to be accomplished, lost their re-
spect for the people and their commitment to justice and claimed the
powers of a monarch. Long before and after these, predatory rulers
have sought glory by preying on the people.
Glory lies in ruling ourselves alone.
9. The democratic citizen is both sovereign

and subject.
Rousseau’s famous definition of the citizen as both subject and sover-

eign echoes Aristotle’s description of democracy as ruling and being
ruled in turn only to go beyond it. Rousseau saw how extraordinary the
achievement of democratic citizenship is. Democracy was not simply
a particular governmental design; it was a disposition and a discipline.
The citizen must have the daring, the vision, the courage, and the ar-
rogance of the ruler. And the citizen must rule that arrogance with an
unrelenting discipline. The citizen must be willing to submit to the law,
to accept the judgments of other citizens, to be ruled. The citizen must
be a subject: deferential to the ruler even when the ruler errs, willing to
serve, willing to sacrifice. The citizen must stand above the law: making
law, forging the standards that law is measured against, changing law,
rebelling when rebellion is required. Citizens rule others. They rule
themselves.
The citizen as subject is necessary to any people who wish to rule
themselves. Their ability to rule themselves is dependent on their
ability to accept that they will not only rule but be ruled. Their ability
36 Wild Democracy
to accept rule with dignity and grace and without fear is admirable.
Their ability to accept rule without violence is necessary. Once, while
watching a presidential election, my friend went to bed before the
results were clear. When I asked how she could do that, she said, “I
know there won’t be tanks in the street in the morning.” The commit-
ment to accept being ruled without immediately taking up arms testi-
fies to the trust a people must have in one another. Yet it also testifies
to their courage, to face an uncertain future with equanimity. We can
no longer be sure about the tanks. We must stay awake through all the
watches of the night.
People who rule themselves accept the idea that they may lose, that
their ideas will sometimes be cast aside in favor of others they reject.
Though they can—and usually will—hold to their positions and prin-
ciples, they accept that they will be ruled, at least for a time, in ways
they do not approve and would not choose. They will wait and watch
and judge the outcome. They will dissent, protest, organize, educate.
They may change their minds. They may rebel. More often, they hold
fast, work, and wait. The discipline of equality is not something they
demand only from the powerful. They demand it of themselves.
The citizen is also, and most importantly, sovereign. It is not the
recognition of other states, still less the recognition of international
organizations, that makes a state. It is the people. The consent of the
governed is the only legitimate ground for state authority. The sover-
eign people stand before, behind, beneath, and above the state. The
power to make a people before that people makes a state lies in each
person’s hands.
Sovereignty belongs to the citizen not only as part of the people but
as one person. If one is to rule as well as to be ruled, one must learn
sovereignty. The citizen is required not only to submit to rule but to
rule: to hold power and use it well. Those moments when the people
come together are few and fugitive, yet the rule of the people is active
and omnipresent. The people, as Tocqueville recognized, “hover above
the entire life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause
and end of all things.” Though that present appears distant and invis-
ible, it is within reach. Citizens are required not merely to rule for but
to rule as the people. They have a duty to seek the common good. They
also have a duty to act for it. They have a duty to rule. They are called to
judge. They are called to make law. They are called to enforce the law.
They are called to defy it. Sovereignty does not belong to the exception.
Sovereignty is a commonplace.
Some of the work of ruling comes formally, in the work of juries,
town halls, and elections. The greater part (in every sense) comes out-
side, below, and beyond laws and institutions. Burke’s wisdom was to
recognize that people constitute themselves in the crafting of custom
and convention. They decide what they are to be, in common and in
practice. This is, as Burke saw, a long slow process in the life of a people,
but people do that work in uncounted decisions that are usually the
work of a moment. Some of those moments change the course of the
people like a rock in a stream.
We honor individual acts of authority. We saw that strength and
power in Greta Thunberg, sitting outside her high school with a hand-
lettered sign. She held fast, and the world shifted. Acts that shift worlds
are not always noticed. The people, the democrats who walk through
the world as the eyes and hands and voice of sovereignty rule the com-
monplace unnoticed. The one who sees a wrong, who says no to a
small injustice, who raises a hand to hold back force, who acts for the
common good or the rights of one, embodies sovereignty and makes it
a force in the world.
Subjects belong to monarchs, citizens to nations and to states. In
a democracy, the distinction between citizen and person should be
slight and suspect. Citizens should value the rights given to them by
law far less than those they hold within themselves. As the Declaration
of Independence (and not only the Declaration) has affirmed, the
rights that belong to all people are inalienable.
They cannot be taken. They cannot be bought and sold. They cannot
be given away.
The rights of citizens and subjects are far more fragile. The rights of
subjects ultimately depend on the will of the monarch. Where the auto-
cratic character of monarchy is tempered, as in the United Kingdom, by
deference to an unwritten constitution, the subject’s vulnerability may
be lessened by law, long-established practice and convention. There,
the rights of citizens are dependent on law and the state. They are not
rights at all: they are gifts, privileges granted by the state and the law, as
monarchs grant them to their subjects. What law grants, law may take
away. What the state protects it may attack. When law or the state is seen
as the source of rights, citizens are encouraged to defer to law and the
38 Wild Democracy
state. They are told that they owe their rights not to “Nature and Nature’s
God” or to their own humanity but to a bureaucratic dictum. They are
not their own masters. Still less are they the masters of the state. They
have nowhere to stand against unjust laws or an abusive state.
Hannah Arendt, like too many intellectuals, believed that rights
were the gift of law and the state. She had known persecution, exile, and
statelessness. She recognized the need for rights, yet she could not bring
herself to accept that rights exist before, beyond, above, and outside the
law. She argued, therefore, for “the right to have rights.” This demand is
as contrived as it sounds. The demand leaves the question of what rights
might be granted or denied to a state or an international organization of
states. Whether one has or does not have rights is left to the judgment
of lawyers and officials. The argument that human rights are the work
of a consensus of international organizations, the gift of international
law, rests the claim to rights—even the “right to have rights”—upon this
all too fragile foundation. This view makes lawyers and legal scholars,
states and organizations the arbiters of claims to rights. Those who give
can take away. The right to have rights is no right at all.
Subjects and citizens can be exiled. They can be forced to become
refugees. Their belonging to states and nations can be given and taken
away like a passport. Yet they still carry within them their inalienable
rights: the rights that belong to all human beings. Subject, citizen,
exile, or refugee, people carry their rights within them. When they are
forced back upon themselves, their rights remain. When they move,
whether from home to work or into exile, they carry their rights with
them. They cannot lose their rights, for those rights are inalienable.
Their rights are as much a part of them as their hands or their heart.
Their rights are held in their bodies. They are right incarnate.
10. Free people keep something wild in them.
Nietzsche wrote of himself:
I hate to follow and I hate to lead

Obey? Oh no! and govern? No indeed.14
Nietzsche is rarely thought to have a disposition toward democracy,

but I (and many with me) think that what some have seen as aristo-
cratic is far more descriptive of free people. People who rule them-
selves disdain servitude and avoid leadership.
There is nothing surprising in the desire of free people to avoid obe-
dience. They pride themselves on their freedom. They see obedience
in its simplest form (obedience to a command) as a threat—and an
insult—to their freedom. They train themselves from birth to judge: to
judge all commands, to question all authority. Nor should we be sur-
prised that they prefer not to lead. They do not long to dominate. They
have no desire to live among those who wish to be ruled. They recog-
nize that dominion diminishes the leader as well as the led. The people
they respect do not require their leadership. They would rather avoid
any connection with people they do not respect.
Free people are like the Cat That Walked by Himself. “The wildest of
all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places
were alike to him.” Though free people make contracts and become ac-
customed to domesticity, they do it on their own terms and for their
own purposes. A free person is always able, and often inclined, to go
“out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet
Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.”15 Free
people never forget how to walk by their wild lone. There needs to be
something wild in us.
Machiavelli saw this. He wrote that there is no sure way of holding
cities accustomed to liberty except by demolishing them:
And whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to living in

freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; be-
cause this city can always have refuge, during a rebellion, in the name
of liberty and its traditional institutions, neither of which, either with
the passing of time or the acquiring of benefits, are ever forgotten.
Free people keep something wild and ungovernable in them. Those

who have learned to rule themselves do not submit to conquest, to re-
pression, or to the bribery of a soft life. Those who have learned the
hard discipline required to rule and be ruled according to their laws
40 Wild Democracy
and their own will, do not submit easily to others: “The memory of
their ancient liberty will not and cannot allow them to rest.”16
Free people shun both obedience and authority. Yet when they
choose they can be very good at both.
Free people obey freely. When they choose to come together as a
people, they do so willfully. They make their people, their country,
their nature, even their state their own. They are transformed by this.
Rousseau saw that this decision made the consenting person “an in-
telligent being, and a man.”17 People become, in one moment, both
more than themselves and more themselves. They acquire a being—as
an American or an Indian or a Palestinian—that is larger in time and
space than the limits of a single life. Their interest suddenly extends to
all those they now see as their own. They have a presence in the past
with their dead compatriots, and a presence in the future with those
who are yet to be. This belonging, this presence in time past and time
future is the work of their will, their conviction, their love. The alle-
giance that overcomes their solitude is more profound because it is the
gift of their solitude.
Knowing that they are part of a people does not end that solitude
or overcome the differences that belong to each person. On the con-
trary, it throws their personal characters into high relief. They look
around at their countrymen and see how very alien they are. They dis-
cover they are not like all others. They don’t listen to the same music,
like the same paintings, or eat the same food. They have different
aims, different ideals. They compete for jobs. They may not share
the same gods, the same goals, the same hopes for their people. They
come to take pride in certain of their differences. They come to treas
ure others. Small differences mark out families and neighborhoods.
For those who belong freely to one people, the differences among
them become sites of greater intimacy and pleasure. They take them
to heart.
Led by these passions for the places and people they take as their
own, they follow passionately. They take pride in their obedience to
laws they make themselves. They may take pride in obedience to laws
they reject, while they struggle to change them. That is pride in their
self-discipline, pride in their capacity to rule themselves. They will
show that discipline even in disobedience.
Consider Socrates. Socrates is rarely thought to be a democrat, but

in some respects he had a democratic sensibility. He works with Meno
and Alcibiades, the slave and the aristocrat. One cannot quite say of
him, as Whitman said of himself, “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman,
Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same,” but his wanderings
through Athens have a democratic promiscuity.18 He stood apart from
the city as critic and gadfly, but he loved the law of Athens with pas-
sion and fidelity. The Socrates of the Apology and the Crito shows no
respect for those of his fellow citizens who brought him to trial. He
mocks them. He points out their errors and refutes their arguments.
When asked what sentence he should receive, he proposes free meals
for life. He walks among his enemies without fear. Though he disdains
his accusers, he accepts the Athenians as his judges and he submits to
Athenian law.
Socrates’s death is an Athenian death: decided by Athenians ac-
cording to Athenian law, accepted by an Athenian. His obedience is
the work of a democratic discipline. Athens is his city, and he will not
leave it. A wealthy foreigner offers him escape and exile. He remains in
Athens. The laws of Athens are his laws. He made them. He fought for
them, he reminds his judges. He defended them against the dictators
who for a time took the place of the people. He accepts those laws and
he will die by them. It is a more powerful testimony to Athens than any
death at war could be. It is a more commanding discipline than force or
law alone could impose. It is not in his submission to law that Socrates
shows his democratic disposition. It is in his submission to the people,
the city, and the law that he chose as his own.
Work as part of a free people, ruling and being ruled, sharpens both
allegiance and independence. People are reminded, in all the work
of ruling and being ruled, that they are not only like but unlike their
compatriots. They belong to each other, but they differ profoundly: on
issues, in their interests, in their principles, and in their ideals. They
learn that likeness in one respect does not foreclose difference in an-
other. They learn that difference is possible for people who have much
in common. They become more sharply conscious of their own in-
dividuality, of their ties to their friends and neighbors. They join
them in common projects, pleasures, and pursuits. When they join,
they follow with passionate enthusiasm. Yet they remain conscious
42 Wild Democracy
of themselves as individual people, unlike each other and of infinite

value. In their legends and their common practices, they honor indi-
vidual eccentricity.
Often (if not always) in legends of heroes, a person who is solitary, a
loner or an outcast, is called to a mission for the people. In the words of
scripture and reggae:
The stone that the builder refuse

Will always be the head cornerstone.19
There is a proud competence in those who walk by their wild

lone. They know their own minds. They know their needs and how
to provide for them. They are famously good at living simply and at
providing not only for themselves but for others. They are critical in
their judgments. They are hard to defeat. They live alone, constantly
encountering obstacles and dangers, and therefore developing strate-
gies to survive and prosper. They work with others freely: by choice,
and in the recognition of common human needs.
III
Rights are born in the body
11. Rights are grounded in the body.
In many languages, the word for rights is also the word for law. Not in
mine. Rights are the name my people give to the democratic demand. It
is easier to speak of rights when the name does not call up a debt to law.
Rights are before, above, and beyond the law. Rights are demands all
people make, demands that call from the flesh. Rights make demands
on us. Rights do not merely impose obligations; they command us.
These democratic demands call us to witness, to recognize, to shelter
and to nourish, to cultivate, to do justice, and to rebel.
Rights are written in the flesh. They follow from the human condi-
tion. They are grounded in embodiment. They are demanded by body
and mind as each strives toward the fullness of the human, toward the
fullness of each particular human.
The right to life is the simplest right, but from this right many others
follow. If you have the right to protect yourself and preserve your life,
you have a right to what is necessary for that. You have a right to food.
As St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed in the Summa Theologica, it is no sin
to steal food if food is needed: “It is not theft, properly speaking, to
take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: be-
cause that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own
property by reason of that need.”1 Indeed, the saint argued, it is no sin
to steal for others who need food. For the same reason, the right to
preserve yourself gives you a right to clothing and shelter: to what you
need to protect yourself from the elements. The idea that healthcare
is a human right is not an imaginative expansion of rights: it is simple
common sense. Healthcare is needed by all who have bodies, which is
to say, everybody. You have a right to care for your health, for without
that you cannot preserve your life. Food, shelter, and healthcare must
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0003
44 Wild Democracy
be secured to all because these are necessary to secure the rights of all
people to preserve their lives.
There is a mind sheltered in the body. That mind, and the soul and
spirit with which it dwells, rely on the body. These too require preser-
vation. They need the protection of the body that shelters them, but
they need more. The mind requires its own food: education, tools,
training, and resources. Securing the preservation of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness requires us to secure the ability of all people
to learn.
If you have a right to liberty, you have a right to move away from
oppression and exploitation. You have the right to leave. You have the
right to migrate: to flee persecution, to flee war and violent criminality,
to find work and preserve your life. You have a right to protect that
liberty which is essential to you. Without it, you are nothing but an
object in the world, the tool, problem or prey of others. The right to lib
erty enables you to become human: to protect your life, your ability to
think, worship, honor, and live as you choose.
Does this imply that other bodies bear rights? Yes, it does. The rec-
ognition that people hold their rights in their bodies, that their rights
are born and carried in their flesh, drives us to the recognition that
other bodies have claims that cannot be set aside. The idea that the dog,
the cat, the elephant, the sage grouse, and the industrially produced
chicken have rights and claims on us is both familiar and unfamiliar.
Ordinary people have the profound sense that animals expect some-
thing from us and that they are right to do so. We understand that we
have a duty to all in the natural world. Their rights are entangled with
our own. We recognize, too, that we should defer to the freedoms and
claims of cats (for example) differently than we defer to those of lions,
human beings, or dogs.
The rights of other bodies—of grass and trees, rivers and oceans—
are also familiar and unfamiliar. People recognize that it is wrong to
despoil, to waste, to dirty what has been clean. We recognize that such
acts are unjust and that they do practical harm to things in the world.
New Zealand’s courts have given a legal form to the rights indigenous
people ascribed to specific rivers and mountains. The indigenous un-
derstanding of these rivers and mountains as beings that have rights
has made its way into once alien judicial institutions. New Zealanders
Rights are born in the body 45
have become more indigenous, more Maori, in their understanding of

the world. They have become wiser and more honorable. Their acts call
us to reflect on what rights we need to respect in the world of moun-
tains, rivers, oceans, trees and grasslands, deserts and marshes. What
does the material world demand of the democratic?
Some of the most thoughtful people in the West think of these
questions as duties of care or stewardship. That sense of obligation
serves people well, but it is not sufficient. The rights of things in the
world around us depend not on our virtue but on the character of
those other beings. Care and stewardship of other bodies, of our world
and all that lives within it, are not acts of virtue but commands we dis-
obey at our peril.
Those who believe that people are created by God in the image of
God believe that God breathes rights into the body with the soul. In
this understanding, deference to people’s rights is the worship of God.
The faithful see the rights of man as a reflection of the substance and
so the glory of God. To respect those rights is to acknowledge the pres-
ence of the divine in each person made in the image of God.
We are not all faithful. Not all of us believe that we can speak for God
or know the divine. Rights belong to the people of doubt and wonder
as well as to the people of faith. There is no need for faith to ground the
rights born in our flesh. Rights are born in the thinking mind and the
fragile flesh. All our rights lie between precarity and power. Whether
or not they are given by God, our rights follow from the needs and
promise of the embodied.
The faithful, atheists, and those who claim no certain knowledge
of the divine can all recognize the grounding of rights in the body.
A person cannot be a person without life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Without life, there is no person, no being, no body, no-
body at all. Without liberty, no one can move in the world, no one
can speak or act or live as a human being. The body that can speak
and read and write has a right to speech. Without this, it cannot
be what it can and should be. People are driven to see, and then to
make, the new. They are driven outward, toward that which lies be-
yond their sight. These are the drives and capacities of every body.
The denial of any of these fundamental rights forecloses the fullness
of human life.
46 Wild Democracy
Whether they are given by nature or by nature’s god, the rights

grounded in our bodies carry commands with them. Every right is
a demand, a duty, a command, an obligation, and a calling. Whether
these demands are voiced or made silently in the presence of the body,
they command. The defense of those rights, in oneself and others, is a
duty. We are commanded to respect rights in ourselves and others, to
be sure, but we have a greater duty. Rights not only protect us; they call
upon us to act.
12. People have the right to life, to liberty, and to the

pursuit of happiness.
All rights live in the right to a life. I chose the form that belongs to
my people. Their language echoes Rainsborough’s declaration that “the
poorest he that is in England has a right to live as the greatest he.”2
Rainsborough’s statement is compelling in its simplicity. He gives
it in plain language. Anyone, the poorest man or woman in the
country, could hear and understand him. This is a revolutionary
claim. Rainsborough sees that the democratic demand for the rights
every body has by nature leads directly to the right people have to rule
themselves.
The claim leads farther than we—even we who believe in natural
rights—often recognize. Rainsborough is claiming not just life, bare
life, but a life, the whole of a human life, the life that each of us has to
live. What is this? This is the democratic demand: a demand that every
person be able to live a full life. This is an argument not only for bread
but for roses, not for bare life but for an education, the tools of a trade,
for all that is necessary to make a human life.
The right to liberty is the right to shape a self in the world and to
shape that world. People who rule themselves do as they think best,
alone and together. The right to liberty entails the right to move freely
in the world. To come and to go, to stay or to emigrate. Liberty also
embraces all the political rights: the right to consent to government
and to withdraw that consent, to judge and to act on that judgment,
to speak freely, to assemble. People with the right to rule themselves
are called to rule themselves. People who rule themselves bow before
freedom of conscience. They are commanded not only to honor that in

others but to act on it themselves.
The right to the pursuit of happiness affirms, as Rainsborough did,
the fullness of the democratic demand. It is not enough to be fed and
sheltered and left ignorant. It is not enough to protect the body and
leave the life of the mind to chance. The democratic demand is not for
bare life but for a whole life. Each person holds within them the de-
mand for what that life requires. Each is called to fulfill that promise.
13. People have the right to assemble.
A life is at once a life apart and a life together. Democrats need to pre-
serve those anarchic spaces where people are ungoverned and so can
remain ungovernable. A full life is a life with others. That begins in
the right to assemble. People have the right to work together to make
space for themselves, in families, among their friends, in towns, wher-
ever they please. They come together to shape the world as they think
best. They gather to rule themselves willingly. They also gather to
govern, reproach, challenge, and overthrow the governments they
create, powers that rise to dominate them, threats to their freedom.
The right to assemble, to appear together in all the fragility and power
of the body, secures both their common good and their freedom to
live apart.
In the United States, but not only in the United States, the right
to assemble has been eroded. We are told that we can assemble only
with the permission of the government and under the eye of the po-
lice. We can assemble only at certain places and at certain times. When
we assemble we are fenced in and herded like cattle through the pre-
appointed route of a permitted march. There are penalties for those the
police determine are disturbing the peace or not observing the limits
of their license to demonstrate. This is not exercising the right to as-
semble. This is permitting the state to take it away.
In the wake of the March on Washington, Malik el Shabazz, Malcolm
X, recognized the limits of this iconic and redemptive assembly: “They
controlled it so tight—they told those Negroes what time to hit town,
how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing,
48 Wild Democracy
what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make;
and then told them to get out of town by sundown.”3
It is easy and convenient to accept the restrictions on marches and
demonstrations (which is to say, on our right to assemble). There is
an implicit contract, quite often breached, that if the marchers and
demonstrators stay in their place, the police will protect them. In any
case, people know the route in advance, and they can plan, if not for an
escape in time of danger (that may be blocked by the fences and inhib-
ited by the presence of the police) at least for their trip home if things
remain orderly, and for an escape if they do not. None of this, however,
needs to be honored. Officials can suggest, and people can follow these
suggestions if they choose. Accepting the limits imposed by the state
may make revolutionary change possible. Yet it is a price, a burden,
and a constraint that we should recognize and resist when resistance
is necessary.
The right to assemble is a right. No license is necessary. No permit,
no permission is required. When people accede to licenses and
permits, it should be their choice alone and ought not to be done too
often. Governments, and the people themselves, must learn again
that the right to assemble is a right and not a privilege. Corporations,
banks, and factories must learn that rights reach farther than the state.
Assemblies of free people can be displays of great recklessness and
courage. The world has watched the people of Hong Kong rally in de-
fense of their remaining liberties. They are the people Machiavelli
described, who, having lived in freedom under their own laws, re-
member their ancient liberties even when they are lost. Sometimes the
will to rule themselves seems to come not from a remembered history
but from nowhere. We watch the people of Thailand struggle toward
a democracy they have never known. The rebellious people may have
little or no freedom to remember, but they drive toward justice all
the same.
We watched the people of Tahrir Square rise up. People all over the
world who had never been to Egypt or known an Egyptian sent one
another videos showing the courage of the Egyptian people. There
is a video of an Egyptian in London, Waseem Wagdi, that I watched
in that time (and often since). He is a middle-aged man in a camel’s
hair sports jacket and a scarf, with a composed, educated manner and
fluent English. He speaks calmly and analytically to the reporter at

first, then with rising passion: “It is something, I had hoped, against
all hope, would happen in my lifetime.” He had hoped that his chil-
dren would see freedom, but the people in Egypt, “the heroes in Egypt
are not waiting. They are bringing all of our dreams through today.”
The reporter asks him what he would say to the Egyptian people. He
responds, “I must say it in Arabic first,” and turns to face the camera
directly. Then with tears running down his face he bears witness to
their courage and says, “I kiss the dirt under your feet.” The people
were, he says, “cleansing themselves of all remnants of fear.”4 They had
the courage to rule themselves. He knew that freedom depended on
courage. He honored that courage in the people who would not wait,
the people fired by what King called “the fierce urgency of now.”
You who read this will know that these revolutions were put down.
They were, as revolutions often are, undermined and betrayed. They
were overcome by military power, by the power of the wealthy, and
by the fears people had of one another. Perhaps we will not live to see
them succeed. Perhaps, in our sight or beyond it, they will find their
way through.
Not all uprisings or assemblies are just or honorable or democratic.
Not all assemblies are wise. Not all respect the rights held in the body.
All people have the right to assemble. They do not have the right to
assemble uncontested. Their assembly voices a demand. That demand
may be just or unjust. The demand calls to us for judgment.
On January 6, 2020, a group of people assembled at the U.S. Capitol.
Conscious of their power, filled with anger, and persuaded that the
presidential election had been stolen, they broke through the police
barriers and poured into the Capital. They wore bison headdresses and
face paint, camo and flannel jackets. There were men and women, old
and young. They said that they were right to come, right to break down
the barriers to Congress and enter the Capitol because “[t]‌his is the
people’s house.”
They had the right to assemble, to confront their representatives, to
voice their anger and their demands. They were right to say, “This is
the people’s house.” Their assembly, their chaotic entry, their costumes,
and even the suspect liberties they took show that belief in the power
of the people over their government endures. We should not condemn
50 Wild Democracy
them for this. Nevertheless, the insurrection of January 6 was undemo-

cratic, the work of authoritarianism and deception.
People can be mistaken; people can be deceived; people can be
misled. Too many of the people assembled on January 6 were in thrall
to the absurd conspiracy theories of QAnon; too many had listened too
long to the dishonesty broadcast by Fox. Too many were made vulner-
able by justified anger and reasonable fear. They were led badly. They
were not judging; they were following.
They were also armed. Too many came not to voice their demands
but to compel by force. There were those who crushed a Capitol po-
liceman and beat others with flagpoles, baseball bats, and pipes. They
inflicted broken bones and brain injuries. They threatened members
of Congress, their staffs, people simply working at jobs in the Capitol,
people visiting.
They sought, by their own testimony, to impose their will on the
country. The use of violence, the indifference to the views of others,
marked their struggle as authoritarianism in the making.
They sought not to expand but to limit rights and freedoms. They
listened to authoritarians; they followed an authoritarian; they acted to
impose their will by force.
The right to assemble carries with it the command to assemble
when assembly is needed. This requires both judgment and courage.
Out of revolutionary assemblies come repeated images of individuals
standing unarmed before heavily armed soldiers and police. These
images of individuals standing alone before power are not the oppo-
site of the people assembled. They stand for the people. The rights that
the assembly calls up belong to the whole people. They are therefore
present in each of the people. They cannot be rooted out. It is for this
reason, and because of their transcendent courage, that people facing
guns and dogs, fire hoses, tear gas, guns and bombs, uncertain of any
victory, still say, still sing, “We shall overcome, someday.”
14. People have the right to speak and to be silent.
One of the rights sought by those who face the naked power of the state
is the right to remain silent. Those who intend to rule themselves know
that they must defend their bodies to keep their souls free. The closed
body, safe from coercion, protected from dependence on others,
shelters the open mind.
Lawyers and scholars have debated whether the right to privacy is a
right at all. They are wrong to doubt it. Privacy is a right so profound
and fundamental that it has become invisible. Without the right to pri-
vacy we lie naked before the eyes of whatever state or corporate power
can place us under surveillance. We are in their power. Without the
right to keep our bodies to ourselves we are no better than slaves the
master can violate at will. Without the right to keep our bodies whole
and healthy and in the forms we choose, we are dependent and, again,
enslaved.
Those who can reach into your body have you at their mercy. This is
the case whether it is the government, a corporation, a religious organ
ization, or a private person.
The right to remain within yourself is also the right to remain silent.
This is one of the prized rights of the Anglo-American political tradi-
tion. It was claimed by those who were asked to take oaths of loyalty
to the ruler and the established church. It is claimed by those on trial
who argue that they cannot be compelled to testify against themselves.
Though it is honored in the Anglo-American constitutions, it is not
confined there. This right belongs to all.
The right to remain silent affirms the right of every person to speak
where and when they choose. The right to freedom of speech is allied
to the right to freedom of conscience.
Freedom of speech is also intimately related to freedom of the press.
The concentration of media in a few hands means that a few control
what can be read or heard, what can be written in the papers or on
billboards, what can be heard on the radio or seen on TV, even (per-
haps especially) what can be seen or heard or read online. When only
those who have wealth can speak or make themselves heard, freedom
of speech is not fully established. When those who have wealth or
power determine what can be said or heard, speech is not free.
If we cannot yet meet as equals in the public sphere, still less can
we meet as equals at work. When we meet each other at home, we can
question, challenge, and reason with each other. At work we know
that we must be silent. It is now taken for granted in many, perhaps
52 Wild Democracy
in most circles that freedom of speech is a right restricted to the po-

litical sphere. If freedom of speech is a natural right, grounded in our
common embodied condition, carried in our bodies, it is carried into
the workplace as well.
The right to speak freely applies not only to states or corporations
or to control of the media. It applies to all places where some can
speak and others are forced to be silent, where some have a voice and
others remain unheard. Consider heckling. Heckling appears to be
the voice of a mob silencing the voice of reason, an exercise of brute
power: mindless and dictatorial. Do not be too ready to make this
judgment. More often, the speaker is famous or powerful, invited to
speak because they have already been heard or read many times. Those
who heckle are those who have much less voice. They are unlikely to
have the chance to question or challenge such a speaker. They meet on
unequal ground. Even it out a bit: let people heckle. Do not be eager
to condemn those who take the rare chance they have to be heard. If
a British prime minister can face a little heckling, speaker, so can you.
Freedom of speech is not a license to speak without criticism, disa-
greement, or rejection. Those who listen are free to criticize, to argue,
to answer, to tell the speaker they have said enough. Free people speak
what and when they choose. We can bring passion as well as reason to
what we say. In academic papers, in debates on television or online,
in lectures, books, articles, and writings of all sorts, those who have
a voice can use it. We can say what we choose, but we cannot silence
our critics. We are responsible for what we say, and we must answer to
others for it.
Freedom of speech does not require us to listen to all with equal def-
erence and attention. That would be often foolish and occasionally dis-
honorable. People judge. They decide if the person speaking or writing
has knowledge or practical wisdom. They decide if their wisdom is
suited to the question at hand. They decide if the person is honest and
likely to tell them the truth. They decide if the person deserves their
respect. They decide if the person has been heard enough. They decide
if the person needs not to be heard but to listen. In many cases, they
should lend an ear and a voice to those who question and those who
heckle.
In a time when there are those who are truly silenced—by the state,
by the media, by corporations, by bosses, and by the people around
them—it is unseemly for the privileged and the powerful to claim that
they are silenced. It is dishonorable for them to demand a hearing on
false pretenses. Honorable people will recognize their power and seek
out those who are less often heard. That will not be easy. People are held
within circles of family, friendship, work, religion, and acquaintance.
While inequality persists, approaches to those less wealthy or powerful
than themselves will be awkward, limited by distrust, anger, deference,
or despair. Those without power find that approaches to the privileged
are forestalled at every step. Inequality is the enemy of freedom.
Freedom of speech is not merely the right to speak without being
silenced by censorship. It is the right to speak freely: to say what you
choose, not a script dictated to you by another. There are still efforts to
make people speak a script written by another: to denounce terrorism,
to confess their sexuality, to refuse this or that. There are still efforts to
make people speak against their will. These violate freedom of speech
as profoundly as silencing does. They are the softer face of torture.
Torture is the effort of one person, often though not always in the
service of a state, to make another speak against their will. Those who
have studied (and those who have experienced) torture have learned
that the tortured do not speak the truth. They speak as they are com-
pelled to speak. The speech that is wrung from them through suffering
is speech to end suffering, speech that signals submission. It may or
may not disclose a hidden truth; it is no more and no less than the tri-
umph of the torturer’s will. Torture is the triumph of force over con-
sent. Free people cannot use, cannot license, torture.
Let the silent speak if they choose. Let those who speak say what
they will. Listen and judge.
15. Assembly nurtures the democratic. Assembly

preserves the anarchic.
Democracy begins when people seize power for themselves. The pro-
cess of making their government to suit themselves begins when they
come together, acting together, binding their aims in a common cause.
54 Wild Democracy
Those who watch and study and, above all, those who police
demonstrations look for leaders and organizers. The people who as-
semble rarely do. They look to each other. They may listen to speakers;
more often they do not. They turn from speakers and talk to each other.
They are many, yet in that crowd they retain their individuality. They
come and go as they please. They chant or refuse to chant. Sometimes
they sing. They choose to be loud or silent, joyful or somber. They
choose to stand fast or to run, to fight or to refuse the fight. Assemblies
remind us that solidarity is possible in anarchy, that an anarchic dis-
position and anarchic commitments do not foreclose the possibility of
acting with others.
The anthropologist Victor Turner wrote that assemblies can loosen
all the restraints of law and custom. People feel free and act on it. They
are unbound. In their freedom they can affirm or refuse their govern-
ment, their laws, their customs, and their people. They know that they
make and unmake governments and people. They can refuse what has
been for what could be. Turner saw this embedded in the coming-of-
age rituals of many peoples. It was, he argued, part of “the ritual pro-
cess.”5 Accepting new people into the group or tribe—or nation—alters
the boundaries of the people. Acceptance changes not only those who
are newly included but those who change with their changing people.
That change, Turner argued, was the occasion for joy.
16. People have the right to a place in the world.

People have the right to stay or to leave, to come
or to go.
The rights to speak, to have a voice, to assemble, to rule are under-

girded by a simpler right. The right to life entails a right to presence
in the world. This, the simplest of all rights, is difficult to defend. The
Cherokee, Jews sent into exile or sent to their death, the Roma, the
Palestinians, the Rohingya pushed off their land, all are denied a place
in their worlds. When people are sent to exile or to internment camps
or deportation facilities, when their land is seized or they are massa-
cred en masse the wrong is clear. They have been denied their rights.
Those rights should be secured.
We know that when some people struggle to find a place in the

world, they may displace others. The tragic history of Israel couples
sin and redemption. All settler colonial states saw the indigenous lose
their land to give shelter and sustenance not only to the wealthy and
powerful but far more often to the poor and disenfranchised. Settler
colonialism effected a double displacement: the poor and outlawed at
home, the indigenous abroad.
There are other, more mundane ways in which people struggle to
find a place in the world. The queer person in a straight community
may be loved and sheltered or shunned and mocked. The religious be-
liever living among casual secularists may feel lost and long for a place
to worship with others. There are always people out of place. Some take
pleasure in their solitude. Some take pride in their eccentricity. Some
are valued by those around them—whether for their differences or de-
spite them. Sometimes, in recognizing the value of those who are out of
place, the community grows larger, greater in size and soul than it was.
This is not always a question of justice or virtue. Those who
are harried and bullied are wronged, and it reflects badly on their
community—and on each person within it. But there are also people
who are simply out of place. There is no injustice done by those who
cannot in good conscience worship as the religious among them wish.
There is no fault in those who long for a life of prayer and piety with
others. There is no evil in the small, intimate, provincial town that
lacks the theater, the opera, the wild diversity that a would-be cosmo-
politan longs for. We should not assume that people are born where
they should be.
This simple principle should be obvious. There are, however, many
who have written so lovingly of the virtues of community that they
forget the trials of those who find themselves out of place. They cannot
see the promise of flight, the courage of the emigrant and fugitive.
Simone Weil envisioned community as the nursery of the moral.
Uprootedness is “the disease of uprootedness,” “by far the most dan-
gerous malady to which human societies are exposed.” Over and over
again she refers to uprootedness as a destructive “disease”: “A human
being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation
in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain par-
ticular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the
56 Wild Democracy
future.” One heritage, one form of life alone can form an ethical person.
People within communities should not be permitted to venture out-
side them in thought. “Outside influences” should be bound by the
community, and people should “receive such contributions only from
its hands.”6 Though she sees the defects of her own time and place, and
of the Romans, the Hebrews, the Americans, and a host of others, she
does not appear to recognize that the power of communities to shape
people can be distorting, imprisoning, and corrupting. Uprootedness
can be liberating and enlightening.
Too much turns on the metaphor of roots. That image sees belonging
as bound to a place, disturbed by movement. That is not how people
are made. People are made to stay and to go, to dig into the earth, to
build from it and walk through it. People can leave the earth to sail or
to fly—metaphorically as well as actually. Weil recognizes that “[r]‌isk is
an essential need of the soul,” yet she is limited by her fear of loss: “The
destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.”7
You have the right to a place in the world. You have the right to move.
The right to be in the world depends in practice on the right to
leave one place for another. Frederick Douglass, who knew the need
to move, wrote of a “right to migration.”8 A slave who escaped his
masters—and the law—he found his voice grew stronger as he moved
steadily northward. There are many kinds of people on the move.
Douglass was an escaped slave, a refugee, an American intellectual
in Ireland and Britain, an American ambassador. There are refugees
fleeing war, seeking to preserve their lives and the lives of those they
call their own. There are the refugees made by natural disasters: floods
and earthquakes, hurricanes and tornados. There are refugees made
by our irresponsibility before nature: drought, dust bowls, floods, and
wildfires. There are migrants who flee hunger. All these (and more)
have a right to go out into the world because they have the right to life.
There are also people pressed by needs as imperative as, though per-
haps less visible than, escaping wars and earthquakes. Local commu-
nities are often praised for their closeness, for the trust and kinship of
the people within them. They are honored by many for their ability
to maintain themselves over time, to develop their own ways. These
communities, however warm and nurturing to some, may be stifling
to others. People who do not feel at home there have the right to leave.
Perhaps they will find homes elsewhere. Perhaps they will always walk
like Kipling’s cat, by their wild lone.
A community too may decide that is does not belong. Perhaps colo-
nial rule has become indefensible to them. Perhaps they have been per-
secuted. Perhaps they have simply grown apart from those they once
regarded as their own. They should not be compelled to stay.
All people have the right to leave: to leave homes, communities,
practices, and pasts behind.
If there is no place to go, the right to leave is empty. I will not pretend
that I can decide for you, or that I can decide in principle, or indeed
that we can decide in principle all that we owe or what we can justly
deny to migrants and refugees. Rogers Smith has argued that we owe
more to immigrants and refugees we have burdened in the past: the
people who have fought our wars, the people we made war against.9
This is a compelling criterion for judgment. There are simpler duties.
People carry their rights in their bodies. Those who breach the
borders, who appear petitioning at the gate, who wash up on the shore,
carry their rights with them. The rights that belong to all belong to
them. They have a right to all that is necessary to maintain life, a right
to fundamental freedoms. Though those rights may burden us, we
cannot disregard them and maintain our honor. The migrant and the
refugee have the right to pursue their happiness. They may have more
rights among more generous people. Our practice in these and other
matters should always exceed our principles. We should give more
than we think is due. That is magnanimity, the virtue proper to people
who rule themselves.
Thomas Paine, who seeded revolutions as he moved, wrote,
“[R]‌eceive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”10
Open the gates to those who want to come. Open them to those who
want to leave.
17. Rights are born in us. They are above, beyond,

and before the law.
Rights belong to us: they are not the gift of law. They are not given by
the state or by any transnational institution. There are civil rights, of
58 Wild Democracy
course. The right to travel under a particular passport. The right to vote
in a particular electoral system, to stand for election, to hold an office.
The right to drive a car or have a dog. These are civil rights, given by a
civil order. Some are important; some are not. They may be given by a
particular people who have already ordered their government in the
form they chose, by states whose procedures determine who will and
will not be granted civil rights, even by a state controlled by an autocrat
who confers civil standing and civil rights as he or she chooses.
Whether civil rights are, in practice, rights or privileges depends
on the actions of the people or the state that claims to grant them.
Privileges are granted; rights are demanded. Civil rights are privileges
the state extends through law or dictate. Rights are ours, and their rec-
ognition is not something to plead for but something to demand. The
civil rights movement, despite its name, demanded not privileges but
rights. Their demand was not that rights be granted but that already
present rights be recognized. The rights they demanded were two-
fold. They demanded recognition of the rights that belong by nature
to all people: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They also
demanded the rights of their people: to vote, to stand for election, to
hold office. They sought their freedom, as people and as a people, as
living human beings and as Americans.
Our natural rights, grounded in the body, are fundamental and inal-
ienable. They are not the gift of law.
18. Rights are inalienable.
Rights cannot be made alien to us. They are born into the living person,
held in the warm flesh of the living body, and each of us holds rights
like a soul. Are they transcendent rights? Perhaps. On earth, we know
no soul separated from the flesh, and it is on earth that we struggle to
rule ourselves.
Rights cannot be alienated. They cannot be bought or sold, traded
or disavowed.
The slave on a plantation, picking cotton in Mississippi, cutting cane
in Louisiana or Cuba; the miner in West Virginia or Witwatersrand
had the rights that belong to any and to all people, long before those
rights were acknowledged, much less honored as decency demands.
Rights are inalienable. To demand, to seize, to exercise those rights
requires extraordinary courage. That courage is visible in revolutions,
to be sure, but it is ordinary courage that enables people to live freely
and rule themselves. The courage that stands against tanks is futile if
it cannot be transformed into the common courage that enables a di-
vided people to listen, to work with one another in ruling themselves,
to speak freely, to walk among their enemies unafraid.
The duty to recognize rights, to secure them, to enforce and defend
them does not fall to the police, to judges, to governments. That duty is
ours. Our rights are grounded in our bodies. Our duty is there as well.
We bear our responsibility in our bodies.
19. Rights are held in common.
We hold our rights in common. Rights are not a gift of law, defined and
parceled out by those in power. Rights are a commons.
The commons differs from collective property. The commons
cannot be owned at all. Holdings in common cannot be alienated. They
cannot be sold or traded. They cannot be given a monetary value. So it
is with rights. They cannot be alienated, sold, or traded. They cannot be
valued in monetary terms. As with a common field, rights must belong
to all equally.
The commons can generate private property, as a fisherman in
Wisconsin takes fish from a river or a hiker in Sweden picks berries in
a field. These may diminish the commons slightly, though often they
help the commons to prosper. Rights held in common are simultane-
ously one’s own and belonging to all. Rights are part of our common
wealth in the fullest sense. The right of one person to preserve life, to
stay healthy, makes all the commons safer and healthier. The right of
one person to pursue happiness, to cultivate talents, to seek an educa-
tion, to learn, increases the common store of learning and wisdom. The
wisdom brought to the commons in this way increases the common
store of material things as well. We learn to cultivate common wealth,
60 Wild Democracy
to preserve the environment, to take in a way that generates common—

and private—resources.
The commons generates rights and powers. As we cultivate the
rights we hold in common, knowledge of rights grows and spreads
like fire. Speaking freely, speaking openly, speaking without fear or
favor teaches. We hear unexpected, unknown things. We are crit-
icized, rebuked. We learn. We recognize forms of injustice we did
not see. We grow wiser and more daring. We become more just. As
we assemble we find ourselves in the company of unexpected allies.
We experience unexpected kindnesses: a bottle of water, a shield. We
learn what fraternity and solidarity look like, feel like. We see how
a great body of people can move as one. In smaller assemblies we
can see the courage of the few against the many. The right of people
to think, to worship as they choose, not merely to possess but to
practice freedom of conscience opens new understandings of the di-
vine to us.
Rights are strengthened when they are held in common. They
lose their strength when they are restricted. Rights held by only a
few are not rights but privileges and, like all privileges, they are inse-
cure. Rights held by all, secured by all, are fully realized in the world.
The rights of the individual and the rights of the community are one.
Because people’s rights are grounded in their bodies they belong to all.
Any failure to respect rights in another person diminishes one’s own
rights. There is no distinction here between public and private, indi-
vidual and community. The protection of individual rights, securing
each person in their rights, serves the whole.
Indeed it is only through securing the rights of individual people
that our common rights can be secured. If you want to keep your
rights, you must defend all.
Rights are thus one place, one commons where the distinction be-
tween private and public, individualism and community becomes mis-
leading and meaningless. So too does the distinction between rights
and duties.
Rights and duties are not opposites; they are related as concave
is to convex. When the Declaration speaks of the right to rebellion,
that right is cast as both a right and a duty: “it is their right, it is their
duty, to rebel.” That is true of all rights. They command. The right
to speak freely becomes the command to speak freely and the duty
to listen. The right to assemble becomes the duty to assemble, the
command to assemble. Rights animate the people who hold them.
They shape those people in themselves and in relation to one an-
other. People who know their rights walk proudly, act bravely. They
know no life is worth more than their life. They are commanded to
protect their own rights, and that command impels them to protect
the rights of all.
The commons is a field open to all. All take rights from it and, in
doing so, increase the rights of all, as fire spreads when it is shared.11
In making common rights their own, in using their rights to shape
the world, individuals increase the commonwealth of rights. They
strengthen themselves. They strengthen the people. They repair
the world.
20. Rights are above, below, and beyond the law.

Rights undergird the law. Rights elevate the law.
This is an old lesson, continually challenged. Law can block the exer-
cise of rights. Law can hedge rights about with restrictions and limits.
There is, however, nothing in the law that can take rights away from the
people. Rights are inalienable.
Rights are the grounding and the mission of law. Rights are above,
beneath, beyond, and before the law. Governments are made and laws
established, in the words of the Declaration, to secure these rights.
When they fail to do so, they lose their legitimacy. Laws must defer
to rights if they are to be legitimate themselves. Rights are before the
law. Just laws are made to ensure that rights can be made secure and
put into practice. Rights are beneath the law, supporting it. Rights are
above the law, governing it. Rights are beyond the law, giving law a mis-
sion to accomplish, a standard to achieve, an ideal to reach. Rights re-
strain the law.
Rights also drive law forward. Knowledge of the rights people
hold drives them to secure those rights, drives them to establish
62 Wild Democracy
governments. Knowledge of their rights drives people to put them

into practice: to cultivate themselves and their people. Laws are one of
their tools.
Rights are not fences; rights are a ground. They ground government.
They are ground to be cultivated.
IV
Free people rule the law
21. Rule law. Do not simply be ruled by it.
“The Rule of Law, Not Men” was one of the battle cries of the English
Civil War. It has an honored place in the history of republicanism and
revolution. That declaration announced the end of monarchy, of all au-
tocracy and tyranny. The word of one would no longer be enough to
rule. Arbitrary rule, in which a favored few or a favored view would
be treated differently, to rise and fall at the whim of the ruler, would be
set aside. Those who longed for the rule of law saw a system in which
no one was above the law and all people would be treated equally. They
saw a system in which law endured and could be known to all. They
saw an enduring order. Yet the rule of law is not and cannot be a good
in itself.
There is no virtue in the rule of law when the laws that rule are
unjust.
There is nothing rare or mysterious about laws that do evil. That
icon of evil, the Third Reich, was a Rechtsstaat, a constitutional state,
a state under the rule of law. The genocide of the Jews, the seizure of
their goods, the ethnic cleansing of the Roma, the imprisonment of
dissenters and those called deviants were all done under the law, with
all the propriety and paperwork that law demands. The Rule of Law
was the Rule of Evil then.
At their best, legal decisions can make a change of public sentiment
visible, give it voice, and guide its development. Yet a legal decision
can as easily (and I fear more often) stand in the way of justice and
freedom. The Supreme Court of the United States has demonstrated,
on too many occasions, its ability to affirm law against justice.
The Dred Scott decision sent Mr. Scott, who had been, by law, a
free man in the state of Illinois and the territory of Louisiana, and
a free man by right in all the world, back into slavery in the state of
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0004
64 Wild Democracy
Missouri. The Court not only denied Mr. Scott his freedom in the
state of Missouri; it denied him and all descendants of Africans their
freedom anywhere in the United States. In doing so it made freedom
dependent on laws of ownership and residence. It made freedom the
gift of the master and the masters’ law. Slaves could not demand or
affirm the freedom that was theirs by right. In denying Dred Scott his
freedom, the Court denied Dred Scott his humanity. He was, Taney’s
opinion declared, a member of “a subordinate and inferior class of
beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether
emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had
no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the
Government might choose to grant them.”1 Here the law served to
seal the slavery not only of one man but of many. Law served injustice,
law served evil, here.
Buck v. Bell, in which Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared,
“[T]‌hree generations of imbeciles is enough,” purported to defend the
confinement and care of those who were dangerous or unable to care
for themselves and allow them to be sterilized for the common good.
According to a contemporary website:
Carrie Buck was a feeble minded woman who was committed to

a state mental institution. Her condition had been present in her
family for the last three generations. A Virginia law allowed for the
sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions to promote the “health
of the patient and the welfare of society.”2
These, we are told, are the “facts of the case.” In law, the “facts of the
case” are not what an ordinary person would understand the facts of
the case to be. They are what the judge determines them to be.3 Here,
the facts of the case—in the ordinary sense—were that Carrie Buck
was not feeble-minded at all. She had had the misfortune to be raped
by a wealthy and privileged man whose family found it convenient to
have her put away.
When the Supreme Court reviewed the case, they did not inquire
into the facts of the case but simply into whether the lower courts
had followed the law. Law can be very far indeed from justice. Law is
often, if not always, seen as a good in itself, subject to its own rules, and
Free people rule the law 65
assessed not by the standard of justice but by its internal coherence and
consistency.
Buck v. Bell legitimized eugenic sterilization. The decision came
at a time when eugenics was widely popular, with contests for “Fitter
Families” and “Better Babies.” The fitter families and better babies were
white and blond, what enthusiasts for eugenics might call “Aryan.”
Eugenics fit very well indeed with the Jim Crow laws and segregationist
practices of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Like segregation, it extended beyond the Jim Crow
South. Nor was it limited to conservatives. On the contrary, the con-
viction that experts, rather than the people themselves, should decide
who should reproduce and who should not, suited the belief of many
Progressives in the rule of experts. Here too the rule of law served
injustice.
Fred Korematsu resisted the forced relocation and internment of
people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II.
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed his internment, arguing not that it
was right but that it was lawful. Law served injustice here, but there
was a voice for justice. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Frank Murphy
argued that law must bow to right: “I dissent, therefore, from this legal-
ization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree
has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unat-
tractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people.”4
Murphy’s dissent marked the divide between legality and legitimacy,
liberalism and democracy, unjust law and the requirements of a free
people.
The rule of law secured slavery in the United States. After slavery
was abolished, Jim Crow laws kept the newly free chained. Law has
subordinated women to men, workers to employers. Law favors the
rich over the poor. A fine that is nothing to a rich man can impoverish
a poor one. Worse, the practice of increasing the most trivial fines with
time—parking meter violations for example—can lead in some states
to imprisonment for failure to pay, regardless of the poverty of the de-
fendant. In such cases, people are imprisoned not for their violations
but for their poverty. The rich have the money to sue and to defend
themselves in court. Few others do. The provision of pro bono lawyers,
as every lawyer knows, does not correct this inequity. How many have
66 Wild Democracy
died or faced imprisonment because the lawyers they were assigned

were overworked, or given too little time or training? The rich employ
the law to avoid paying taxes. The wealthy who employ these shifts are
contemptible to be sure, but how are we to judge a law that in its very
bones favors the rich over the poor?
There was—there is—no justice, no right in being ruled by such
laws. If the law is not just, the rule of law is nothing to honor and
cannot justly command obedience. “The law,” James Baldwin insisted,
“is meant to be my servant and not my master”5
There are also laws that are mistaken, antiquated, or simply silly.
Should they be obeyed? Not necessarily. People who rule themselves
must learn not to submit to the rule of law, but to judge the law. The
state, even the liberal state can be as exacting a master as any king, and
law the state’s most effective tool.
I have put American laws before you, but this is not solely an
American problem. There are, I suspect, more unjust laws than just
ones. All are called to judge their laws. All must ask whether the laws
that rule them secure the rights that belong to all human beings. They
must ask whether the laws protect people and advance their welfare.
They must ask whether the laws are just. When the laws fail, they must
be changed. When the laws do harm, they must be broken. People who
rule themselves rule their laws.
This is not a matter the people can leave to lawyers. No lawyer, no
judge, no court, even those named “Supreme” or “Constitutional,”
can justly claim the final word on the legitimacy—and still less on the
justice—of the law. Doctrines of judicial supremacy depend on the no-
tion that law is the province of experts alone. When law is made by
experts, by judges or lawyers, it is no longer the means that enables
people to rule themselves. It becomes a prison and the means for
placing people in servitude and slavery. Behind this elevation of law
is fear of the people. The people are Sovereign, and they determine all
questions that belong to the sovereign. They rule themselves. The law
therefore must bow to them. The people shall judge.6
Law, like government, can secure rights, but it is not in itself a force
for freedom. Law is a force for order. Order can be a protection or
a prison. At its best, order gives us peace and the ability to plan. At
its worst, law imprisons. Order forecloses opportunities, precludes
change, and prevents the achievement of justice. Even the most benign
orders can be stifling.
Law can help forge a better future, one in which rights are more
secure, freedom greater, and people more able to pursue their own
happiness, but it does not, in itself, drive toward the future. In states
governed by precedent and common law, law anchors itself in the
past. Common law is the work of convention in time. At its best, the
common law captures the accumulated wisdom of generations of
practice. At its worst, it preserves unjust practices, hardens them,
and secures the yoke on the necks of the oppressed. In either case, the
common law is conservative in its forms, methods, and effects. Above
all, the notion of precedent as authoritative makes the conventional
past the limit of law. All law, all judgment must be justified according
to its adherence to the past.
The past, however, has rarely been just. The full text of Baldwin’s
quote runs:
This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard
from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so ob-
scene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less
my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in
which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his
self-respect.
The rule of law must be understood not as a rule we accept but as a

rule we exercise. The people are not simply subjects to be ruled by law.
The people are sovereign, and they rule the law.
Any appeal to the principle of rule of law should be answered by the
questions “What law? Which laws?” There is no honor, no morality,
and no political virtue in the rule of unjust law. Many appalling crimes
have taken place under the color of law. Every former colony will recall
the inequities of imperial rule. Americans will remember more recent
injustices: the effort to give cover of law to Guantanamo, black sites,
and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many more. The
rule of bad law deserves no reverence. It calls for action.
Rule of law should not, however, be abandoned as an ideal. We
should listen for what is said in that phrase. We are bound not only to
68 Wild Democracy
be ruled by law but to rule it. The rule of law should describe not only
the rule of law over all people equally but our rule of the laws we make,
the laws we are called to obey. Any people that began in revolution, or
prides itself on the revolutions that freed it from arbitrary rule, should
honor the decision to rule law rather than merely be ruled by it.
The rule of law by the people is a far more demanding discipline
than simple submission. People are required to judge. They have to
think. They have to consider what the law does—not merely in inten-
tion but in effect. They have to consider whether the operation of a
damaging law might be repaired by interpretation. There are many
people, particularly lawyers, who believe that the interpretation of laws
is a matter for experts, that lawyers and judges should interpret the law
and the people should remain passive. If the laws are the people’s laws,
they have the right and the duty to interpret them. This is true for all
law, from the smallest regulation to constitutional laws. People may—
they should—turn to others for help in this task. They should question,
debate, think, defer to judgment they judge better than their own, but
the right to interpret belongs to them. There are times when the most
powerful interpretations belong not to the rule of experts but to the
expertise of rule.
Langston Hughes’s poem “Freedom’s Plow” provides an example of
how the texts that define a people are to be read. Hughes quotes the
words of the Declaration of Independence, and then goes on:
A long time ago, but not too long, a man said

“ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL,
. . . ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN
INALIENABLE RIGHTS, AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY AND
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS”
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then.
But in their hearts the slaves believed him too
And silently took for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.7
The slaves’ reading was closest to the letter of the text and still closer
to the spirit of that text. Their reading has an authority the founders’
reading lacked.
We have come to recognize that a piece of writing can contain more

meaning, more wisdom than its author knew or intended. When a
piece of writing becomes the North Star of a people, its capacity for
transcendence becomes still greater. So familiar is the text of the
Declaration that women who read “all men are created” need not pause
over the words. We know that what they said was also meant for us,
whether those who wrote it knew it or not.
Many of us have learned to read our presence in texts not meant for
us. We have learned to see beyond the failings of those who wrote the
words to the promise we can read in them. We have learned that some-
times people need to steal the words of the rich and give them to the
poor. Hughes offers us more than this, however. He raises the possi-
bility that the meaning of the laws and ideals that govern us should not
be judged simply by the intention of the author or by the judgments of
experts but also by those on whom burdens fall most heavily or those
who are most capable of seeing the promise the laws hold. For these
reasons, and for many more, we should reject the idea that we should
be governed by the “original meaning” of any text.
Words can become greater than they were. Laws can grow in what
they offer, in the possibilities seen in them by the people. Laws can also
have consequences—intended or not—that diminish the people who
make them. Prisons were developed as a way of making punishment
kinder, of enabling people to reflect on their errors and improve. They
became places that increased the brutality of those who were impris-
oned and those who imprisoned them. Laws have increased suffering
they were intended to diminish. We have learned this. Now we must
work to find better ways.8
Those who have found laws unworthy, inadequate, or simply wrong
have to act. If they are among people of good conscience, the greater
part of the laws is good, and there is no immediate need, they can act
within the law, evade the law, and work to change the remnant of laws
that are unjust. That work may be hard. In most cases, they neither can
nor should act alone. They will have to explain to others the problems
they have found in the law, to seek out solutions, and to organize to put
those into effect. The work is demanding, often frustrating, and rarely
easy. It is work for the thoughtful and the long-sighted. It is work for
people strong enough to rule themselves.
70 Wild Democracy
There are laws no decent person can obey. They will not obey them.
22. Justice, like democracy, goes beyond the law.
Praise of anarchy, outlaws, rebels, and rogues may trouble those who
believe in the Rule of Law, who prize order and precedent, who bow
too deeply to tradition. People who rule themselves are concerned not
only with obedience to the law, or even ruling the law. They are able
to set law aside. The demands of justice surpass the demands of law.
The protection of rights has a commanding power greater than the law.
Law does not set aside the rights people have by nature. Rights surpass
the force of law. People who rule themselves do more than obey the
law. They rule it; they make it their own.
This is no revolutionary novelty. This is an old wisdom. Aristotle
observed in the Politics that law does not always accord with justice.
Justice may require more or less than the law lays out. Plato offered that
lesson in the Euthyphro. Practical experience persuaded the British of
the same thing. If law were all that was at issue, it would be unneces-
sary, even undesirable, to have a jury of one’s peers. The verdict would
be a matter of applied expertise. The judge, an expert in the law, would
be sufficient. But knowledge of the law is not enough. The jury provides
the means to give the community a voice in the justice of the verdict
and the sentence. When people judge, in formal trials or in their ordi-
nary lives, they ask not only “Is it legal?” but “Is it just?”
There is a space between law and justice, between law and rights,
between law and the people. That space will not vanish. It is the work
of time as well as politics. In this terrain, this legal no man’s land, the
people shall judge.
They judge whether the law is just. They judge whether the law
is theirs. There are many people, every day, who look upon the laws
they know and find them unjust. They must judge if it is their duty to
rebel, to organize against the law, or to decide that this is one of those
moments in which they can accept injustice done in their name.
Law belongs to those who make it. When a law becomes alien to a
people, they should repeal it.9 That law is no longer theirs, and they
need not obey it. Perhaps once pious people, they have become less
persuaded of the truths of their faith. Perhaps they have become more
religious and believe they can work to approach the divine. Perhaps
people who once thought they were from a single race or tribe have
learned to welcome refugees and immigrants. People may realize that
episodes in their past are more or less honorable than they had sup-
posed. People change, they learn, they grow. Regret for past wrongs
can be written into laws that look to the future.
In making their laws more just, they change who they are as a
people. Their laws come closer to justice, and so do they.
Across the world, from the Amazon to the Antipodes, North to
South, people have recognized wrongs done to indigenous people.
The wrongs are many. Parents were stripped of their children; chil-
dren were sent to boarding schools and stripped in turn of their lan-
guages and cultures, were buried in unmarked graves. Lands once held
by people in common were seized by conquest, crime, guile—and law.
Indigenous beliefs about an obligation to the land, to beings of and on
the land, to spirits held within it were once mocked and ignored. Law
made these wrongs possible. Law licensed and drove injustice.
People have come to regret the harm they did to the indige-
nous. Those regrets are not remorse alone. New Zealand has recog-
nized Mount Taranaki and the river Whanganui as beings holding
rights. In doing so, the people of New Zealand are doing more than
amending wrongs done to the land and people who first made their
home in it. They have taken the view of the indigenous people as the
view common to all New Zealanders. They have learned. They have,
thoughtfully, made themselves different than they were, in their laws
as well as their learning. They have learned that colonialism wronged
the Maori. That, perhaps, was the easiest lesson. They are learning a
harder and more valuable one. They are learning what the land was
and is to the Maori. The recognition of wrongs done testifies to their
work to make themselves more just, more learned, more responsible.
The will to make themselves more Maori, not only to learn from but to
learn within Maori concepts, ideas, and understandings, makes New
Zealanders an altered and transcendent people.
There are more mundane changes. People change around the
world, and around the people the world changes. People who work
to rule themselves are committed to sailing in that open, unmapped
72 Wild Democracy
sea, changing course when conditions require it. They will find, from
time to time, that their laws no longer serve the people they are or the
people they wish to be. They will find that the future presents them
with problems they did not anticipate. Weaponry changes. When
navies sailed and states fought pitched battles from wooden ships,
oak was a requirement of national security. States outlawed the cut-
ting of large oak trees. Rich and poor bore the burdens of cultivating
oak for the Navy. That has long been unnecessary, and the laws have
been changed. Printing, publishing, social media all changed how
people communicate. Each required new laws. Each made other laws
unnecessary.
Ruling the law requires constant vigilance. Justice requires judg-
ment. Justice requires us to make exceptions. Justice requires mercy.
Justice requires ethics. When we see a law broken we decide if we will
enforce it or look the other way. We decide if the law is just. We decide
if justice requires an exception to a just law. We decide if justice will be
done by demanding that the law be obeyed or that it be set aside.
People who rule themselves discover that law is not enough for
them. Law does too little as well as too much. Grifters and greedy busi-
nessmen, caught in the evasion of taxes, in acts of naked nepotism or
immoral acquisition, often reply defensively “It was legal” when chal-
lenged about their conduct. When someone’s defense of their conduct
is only “It was legal,” they are likely to be acting unjustly. Obedience to
law is not enough for ethics, morality, or simple human decency.
People who rule themselves are licensed to go beyond the law in re-
bellion, in disobedience, in mercy. They have the right, they have the
duty, to rebel against unjust governments. They are required to be not
only lawful but ethical. They are required to go beyond the law in their
demands on themselves.
23. People should judge. Democracy depends

upon judgment. Democracy hones judgment.
Judgment is at the center of democratic life. This is one of the most

daunting and unrecognized demands made on people who rule them-
selves. In a democracy, among a free people one is always judging and
judged, and that twice over. Each democrat is called to judge as part
of the whole. Each is subject to the judgment of the whole. Each free
person judges and is judged by the others.
Legislating is not the only role the people take in a democracy. They
judge and they execute. They are called to see the laws they made put
into action. They are executives. Judgment, of and beyond the law, is
the work of the people, who are sovereign. Before, beneath, beyond
government is the possibility of revolution. In their sovereignty, the
people affirm or change their laws and decide the need for revolution.
The people’s judgment is made formal and institutional in the jury
and in the work of election. People decide who is innocent and who is
guilty. They decide whether the laws themselves are just, whether they
should be upheld or set aside. The right of the people to judge not only
the case but the law is acknowledged explicitly in states where jury nul-
lification is recognized.
Judgment is demanded often in the ordinary workings of a common
life. One is called to decide whom to vote for, what (if any) party to
join, what verdict to give on a jury, when to press for the making or the
repeal of laws, which laws to obey and which to ignore.
One is also called, every day and in times of the greatest crises, to
decide who and what is to be tolerated. Generations ago Marcuse
declared, “Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of
behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if
not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and
misery.” Many would agree that “what is proclaimed and practiced as
tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving
the cause of oppression.”10 We are, however, divided over which poli-
cies serve repression and which liberation, which policies ought and
ought not to be tolerated. This is, with varying intensity, nothing more
or less than democratic politics. We have different interests. We are
differently situated. We have borne different burdens and enjoyed dif-
ferent privileges. We are moved by different fears and hopes. We work
for different ends. In confronting the fact that we do not want what all
others want, we demonstrate our capacity for unity in difference, our
common courage, and our ability to rule ourselves.
This should be, as George Washington recognized, our pride. In his
letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport he wrote, “It is now no
74 Wild Democracy
more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one

class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent nat-
ural rights.”11
People who rule themselves are called to judge every day. They are
called to judge in the formal institutions and ad hoc practices that en-
able them to govern themselves. They judge—and they are conscious
of judging—in all their dealings with one another. They judge in acting
as sovereign and in accepting subjection. They judge when they learn
to rule themselves in the small matters of everyday life. Practices once
seen as evil can be recognized as unimportant differences. If someone
eats pork and someone else does not, what of it? If someone is tattooed,
what of it? We learn when to judge and when to withhold judgment. If
someone goes to church on Sunday rather than the mosque on Friday
or the synagogue on Saturday, what of it? Let conscience guide them.
The capacity for democratic judgment guides people away from tol-
eration and toward a recognition of natural rights. This enabled
Washington to say—and to take pride in saying—that the government
of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no
assistance.”12
We also learn to our sorrow that practices, acts, and laws we thought
were acceptable or even good are wrong. Clearing forests for farm-
land once seemed a work of honorable labor. Plastics were a splendid
invention, useful from the kitchen to the hospital, saving resources.
Spanking was a sensible way to correct a child. Driving the indigenous
off the land made the land able to feed many more. In coming to terms
with unrecognized evil and unintended consequences people learn.
They become wiser, more conscious of their fallibility, more careful in
their judgments, more just and more generous than they were.
People who rule themselves hone their judgment. They are more to
be trusted than those who are merely shaped by custom or educated
in law.
Change is accomplished not only by individuals changing their
own minds, learning and reasoning. Change comes to communities
as well. Burke recognized and commended change that moved in ge-
ologic time: the slow erosion of a mountain, the slow building of a
coral reef. Burke’s favored forms of change were almost invisible. They
proceeded through small and temporary deviations. No single change
was obvious or disruptive. Each seemed to preserve a long chain of

precedent and ancestry. At any moment, a person might say “We do
as we have always done.” Order was preserved. So too was a sense of
belonging to a people that stretched into the past. Any thoughtful
person—libertarian, socialist, liberal, or conservative—can recognize
the power of popular practice. Change is often accomplished gradu-
ally, through the small, combined efforts of people making prudent
decisions day by day.
This is, most often, how societies change. The role of the individuals
within them proceeds according to a different tempo. The building of
social consensus and convention is slow, gradual, incremental. Yet it
is impelled by immediate and often urgent demands on individuals.
Those decisions, though they may be impelled by long reflection, are
made in a moment. You decide whether you will punch that Nazi. You
decide to join or restrain a protest as it forms. You decide to speak or
remain silent. The demand for these decisions clearly comes thick and
fast in times of crisis, but it comes just as thick and fast, though more
discreetly, in the conduct of daily life. For a people, judgment may be
slow and incremental. For individual people, judgments are fast and
decisive.
Mindful of this, we should consider how Carl Schmitt’s “Sovereign
is he who decides on the exception” might be subverted and redeemed
in the conduct of a democratic life.13 Schmitt’s statement is taken, as
its author intended, as declaring that in the end decisions are always
made by one man: not by law, not by custom, but by the will of that
man. Sovereign rule was an imitation of an incarnate divinity. If one
recognizes how decisions are made in practice, the image of the single
willful ruler melts into air. Customs, conventions, and constitutions
are shaped by individual decisions. The acts of individuals become ec-
onomic forces. Change through the commons, like change in individ-
uals, can be fast or slow.
The will to judge, the insistence on judging, is essential to demo-
cratic practice. The democrat must be willing to praise and blame, to
permit or deny, in order to perform the most fundamental functions
of democracy: to legislate, to execute, to judge. Judgment requires
thought, work, and courage. The one who judges must be willing to
decide, to make a decision now. One cannot always defer to another
76 Wild Democracy
person or another time. This willingness to set deference aside marks

the sovereignty of the democrat, the willingness to rule as well as to be
ruled. The willingness to rule requires courage.
Judgment drives the judge outward. Ruling drives the ruler outward.
Judges and rulers must consider the questions, problems, even crises
that do not concern them. They must listen to, learn of, imagine the
positions of others. In these practices, the one who judges, the one who
rules confronts a chaos of the known, the partially known, the unknown,
the suspected, the feared, the unheard of. The one who judges, the one
who rules learns aspects of the lives of others. The one who judges, the
one who rules confronts the chaos of an outside that is always outside,
always other, never fully one’s own. The one who judges, the one who
rules confronts—and must answer—the demand to act in the face of the
unknown and unknowable. Among free people, all judge, all rule.
24. The people are wise.
The claim that the people are wise is at once the most doubted and
most accepted claim for democracy. It belongs to old documents and
to the virtual. It has an honorable and bastard pedigree. The ancients
placed democracies among the ignorant cities, yet they also recog-
nized that only the wisest know that they do not know. Ignorance is the
beginning (and sometimes the end) of wisdom. Conservatives praise
the wisdom of custom and tradition, of settled people whose ances-
tral ways reflect a long learning. This is one form of the wisdom of the
many. Another has become common in our time. The wisdom of the
many is harnessed in wikis.
There is another form of the wisdom of the people that approaches
the divine. Aristotle argued for democratic wisdom in the Politics. He
wrote that “the many, of whom none individually is an excellent man,
nevertheless when joined together can be better—not as individuals,
but all together.” Combined, their varied virtues and capacities can
surpass the wisdom of a single man.14 Al-Farabi echoed and expanded
this argument in his aphorisms.
Aphorism 57 opens the possibility that the virtues and capacities
necessary for governance might not exist in a single person, as those
who searched for a “philosopher king” wished. Instead they might

exist “dispersed among a group. . . . So this group all together takes
the place of the imagined king.”15 Al-Farabi, moreover, believed that
wisdom was primarily the result of education and habits that are in
large part owed to custom: “It is not possible for a human being to be
endowed by nature from the outset possessing virtue or vice.”16 Moral
and intellectual virtue are potentials. To be realized, they must be cul-
tivated, both by the people concerned and by those around them. The
people make themselves, and they may make themselves wise.
In Al-Farabi’s view, wisdom was always work done in common. The
potential was there in each individual, but people could become wise
only if that potential was cultivated. The growth of wisdom was not
due to parents or to teachers alone. It depended upon the institutions,
customs, and practices of the city.
There are many now who argue that the people collectively decide
as well as or better than experts. This claim underlies the structure of
Wikipedia and other wikis. Wikipedia showed one way democratic
wisdom might be formed. The first Wikipedia entries were often undis-
tinguished, often wrong. Yet anyone was able to edit and correct them.
Rapidly—far more rapidly than most scholars expected—the errors
diminished. This was due primarily not to the work of scholars and
experts but to the combined work of people who knew something—
often something small—about the subject. Errors fell, one by one, to
the work of the many.
The crafting of artificial intelligence also depends on the laborious
efforts of many individuals. For a machine to classify reliably, it must
be taught to see as people see: “A.I. is learning from humans. Lots and
lots of humans.”17 A multitude of humans. These humans are, more-
over, rarely experts. The people training artificial intelligence systems
to recognize hazardous growths in human systems are not doctors.
They need not even be trained in medicine. They can be trained to rec-
ognize one small thing, and their collective identifications of that thing
create a model that surpasses both their individual judgments and
the judgment of experts. This work is done not only by the multitude
rather than experts; it is also done by the relatively poor.18
We have learned that the greatest wisdom of the people is to know
what we do not know. This knowledge is protection against arrogance.
78 Wild Democracy
It is also a spur to work. Discovery, invention, philosophy, learning, all

come from the knowledge that we do not know and the desire to over-
come our lack.
Despite ignorance people must act, must decide. People are fal-
lible: what then?
“The people,” William Jennings Bryan declared, “have the right to
make their own mistakes.”19 Bryan was a prophet and a statesman,
followed by multitudes, praised by poets, and feared by elites. He be-
came a reviled figure, caricatured as ignorant and fanatical. Popular
judgment surpassed that of the elites. We should honor Bryan more
than we do. Bryan opposed imperialism. He opposed eugenics. He is
often castigated for his role in the Scopes trial, but only because history
fails us. The textbook Clarence Darrow defended was not a defense of
the theory of evolution; it was a textbook on eugenics.20 Bryan was a
tireless, intrepid advocate for the people against the dominion of the
wealthy and the enforcement of hierarchy.
Bryan was also clear in his understanding of legitimacy. Hélène
Landemore dared to make the harder argument: that democratic
multitudes can decide correctly. She set aside the question of right.
Bryan dismissed the question of correctness in favor of the question of
right. His answer echoes Locke: “The people shall judge.” They have the
right. Yet when one considers how people learn, Bryan and Landemore
are not far apart. People learn by making mistakes. Theories advance
when a flaw is found. Contradictions and gaps in a text point the way
to a fuller understanding. The inexplicable invites investigation. The
people not only have the right to make mistakes; they have the need to
make mistakes, for it is in confronting our mistakes that we make our-
selves wiser and better than we were.
25. Democracies depend on truth.
People who rule themselves depend, like all rulers, not on their wisdom
and virtue alone but also on good information. We are called upon
to judge, and to judge justly we need to know the facts. We are called
to make, to enforce, and to submit to the law. Each of these requires
knowledge. Knowledge, however, is not the only form of truth we need.
We need people to speak the truth as they see it. Perhaps this is neces-
sary for the trust that some see as essential to democracy. I think we
can live with our enemies and that we need not trust them too far, but
I still think we need them to speak the truth as they see it. We need to
hear that truth, certainly, but we also need the courage it takes to speak
it. Ancient philosophy saw speaking truth fearlessly as an attribute of
wisdom. We need that wisdom. Religious scriptures see speaking truth
to power as prophetic. We need the courage to chasten and correct our
rulers. When we rule, we need those who have the courage to restrain
and rebuke us. Those who rule themselves, if they are to touch the di-
vine and give it voice, must speak the truth. There are hazards enough
moving into the unknown. We must bring what light we can.21
26. Truth prospers when the people rule.
Democracy, it is said—most particularly by liberals and philosophers—

is dependent on truth, but truth is independent of democracy.
Democracy does indeed depend on truth and, more importantly, on
truth being open to all, but it is also true that truth depends on the rule
of the people.
Revolutions have been marked, in matters great and small, by an
opening to knowledge. The people of Paris who opened the Bastille
and rummaged through the drawers of the Tuileries were not simply
bent on humiliating those who had claimed to be their betters. They
were opening secret places to the gaze of the people. They were looking
into power in its most desperate and its most ordinary places. They
sought truth, recognizing that truth serves democracy.
Truth, however, cannot prosper without the democratic. There have
always been those—the wealthy, the privileged, and those arrogantly
convinced of their intellectual superiority—who claim that an enlight-
ened despotism serves truth and its adherents better than democracy.
They have learned, to their cost, that tyrants make poor patrons for
those who struggle toward truth. The list of those killed for truth-
telling far surpasses the list of those protected by their privileged pa-
trons. Nevertheless the myth persists, preserved by fear of the people
and a foolish faith in the protection of the privileged. The martyrdom
80 Wild Democracy
of Socrates by the Athenian democracy made him the patron saint of

this mythology. In this account, Socrates was sacrificed to the hostility
of an ignorant demos. There is much to admire (and something to con-
demn) in the story of Socrates before the Athenians, but this reading of
the myth is untrue.
Truth thrives on democracy. Democracy makes learning ac-
cessible. To be a democrat one must have access to information, to
knowledge, to debate, to what wisdom one can acquire. Democracy
makes information, knowledge, and wisdom accessible to all who
reach for it. More people are engaged in learning. As more people
are brought into schools, to discussion, to debate, more informa-
tion becomes available. More is learned by more people. If they are
democrats, they learn to judge. Knowledge is tested against diverse
experiences, assessed from different perspectives, subjected to more
challenges. These challenges speed the acquisition of information, the
spread of knowledge, the attainment of wisdom. Each moment in the
growth of knowledge, of publishing, of the media brings new hazards
and makes new demands, and people who rule themselves are pre-
pared to meet them.
Truth, like democracy, is not a stable, certain thing. Truth, like de-
mocracy, is something we struggle toward. The struggle for truth
and the struggle for democracy require the same virtues. They re-
quire courage. People who want to learn have to take risks. There are
explorers, volcanologists, scientists who fly into hurricanes and chase
tornados. There are medical researchers who give themselves diseases
or try untested treatments on themselves. There are astronauts and
divers, test pilots and spelunkers. There are war reporters. There are
also those quieter but no less daring people who ask “strange, wicked,
questionable questions,” who brave laughter, ridicule, and occasionally
accusations of madness to unsettle old conventions, try out new theo-
ries, and find their way to a truer understanding of the present or the
past, or our practices and principles.
Anyone who looks for truth does well to remain mindful of their
fallibility. The challenge, for those who strive toward truth, is to make
it clear to the people that the search for truth does not end, that all
seeming certainties may be uncertain, that those who claim certainty
are rarely to be trusted.
There is a simpler reason why truth depends on democracy. All

undemocratic regimes depend on lies. Aristocratic and monarchical
regimes depend on the belief that monarchs and aristocrats are supe-
rior. There are generally other lies attached to these. People are taught
that aristocrats are more well-bred, more cultured, with an ingrained
sense of elegance or duty. They are taught that their place in the so-
cial order is determined by nature or the deity, that their subordina-
tion is just. Authoritarian regimes depend on lies. Dictators claim,
as Hafez al-Assad once did, that they are “the Great Pharmacist,” or
the Great Whatever and lay claim to a host of achievements that an
honest glance could debunk. “Kim [Jong Un] could drive a car and hit
a light bulb with a rifle at 100 yards, all by the age of 3.” An official bi-
ography claimed “he had perfect pitch, that he could ride the wildest
horses at age six, and [at age nine] had twice beaten a visiting European
powerboat-racing champion.” He was following in the footsteps of his
father, “who wrote six full operas in two years, ‘all of which are better
than any in the history of music” according to his official biography, in
addition to the 1,500 books he wrote in college.22
Hierarchies of race and sex, the aristocracies of a corrupt moder-
nity, depend on lies: that one race or sex or class is superior to another,
that one race or sex or class is entitled to deference, that one race or sex
or class has the right to command. Capitalism lies constantly, about
the worth of things and people, about the making and unmaking of
the world.
Faith may lead people to believe that they know the truth, or the
only truth that matters, and that they not only may but must testify
to that truth. That is their duty. Those who question the certainties of
faith have a duty as well.
Democracies may err, democrats may lie and mislead themselves,
but democracy is not founded on a lie and does not depend on lies for
its survival.
Democrats and those who work toward truth cannot afford to
lie. Not to the authorities, not to the people, not to themselves. New
findings, however dangerous, have to be faced and contested. While
they hold, they command our deference, but they are always doubted,
always questioned, always subject to challenge. The desire for certainty
is dangerous, the belief in certainty, destructive.
V
Democrats live with open hands
27. Democracies are places of wild diversity.
The idea that one can describe the institutions and forms of govern-
ment in a democracy is fundamentally wrong-headed. Each democ-
racy is distinct. When the people rule themselves, they do so in the
manner they decide. They may choose to fill offices by lot or by elec-
tion, for a term or a task, or to have no offices at all. They may regard
representation as necessary or abhorrent. They will draw their bound-
aries in different ways on different dimensions: by territory, language,
religion, ethnicity, descent, or principles. Perhaps they will have no
boundaries at all.
We do not yet know what democratic peoples will become, but in
our time and, I suspect, for a long time to come, they will not be wholly
democratic. They will be, they must be, different from one another.
They will defer, perhaps wisely, to the customs of their people. They
will do things other people (and other peoples) regard as decadent,
puritanical, or silly. They will value things that others dismiss. These
differences, great and small, will set them apart from one another.
When we look at other democracies we will not see our own. We
will see other people building a common life together, another people
making themselves as they choose. Perhaps we will be astonished by
what they build. Perhaps we will want to make those things our own.
Perhaps we will regard them as shameful and degraded. Perhaps, over
time, we will change our judgments. Perhaps not.
Do not expect to see people becoming more and more alike in their
ways of life. People who are free do as they please. “Aren’t they free?”
Plato’s Socrates asks of democrats. “And isn’t the city full of freedom
and free speech? And isn’t there license in it to do whatever one
wants?”1 Free people (as Plato did not write) do as they think best.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0005
Democrats live with open hands 83
People who rule themselves build new worlds together. These

cities, states, countries will not be the same. Freedom for individuals
unleashes curiosity and invention, exploration and discovery. We have
not yet seen democracy in its fullness. We have seen only shadows of
democracy and only a few types of democratic institutions. We should
expect to see many more as people become more skilled in governing
themselves.
There will be differences in how people understand themselves as
a people. Perhaps they will believe that they are united by their faith.
Perhaps they will believe, as people have believed before, that they
have a common descent from trees or dragons’ teeth, that they be-
long to Canaan or Aztlán. Perhaps they will believe that they have a
common gift: for living peacefully with one another, for exploration,
for learning, for trade, for generosity, for careful work, for queuing and
all that queuing symbolizes. The differences may be greater than we ex-
pect, greater than we want, greater than we know, but we should not be
afraid. We should be curious.
The love of the new, of the different and the alien, has long been
seen as an attribute of democrats. Democracy, Plato wrote, was “prob-
ably the fairest of the regimes” and the one most open and in love with
difference. The democratic city was the sort of place that appealed to
women, the young, and the masses (perhaps not the condemnation he
intended). “Many perhaps . . . like boys and women looking at many-
colored things, would judge this the fairest regime.”2
Perhaps it was not democrats but those who distrusted democracy
who treasured childish things.3 The aristocrats preoccupied with an-
cestry, blazoning themselves about with heraldry and fancy dress, the
absurd costumes of kings and cardinals and judges, the gilt adorning
generals and autocrats, all of these catch the eye of the light-minded.
Perhaps the ornaments of the wealthy and the powerful are baubles.
Perhaps they are weapons. Perhaps they are a test.
When Al-Farabi took up the passage, Plato’s slightly contemptuous
acknowledgment of democracy’s appeal became a paean to democracy.
Democratic cites belong, for Al-Farabi as for Plato, to the cate-
gory of the ignorant cities, but the distinction between the ignorant
and the enlightened is altered by the advent of monotheism. For Plato,
the enlightened—those few, let us say in accord with tradition—that
84 Wild Democracy
escape the cave seeing the light of the fire as a pale imitation, a frag-
ment, of the sun. They come to enlightenment through their own will.
Enlightenment is knowledge of the being of the things that are and the
nonbeing of the things that are not. It is stable and enduring. Gods have
little or no part in it. The divinity of truth is apart from them. Though
the wisdom of the few enlightened ones has often been presented in
mystical terms, it is in important respects technical knowledge. It is ac-
cessible only to an elite. It endures unchanging. It can be mastered, but
it cannot be easily shared. Mastery sets the few apart and gives them
the right to rule.
Al-Farabi’s commitment to Islam altered his reading of the text.
For the peoples of the book, who share a commitment to a single
divinity and truth revealed in scripture, enlightenment is quite
different. The will of God, not the work or the will of men, makes
it accessible. It cannot be mastered, and it remains mysterious.
Revelation masters even the messengers, who suffer for the message
and are overcome by it. Enlightenment through revelation is stable
and enduring, and it is fundamentally accessible to all.4 But in the
absence of a prophet or messiah, it is subject to the limits of memory
and record, preserved only through the necessarily imperfect means
of imitation.
In this world, the ignorant cities appear differently than they did to
Greek philosophers. As Socrates was once recognized for the wisdom
of knowing that he did not know, so the ignorant cities, mindful of their
ignorance, may surpass the wisdom of those who have only the echo of
prophecy in scripture, only the imitation of virtue in the sunnah.
Under this understanding, democratic cities are ignorant, but they
are also free. They are the only cities able to come to virtue and to good
governance through their own reason and reasoned will. They are the
cities that may come closest to divinely inspired prophetic direction.
Plato wrote dismissively of democracy. Yet even in his hostile
and contemptuous account, this place of pretty and desirable things
emerges as a place of danger and promise. “Aren’t they free?” Socrates
asks of democrats. “And isn’t the city full of freedom and free speech?
And isn’t there license in it to do whatever one wants?” These are
indictments for Plato, the marks of an ungoverned, perhaps ungovern-
able people, led by their passions and appetites.
Al-Farabi’s emendation of Plato’s account has a different character.

He writes:
On the surface, it looks like an embroidered garment, full of col-

ored figures and dyes. Everybody loves it and loves to reside in it,
because there is no human wish or desire that this city does not sat-
isfy. The nations emigrate to it, and reside there, and it grows beyond
measure. People of every race multiply in it, and this by all kinds of
copulation and marriages. . . .
Strangers cannot be distinguished from the residents. All kinds of
wishes and ways of life are to be found in it. . . . The bigger, the more
civilized, the more prevalent and the greater are the good and the evil
it possesses.5
I have not found a more beautiful and precise description of the demo-
cratic city. Al-Farabi recognizes not only the danger but the promise of
democracy. For him, as for Plato, diversity is characteristic of democ-
racy. The gates of the democratic city are open to all; the city attracts all,
whether they are welcome or not. Al-Farabi suggests that whatever the
conditions of their arrival, these wildly diverse people will join one an-
other. They will trade together, make and sell and eat each other’s food,
taste each other’s pleasures, and make new children of every color and
kind. Democracy does not overcome difference. Democracy attracts
and proliferates difference. Democracy breeds diversity.
It is diversity, Plato and Al-Farabi thought, that attracts people of
every race and kind to democracy. Muslims might consider how Al-
Farabi’s description of democracy echoes the Qu’ran: “Oh mankind,
indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peo-
ples and tribes that you may know one another” (49:13) and “[O]‌f
his signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity
of your languages and your colors. Indeed in that are signs for those
of knowledge” (30:22). All should see, in this Qu’ranic verse, and in
Al-Farabi’s description of democracy, the power and beauty of cities
where the people rule.
This runs directly counter to the view, common in our time, that
democracy depends on trust and trust upon homogeneity. I hold
to the old wisdom. Democracy calls to all people. Homogeneity is
86 Wild Democracy
contingent, relative, and fleeting. The Swedes or Norwegians or Danes

who may appear so like one another to an American see Jutlanders and
Sami. They mark ethnic and racial differences we cannot see. They see
differences of class and faith, differences that mark out farmers from
fishermen and herdsmen. They recall violent conflicts between regions
and interests. They remember that these differences have led to battles
in the past. They remember the years when they took horses and chil-
dren from the Roma. When they look at the United States or Canada,
Mexico or Brazil—indeed, any part of the New World—they may well
see themselves as homogeneous. Among themselves, they see diversity.
Differences come and go. Once Americans knew ethnic slurs to di-
minish Hungarians, Swedes, Finns, the Irish, Italians, all the recently
arrived immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries. These slurs are largely forgotten. Where they are remembered,
they have lost their sting. Where the sting remains, work needs to be
done, for make no mistake: this is no predestined progress. On the
contrary, once small and benign differences can come to be seen as
great and threatening. Arabs, hardly noticed at all in the first half of
the twentieth century, came to be seen as racial others in the opening
of the twenty-first. A geopolitical realignment, the emergence of new
foreign conflicts, a border skirmish, a local conflict over fishing rights
or mushroom hunting can awaken old enmities or create new ones.
Injustices people have not recognized or rectified stand in the way of
people ruling themselves. It is our duty, our discipline, and our work to
face difference with courage and greatness of soul. It is our reward to
find not only pleasure but wisdom.
28. The democratic disposition is cosmopolitan.
The word “cosmopolitan” was coined by a man who ruled himself, a

philosopher whose practices were democratic. Diogenes is remem-
bered for carrying a lantern in the sunshine, saying he was looking for
an honest man. In his own time he was distinguished not only by his
wisdom and eccentricity but by his indifference to wealth and rank
and status. He disrupted Plato’s lectures, outraged public customs and
conventions, and showed no deference even to the most powerful.
When Alexander came to see Diogenes, he is said to have offered him

anything he wanted. Diogenes is said to have replied, “Move, you are
blocking my sun.”
Democracies, because they are founded in the consent of the
governed, will be different from one another, reflecting the will of that
particular people. Yet because democracies are founded on certain
principles, because they are bound to recognize our inalienable rights,
they are open to people of all kinds: “Everybody loves it and loves to
reside in it.” These cities, these nations pride themselves on the people
they attract. Their citizens boast of the array of foods, goods, languages,
and ideas that flourish there. New Yorkers, Londoners, Parisians see
themselves as wholly unique, and yet they often claim that they hold
the world within them. Cairo calls itself the umm ad dunya, the mother
of the world.
There is, no doubt, an arrogance in this pride. Yet the pride
democrats have in their worldliness has humility in it as well. The
Declaration of Independence submits the claims of the newly made
people “to the judgement of a candid world.” There is no requirement
for a particular process of civilization, cultural education, expertise, or
ancestry. Anyone may judge, anyone in the world. The requirements of
democratic justice should be visible to all.
The democratic disposition is cosmopolitan in its desires, in the
reach of its offerings and its attractions, and in the humility and ar-
rogance of its claims to universality. Democracy can accommodate
anyone. Democracies must accommodate everyone, respecting the
rights that belong to them as people. They must provide for everyone,
ensuring the things that all people need to survive. They must listen
to everyone, submit the conduct of the government to the judgment
of all. Everyone must be given a hearing; no one may be silenced.
Democracies—and democrats—are open to the views of all the world.
Democratic cosmopolitanism is at once humble and arrogant. No
one, citizen or foreigner, is worth more than anyone else. Each has
rights. Each has the right to sit in judgment on the state and its people.
The pride taken in that cannot be faulted. There is, however, a dan-
gerous temptation to arrogance for cosmopolitan democrats. The con-
viction that all people are equal in their rights and in their worth can
lead too easily to the conviction that we know what is best for others.
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If all people are like us, we know what they need. Our best defense
against this arrogance lies in respect for the principle of the consent of
the governed. “A decent respect for the opinions of mankind” should
chasten us. Respect for the men and women we hope to help or defend
obliges us to listen and defer to their views. Without that deference, we
do not serve democracy. We betray the principle that people should
rule themselves.
The democratic disposition is cosmopolitan. Democratic princi-
ples and loyalties must be as well. Subjects give their allegiance to a
person; nationalists give their allegiance to a nation. Free people can
do neither.
29. How free people love their countries.
If the democratic disposition is cosmopolitan, if democracies open

themselves to others, if free people value the rights they carry in their
flesh above the nation and the law, is patriotism possible? Can free
people love their countries? Can that love be honorable?
Some on the left believe, mistakenly in my view, that a love of
country precludes a commitment to humanity. This is no more true
than that a love for your cat or your dog precludes love for other cats
and dogs, or that a love for your partner or your child precludes love
for others. On the contrary, it is through the particular that we learn
that depth of affection, respect, and commitment that makes love for
others possible. Love for one’s people, the desire to make a country to
be proud of, pride in the work done so far, and love for the country yet
to be built drives all toward humanity.
Conservatives believe that leftists do not love their countries. They
are wrong, but there is a decided difference in how left and right face
the patriotic. People on the left are commonly committed to a cosmo-
politanism grounded in a respect for common rights, common needs,
common capacities, yet they are very much aware of their countries as
their own. They think it is as unseemly to praise your country as it is
to praise yourself. People on the right do not seem to share this view.
What the left regards as a polite and seemly reticence, they regard as a
refusal of love. The right sees their reticence as shame.
There is no defense for flag-waving, chauvinistic patriotism among

free— or even decent— people. Such people claim to honor their
country, but they forgive every sin and forget every shortcoming. Their
indifference to their country’s faults speaks of their shamelessness and
of the falsity of their patriotism. If the conduct of their people does
not matter to them, those people are not their own. They claim to love
their country, but the flag they wave could be any flag. They know their
weakness, so they look for strength, but the leader they follow could
be any leader. They lack judgment, so they choose unwisely. They are
afraid, so they look for a master, and an enemy. As anarchy nurtures
courage, self-reliance, and solidarity, this empty patriotism breeds
authoritarianism, bigotry, and war-making. This is not love of one’s
country; this is the love of any country, any order, any power.
Perhaps people will come to love different countries differently.
Perhaps they will not see themselves in nations at all. Free people will
make themselves as they choose. They will build their democracies dif-
ferently. They will become different peoples: in different places, with
different customs.
Perhaps I can speak only for my own love of country.
There are those who love the land. Perhaps they love it because the
land has fed them and sheltered them for time out of mind. Perhaps
they love the land because it holds the bones of their ancestors. Perhaps
they love it because it has shaped their ways. That love sinks into the
soil. Perhaps it is merely love of beauty or love of one’s own. This is un-
derstandable, but it is nothing to praise.
Love of the land is not love for America. The “purple mountains’
majesty” that Americans sing about is not important. Some Americans
will never see those mountains. I love the waves that break like a bear
moving off the California coast, the round rocks like moons among the
wild roses of Rhode Island, the baked reds and greens and blues of the
mesas of New Mexico, the wheat fields filled with fireflies at twilight in
the Midwest. Yet love of these is not love of country for my people. We
could be Americans in other places. We are Americans in other places.
In a country so large, we do not live in the same places at all.
We do not speak the same languages. We do not have the same
religions, eat the same foods, play the same music. We do not have the
same virtues. When Whitman made poetry of lists, he called to this
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America, to the America of fragments and gathering. What we are has

not yet come into the world.
Loving the America of the past and present is always mixed with
grief. We do not have our country yet. We love the America we long to
be. There are pieces of that steel in the past, pieces in the present. We
know they are fragments. We know we are imperfect. We are beating
that steel into shape. We are building. We are planting. We are feeding
a fire that must spread across the prairie, seeding the grasses that will
grow when the burning is done.
So it is, so it will be, with other free people. Love of country must be,
in no small part, a refusal of what we are in the present for what we long
to become. That love builds on earth out of the earth, with the minds
and hands of the living. It bears the mark of those people, and they
are free to love it as their own. A decent love knows that others do the
same, and finds solidarity in this. An honorable love of country works
for the fulfillment of democratic demands.
30. Democracy is generative. Democracy is

excessive. Democrats live with open hands.
Those who doubt and distrust democracies, who prefer “energetic”

(which is to say, arbitrary and autocratic) executives bemoan demo-
cratic slowness. Democracies, they say, deliberate endlessly, never
deciding. They are indecisive. They talk, they chatter. They are ineffi-
cient, unable to make things happen. Yet democracies are also faulted
for acting too fast: moved by passion and appetite, by resentment
of the rich and lust for their goods. These criticisms, often made by
the same person in the same text, are contradictory, yes, but in their
contradictions there is recognition of a quality found among people
who rule themselves. They are generative.
They make things happen. They create goods. They invent new
things, new processes, new ideas. There is room, in a free country, for
someone to run with an idea that others think is crazy. That idea may
be bubblegum or Saran wrap. It may be harnessing electricity or trans-
mitting information over wires and bouncing it off satellites. It may
be the abolition of slavery, giving women the vote, or free healthcare
for all. People in democracies talk, they debate, they chatter endlessly,
and out of that comes invention. People who rule themselves prolif-
erate things, ideas, rights. They make laws and regulations (perhaps
too many). They are striving to remake the world.
They mull things over; they carry ideas like a child in the womb.
They take the time to let policies mature, to explore ideas, to debate, to
consider, to let the plan mature among them before it is brought into
the world. The work of engendering may be slow and deliberate. The
agreement, the making, the spread of a new commitment can be like
lightning. They think fast. They make fast. They think on their feet.
Fast or slow, people who rule themselves overflow with plans, goods,
ideas, inventions, actions. They create excess.
That excess is a source of pride. Free people always struggle for
more: more freedom, more rights, more power, more inventions, more
discoveries. They go farther in their imagination and ambitions. They
do not believe that anything is closed to them. Their daring and their
courage spur them on. Because each person is valued, all understand
that they must be educated and their fundamental needs ensured. They
are free to cultivate their abilities: free to invent, free to discover. Their
achievements open opportunities to others. “Job creation” is not the
province of the few whose accidental patronage is praised to the skies,
but of the many, whose work overflows with generosity. People who
rule themselves are excessive in their ambitions, in their daring, in
their imagination of what they can become. That is how they grow.
Democracies, radical democracies, maintain within themselves
the spaces of anarchy. They are always experimenting. They prolif-
erate institutions, practices, and modes of resistance. Their capacity
for solidarity enables them to work together, to assemble, to make
committees, unions, cooperatives. Their anarchic spirit enables them
to take these down again. Their capacity for solidarity enables them
to build forms of governance. Their anarchic disposition drives them
to change governnments, escape governance, try again. They experi-
ment. They are not bound to what they have or to what has been. They
build from the ruins of the past when they choose; they refuse the past
when they choose. Their experimentation has two effects. First, they
expand the available forms of governance. They provide their people
with more places to work together and more ways in which to do it.
92 Wild Democracy
Second, the proliferation of sites of governance makes voice and exit

easier. If they choose to leave one site of solidarity and power, they can
more easily find or make another if they choose.
Generosity belongs not only to democracies but to democrats. The
democratic ethic is an ethic of open hands: hands that hold the reins
lightly, hands that grow and make, hands that reach out for the new
and the unknown, hands that reach out to one another.
31. Democrats can tolerate the undemocratic.
“What are my parasites to me?” Nietzsche asked.6 Perhaps this was

aristocratic disdain for him; for us it can be the generosity of the demo-
crat. Walt Whitman asked:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)7
Democracies have a virtue once marked as aristocratic: they have

magnanimity. We are the many; we contain multitudes. We embrace,
as Al-Farabi recognized, peoples and practices of all kinds. Not all of
those are democratic. Yet they are taken in, fed and sheltered, heard
and considered. We are big enough. This practical generosity can be
found in conservatives and radicals, in law and practice. It is an old
virtue, and one cultivated throughout the world. The Arabs who say
ahlan wa sahlan welcome the traveler as their own, giving food and
shelter. When I was a child in Thailand, exploring the streets and the
klongs, people would invite me into their houses and share their food.
On a bus in Tunisia, the women shared food with each other. There
is an old graveyard by my family’s house. In that graveyard is an early
nineteenth-century gravestone, recording the death of a woman who
came to the house as a stranger, fell sick, was nursed, and died there.
The epitaph records not their pride in caring for a stranger but their
praise of a woman they barely knew.
Free people live with open hands. They accept refugees, for these
people are entitled to the rights that belong to all people. They are to
be protected. They accept immigrants. They grant asylum to the perse-

cuted, food and shelter to the refugee. They are proud that people want
to come to them, and they have faith that they can make a place for all.
People who rule themselves know, in their greatness of soul, that
they can often live untroubled by the presence of the undemocratic.
The wisdom that enables them to recognize that we are all dangerous
to one another and the courage that enables them to walk among their
enemies unafraid make it possible for them to live with even the most
profound dissenters. They have learned that they are not harmed if
there are a few people who believe in divine right, if they give a little
space to an enclave that adheres to an undemocratic set of practices or
scriptures, or to a tribe unwilling to live with others. They have learned
that isolation may be chosen, and that though aristocratic pretensions
must be governed, they need not be annihilated.
Perhaps there will always be those who think that they or theirs are
superior to all others. Perhaps in time all people will come to think
that, and in their pride come to the magnanimity that treats inferiors
with welcoming grace. Perhaps they will grow wiser.
32. All you need for democracy is humanity.
Those who doubt and distrust the ability of people to rule themselves
hedge democracy about with requirements, as if it were a country
club with peculiar criteria for admission. Democracy is only for the
wealthy, the educated, for men, for people of a certain race or tribe or
religion, for people who have a certain level of income or a certain cul-
ture. This may describe a country club in the segregated South or a
swim club outside Beirut, but it does not describe democracy. There
are no admission fees. There are no educational requirements. Those
who restrict membership to a particular tribe or race or religion make
democracy impossible if they cannot claim to have the consent of the
governed.
A more common and quite respected position argues that democ-
racy is impossible without trust, and trust is possible only among “one’s
own,” that is, they say, among those of the same culture or ethnicity.
This is wrong many times over. People who can rule themselves are
94 Wild Democracy
brave enough to live with their enemies. They are attracted to differ-
ence, and people of all kinds are attracted to them. Moreover, it is not
so easy to determine who is alike and who is different, even when the
signs of those differences—as with race—are codified and detailed.
Difference and likeness are attributes that shift with context. We are
all alike in our mortality, in the inalienable rights that belong to our
embodied humanity. We are all different in the radical solitude of body
and mind, in how we shape ourselves and how we remake the world.
Insistence on the need for cultural (or ethnic) homogeneity for
social trust, and on the necessity of social trust for democracy, is
weakness at best and bigotry at worst. People who cannot learn to
live bravely and openly with those who are not like them are not
yet prepared to rule themselves. They are not yet fully prepared for
politics.
The complex of desire and courage that democracy calls forth in
democrats is never for one demos, one people, alone. The democrat
cannot easily tell strangers from residents. Democrats may look at
their fellow citizens as foreigners. They may know them as political
rivals, even as enemies. They learn to walk among them unafraid. They
are able then to face true enemies with courage and equanimity.
As political struggles and disputes school them, they learn to see
both enmity and friendship in their fellow citizens. They learn to see
the potential for citizenship in the stranger. If they are conscious of the
rights that belong to all people, a common humanity may teach them
to see all people as, in the most fundamental sense, their own. They
may look at foreigners as they look at citizens. They may look at them
as others, alien and intriguing, opening worlds of danger and promise.
They are prepared to walk out into the world impelled by curiosity and
desire, shielded with courage.
33. The strength of the poor is the strength

of democracy.
Fear of democracy is often no more than fear of the poor. That is a fear
that justice may someday spare us. Until then, we should ask ourselves
why the poor should seem to be at the heart of democracy.
This fear—that is also a hope—is very old. Plato’s writing links

poverty to deprivation and strength, to appetite and self-restraint.
Machiavelli’s observation that the poor want only not to be oppressed
has a more immediately political expression in the writings of peasant
rebels. That desire was captured in a list of demands that the rebel-
lious peasants of 1525—his contemporaries—made to their overlords.
Article 7 of the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasantry declares, “We
will not be oppressed anymore.”8
The poor are people in their simplicity, with few possessions. They
lead precarious lives, with few resources, lacking secure supplies of
food, shelter, and protection. They are people who learn how to pro-
vide for themselves. They are people who learn to work with others.
Plato and Lacan, Ibn Khaldun and Antonio Negri, have all recognized
that power comes from lack and that poverty can give rise to strength.
Judith Butler’s work on precarious life reflects on the ability of
people to build solidarity from grief and mourning.9 Grief, loss, and
mourning are, Butler argues, entailed in our mortality. They belong
to us all. This universal experience may illuminate other rights held
in common. The experience of a precarious life—of poverty, danger,
abjection—is an intensification of this universal experience. Thus
it may not only make individuals and their relations of solidarity
stronger; it may also position them to see the situation of mankind
with greater sympathy and acuity.
Reflection on precarious life invites the recognition of a common
vulnerability, a common experience of loss.
We can also see promise in our common precarity. In the Putney
Debates, Col. Thomas Rainsborough famously declared:
I think the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, as the

greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man
that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent put
himself under that government; and I do think the poorest man in
England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government he has
not had a voice to put himself under.10
Rainsborough shocked his superior officers. Gen. Henry Ireton

responded that if he maintained this he must “fly for refuge to
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an absolute natural right, and you must deny all civil right.”11
Rainsborough did, and he was right to do so. The right to be governed
only by governments that have our consent, to rule as well as to be
ruled, belongs to all people, rich and poor. It belongs to us in our naked
humanity.
Democratic cities, as Plato presents them, emerge from the violent
power of the poor. The poor see the weakness of the rich and doubt
their strength. Democracy “comes into being when the poor win.”12
Plato’s dialogues present this triumph of the poor as the work of an un-
lovely envy. This view predominates in the canon. Rainsborough saw it
differently. So did Ibn Khaldun.
For Ibn Khaldun power arises out of lack, on the territorial, cultural,
and economic periphery, among those who are forced to rely on them-
selves. Hardship and deprivation produce people with qualities that
enable them to win power and use it well. As individuals, they become
self-reliant. They acquire fortitude. They are forced to be disciplined,
strong, inventive, intelligent, and stoic in order to survive. Their pri-
vate strengths and virtues are not, however, enough to preserve them.
These self-reliant people also develop the strongest ties of solidarity.13
Ibn Khaldun’s account of the emergence of power on the periphery
is at once familiar and challenging. His conception of the frontier is
familiar, capturing the combination of independence and cooper-
ation that characterizes frontiersmen from the nineteenth-century
American West to Jim Scott’s Burma. Yet despite its familiarity, this
account presents a challenge to enduring prejudices in Western polit-
ical thought. Conservatives too often see the poor as lazy, lacking in
talent or morality, undisciplined. Those who see the poor in this way
will strip themselves of their own virtue, losing generosity and great-
ness of soul. They will also fail to see where the strength of the people
comes from.
Hardship produces not dependence but fortitude. Much follows
from this conception of power’s origins. For democrats, it marks the
“great unwashed,” the “teeming masses,” the shaab who are both “the
poor” and “the people” as fit—perhaps especially fit—to hold power. It
inverts the understanding that saw—that sees—power as the preserve
of the privileged, to be extended to the subordinate only insofar as edu-
cation and imitation assimilate them to their betters.
Butler saw the possibilities of a solidarity built from grief and

mourning. Mindful of Ibn Khaldun, we can think differently of precar-
ious life. We should not forget our common vulnerability or abandon
the likeness seen in a common experience of loss. Yet we might also
recognize with Ibn Khaldun, with our own memories of frontiersmen
and pioneers, leaders and saints, that precarious conditions can forge
strong and self-reliant individuals: people with fortitude. As these
people draw together, binding themselves to one another, they go
from strength to strength. Precarity produces not only recognition of a
common vulnerability but the achievement of a common strength and
fortitude. For Ibn Khaldun, precarious life is the forge of strength and
the nursery of power.
Ibn Khaldun instructs us to look differently at poverty, hardship,
deprivation. His theory grants great dignity to these. People formed
under conditions of hardship, in a precarious life, are no longer suspect
democratic subjects. They know what it is to be ruled, and they have
learned to rule. They have been trained in a hard discipline. They have
learned, singly and collectively, to rule themselves.
This reading should drive us to a reconsideration of the significance
of double consciousness for democratic subjectivity. The experience
of African Americans and other oppressed and subordinated people
furnishes individual accounts of the process Ibn Khaldun describes
at the level of tribe, nation, state, and empire.14 Frederick Douglass
describes how poverty made slaves ingenious. He remembers his
grandmother’s cabin, the shadowed paradise of his childhood, and
the clever mechanism she used to draw water. The enslaved learned to
make. They learned to think. Slaves, W. E. B. du Bois famously argued,
needed a “double consciousness.” Their vulnerability obliged them to
see not only from their own position but from the masters’ perspective
as well.
So it is with the poor. Poverty requires thought. The ordinary
requirements of life—finding food, finding shelter—require ingenuity.
Anyone who has seen a poor person in the global south hammer a sat-
ellite dish from an oil drum, or seen the compact and clever ways a
homeless person carries shelter in a bundle, has seen the evidence of
this ingenuity. Anyone who has experienced poverty, even briefly, has
learned how very clever one has to be to manage. The poor need to
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make the most of what they have and what they know: to forge alliances
with friends and family and cultivate the few resources they have. The
rich can simply spend some money. They do not need to think at all.
Plato wrote in the Symposium that desire was the child of poverty
and resource. Ibn Khaldun’s work makes that observation political. The
poor join together because they must. The poor become resourceful
because they must. They become powerful because they can. Their
poverty taught them to be clever and enterprising. They learned that
solidarity not only enabled them to survive; it made them stronger
than their enemies.
Reading democracy in light of Ibn Khaldun, affirming the capacity
of those who live under hardship to acquire self-reliance, practice sol-
idarity, and acquire power, counters the exclusionary liberalism Uday
Mehta identified.15 The two Mills, and other enlightened liberals com-
mitted to the project of empire, saw the capacity for democracy as an
achievement contingent on education, the cultivation of certain mores
and specified cultural or civilizational contexts. For many more that
capacity was dependent on financial as well as cultural capital. Ibn
Khaldun’s work reminds us that we need nothing for democracy but
humanity.
Ibn Khaldun’s account also counters the assumption that anarchy
and individualism are opposed to solidarity and social action. Ibn
Khaldun recognized that solidarity is not an alternative to individu-
alism but its necessary accompaniment. They are related as concave
is to convex. The conditions that make individualism necessary make
solidarity desirable. According to this logic of origins, the more an
individual is forced to self-reliance, the more that individual sees the
virtues of solidarity. Solidarity grows not from the weakness of the
dependent but from the recognition of limits in the strong. This rec-
ognition is not peculiar to Ibn Khaldun. It animates anarchism across
time and space. Kropotkin’s anarchism is famously allied to his recog-
nition of the necessity—and the drive—to mutual aid. For Kropotkin,
solidarity was natural, a consequence of the form of human and other
embodied beings. David Graeber, citing the work of Joanna Overing,
describes anarchic practices among the Piaroa.16 The acequias of New
Mexico are communal irrigation systems, run on the old anarchic
system of the commons.
Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of hardship casts further light on

Plato’s conception of the origins of democratic power. Plato wrote that
the “lean, tanned poor man” standing in the ranks of the Athenian
army looks to the soft, fat and wealthy and says, “Those men are ours.
For they are nothing.” This account is not wholly in accord with por-
trayal of the many as empowered only by their numbers. Here, in the
shadows of the dialogue, we can read a reluctant and allusive acknowl-
edgment of the strength of the impoverished individual and the indi-
vidual democrat. If we read Plato differently, in light of Ibn Khaldun
and with the experience of poverty, we can see the origins of democ-
racy in the strength and fortitude of the poor and the disenfranchised.
We can see democracy as the political fulfillment of a solidarity begun
in the common bearing of hardship.
The democrats seen in this reading are stronger, fiercer, and braver
than the fearful people of liberalism’s social contract. Those who con-
tract in Hobbes live in fear, make their contracts from fear, and fear-
fully consign themselves to the rule of an autocrat.17 The women who
make the Devil’s bargain in Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy
seek dependence to ensure their safety. They fear, they seek a protector,
and they make a dictator. Rawls too roots contract in anxieties about
an unknown future.
Ibn Khaldun reminds us that the poor are not always fearful, that
they are often capable of protecting themselves and others, and that
this recognition was present in Greek democracy as well. “What,”
Socrates asks, “do the people of democracies call themselves? They call
themselves rulers.”18
Want teaches anarchic fortitude, the strength of those who walk by
themselves. Want teaches self-reliance. Want teaches ingenuity. Want
drives people to solidarity. Mutual aid is part of the ingenuity of want.
Those who want work to fulfill their needs find that they can do more.
They are driven from want to wanting, from need to ambition and de-
sire. They have learned that together they can do great things. This is
dangerous and daring knowledge. The desire for glory drives domina-
tion. The desire to secure the democratic demand for themselves and
others, to turn democratic excess against democratic want, drives to-
ward greatness.
VI
Taxes
34. Taxes are how people pay for the work they do
together.
People love to inveigh against taxes. Their taxes are too high, there are
too many taxes, too many governmental bodies. Taxes are imposed by
a government that does not understand how hard it is to run a busi-
ness, that doesn’t see that the wealthy are wealth creators. Taxes are the
government’s hand in your pocket. In America, we are reminded that
tax protests are the very foundation of the Republic. The Revolution
began in resistance to the Stamp Act. The rebels who dumped British
tea in Boston Harbor were resisting taxes. “No taxation without repre-
sentation” was a war cry of the Revolution and remains the motto of a
still disenfranchised Washington, D.C.
Libertarians charge that taxes are coercive. They steadily increase
governmental power. They make bureaucratic authoritarianism pos-
sible. They are often a covert attempt to reshape people’s behavior (the
soda tax, or “sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco). They are often a tool,
openly used, for redistributing income: taking from the rich to give
to the poor. Critics are correct to question the use of taxes to control
behavior, especially when it serves to “nudge”—that is to say, to influ-
ence behavior covertly. They are right to cast a suspicious eye on the
state, for states possess coercive power. There are elements of truth in
these critical accounts of taxation, but there is something fundamental
that is lost. It is astonishing that libertarians, who accept the tyranny of
bosses, debt, usury, and other exactions of finance, should cavil at taxa-
tion. It is absurd that anarchists, taught as they should be by Kropotkin,
should object to a practice of mutual aid. There can be unjust taxes to
be sure, but there is nothing opposed to liberty, nothing hostile to an-
archy, in the choice of people to work together.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0006
Taxes are how people pay for the work 101
Where people rule themselves, there is nothing coercive about

taxation. Taxes are not an alien government sticking its hand in your
pocket. Taxes are not an imposition. Taxes are how we pay for the work
we choose to do together.1 They testify to down-to-earth, common-
sense commitments and to the dreams of the people. Ruling the nation
is not simply a matter of inspiration or good ideas. There is practical
work to be done. There are roads and bridges to be built. There are
harbors to be cleared, canals to be dug, wildfires to be fought, oil spills
to be cleared. If people want running water and sewer systems, they
must repair or build them. In his paean to common democratic work,
Langston Hughes writes:
The eyes see materials there for building,

See the difficulties too, and the obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help—
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.2
We are the builders. We support ourselves. We take care of our own.

Trying to evade this is shameful and petty. “A man would be ashamed
to be told that he signed a petition, praying that he might pay less than
his share of the public expense,” Thomas Paine wrote, “or that those
who had trusted the public might never receive their money; yet he
does the same thing when he petitions against taxation, and the only
difference, that by taking shelter under the name, he seems to conceal
the meanness he would otherwise blush at.”3 They should feel shame,
these critics of taxation.
There are those who say of people poorer or frailer than they, “They
want to be given things,” or, only slightly less grudgingly, “We give
them. . . .” They believe that money is taken from the hard-working and
deserving and given to the lazy and profligate. They are usually wrong,
102 Wild Democracy
but what if it were true? These are their people. Such people may pride
themselves (however mistakenly) on their self-sufficiency, but they can
never claim to love their country. They regard taxation as a transaction.
They expect to be given something for it, and they are looking for a
bargain. This is a small, greedy, mean-spirited mentality. These people
have not even advanced to politics, much less self-rule. They do not
know their own people. They have no pride. They lack the greatness of
soul people need to rule themselves.
Magnanimous people glory not in what they take but in what they
can give. If others take more than they do, so what? If others feed off
them, they say with Nietzsche, “What are my parasites to me?” The
honorable take pride in generosity. They glory in giving. They smile
and say, “You are welcome.” If they love their country they say, “You are
my people and I will see you fed.”
Those who begrudge their taxes, who have no desire to share their
wealth, have no love of country. Their affection does not extend far
enough. Those who love their country take all within it as their own.
They steward their land, they build with beauty and efficiency. They
aim to “walk in beauty.”4 They are proud of their people and treasure
them—even those they count as their enemies. They feel a responsi-
bility for all within it, good and bad. They are ashamed to see any one of
their people in need.
For the subjects of a monarch, national greatness may lie in conquest
or empire, in the grandeur of the monarch’s castles or the size of the
Crown Jewels. For democrats, “the crown jewels” has become a collo-
quial term for something every man possesses. Military dictatorships
and nations governed by force take pride in the size of the military.
Military parades, aircraft carriers that might never leave the harbor,
and uniforms with a great deal of brass are the currency of national
greatness.
Economists teach us to see national greatness in the size of a nation’s
GDP or the wealth that millionaires and billionaires are able to amass.
For those who value wealth alone, who measure greatness in renminbi,
dollars, or euros, displays of private wealth may be a source of pride.
Democrats take pride only in their accomplishments and the wel-
fare and accomplishments of their people. They are proud of what they
build together. They are proud when everyone has food and shelter,
Taxes are how people pay for the work 103
when everyone learns and takes pride and pleasure in their work. They
take pride not in the wealth of the few but in the prosperity of all.
It would be unjust to say to someone “Roads will serve us all, but
since you need them for your business, you build them.” It would be
arrogant for someone to say “I am wealthy” (or “I am ambitious”).
“So I will build your roads and provide your defense.” No one should
be trusted with that power. Who is that one person to decide for the
people?5 People who rule themselves are proud: proud of their inde-
pendence, proud of their abilities. Are we too poor to build our own
roads? Are we too poor to protect ourselves? No, we can do this for
ourselves.
The idea that taxation is coercion has its origins in resistance to
monarchies and dictatorships. The dictator who taxes you does indeed
have his hand in your pocket. The elected official who builds himself a
palace with public funds is a thief. When people rule themselves they
are not taking from someone’s pocket and putting it in someone else’s.
They are spending common funds on a common project. They are
working together.
Paine, who fought for democracy on two continents, argued that
though rebellious people had opposed the taxes their rulers laid
on them, they would not end all taxation. On the contrary, Paine
thought free people—people who ruled themselves—would simply tax
themselves differently. They would be free of the expense of a mon-
archy: the pageantry that accompanies it; the expenses of a dynasty and
its hangers-on. They would fight fewer wars and spend less on armies
and navies and the machinery of combat. They would not, however,
dispense with taxes altogether. They would tax themselves willingly.
For a people who rule themselves, under laws they make and will-
ingly submit to, the greatest shame would be to neglect their duty to
one another. For a free people who live together willingly, the sight of
people who are homeless or unfed, who struggle to find work or get an
education is shaming. When we see that, we see our failures.
Our duty extends beyond those who are ours by law and custom.
There is a greeting in Arabic: ahlan wa sahlan. The late Farouk Mustafa
used to translate this as “You are among your people and your keep is
easy.” The greeting comes to strangers as much as to one’s own. To say
this, to practice this, is the mark of a people who have ears to hear the
104 Wild Democracy
democratic demand and eyes to see it, who live with great hearts and
open hands.
When I was a child and we were about to move overseas, my mother
took me aside. She explained to me that I would see beggars. This was,
she told me, a sad and terrible thing, and I should prepare myself for it.
I learned in that moment that for a country to have beggars was a cause
of great shame. I did not know then that my country’s beggars had been
hidden from me. I have learned since to long for the day when I can say,
“There are no beggars in my country.”
VII
The problem with liberalism
35. Undemocratic governments are unjust, but not

all democracies are just. Democracy is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for justice.
Al-Farabi wrote that places where the people rule are open to the
greatest evil and the greatest good. He wrote of the democratic city,
“The bigger, the more civilized, the more prevalent and the greater
are the good and the evil it possesses.”1 Democratic people are free to
shape themselves and their common life together as they see fit. They
will not always do that well. Langston Hughes writes:
The people often hold

Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumbling say them,
And faultily put them into practice.2
People struggle. They are sailing into the unmapped, unknown future.
They may be (they will be) deceived and misled. Perhaps the people,
as the Prophet Muhammad believed, will “never be agreed upon an
error.” Perhaps “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”3 Until
that unity, people will struggle to make themselves. They will make
mistakes. They will be tempted by glory and rendered powerless by
fear. They will do wrong. They will have to govern as the Vikings sailed,
steering out of the dangers they encounter in uncharted waters. Such
mistakes can be costly, even devastating, to the people and to others.
It is necessary, therefore, that people take precautions against pos-
sible errors. There should be no loss, no error that would leave the
people vulnerable. There should be no single place or person whose
fall would end the people’s rule or damage it beyond repair. When
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0007
106 Wild Democracy
power is spread across regions, when people employ different forms

and practices in governing themselves, when each person watches out
for the common good, threats are countered from the start.
Perhaps there can be a people that is democratic and evil. Every
virtue has an attendant vice shadowing it.
Perhaps democrats will come to value their people, their particular
people, more than all others and mistake a race, a religion, a tribe, or a
set of customs as that which must be preserved at all costs. Perhaps the
courage, the daring of democrats can become mere recklessness, a will-
ingness to gamble with things—and, more important, people—that
can lead to a lust for glory and dominion. Perhaps curiosity, openness,
a passion for the new can expose the people to unexpected dangers.
In writing this, I can see how a democracy might turn to evil. When
I write “people who rule themselves,” I think it much less likely. The
idea of a people, a demos, that can be defined in ethnic or tribal terms
carries the possibility of bigotry and chauvinism within it. People who
have learned to rule themselves need have no commitments to ethnic
or tribal identities. They are not bound to a demos or a tribe. People who
have learned to rule themselves have already become disciplined. They
have learned to judge their laws, their government, and themselves.
They have learned to wait, to stand fast, to rebel when duty requires it.
That judgment, diffused throughout an entire people, makes errors less
likely and makes it harder for evil to take hold. People are protected
by the spaces of anarchy they keep in their country and in themselves.
There is no people known to me that can claim to truly rule them-
selves. We have made democracy shabby by taking our work for it as
an achievement. We have only the seeds and seedlings of democratic
practice. We rule ourselves only here and there, in practices that have
not fully grown up among us.
We struggle to rule ourselves. Democracy is a commitment, a con-
viction, a principle, a star to steer by in the unmapped sea. It is not
what we have or what we are. Perhaps it is, at its best, what we long to
be. Those who want neither to rule nor to be ruled, when they need
or wish to act together, have learned that it is possible to preserve
their freedom by acting democratically. We are learning how to rule
ourselves, in small ways and great ones. We are not dreaming; we are
The problem with liberalism 107
working. There is work to be done and many obstacles to overcome—

not least those presented by the supposed friends of democracy.
36. Liberalism is a problem.
People speak of “liberal democracy” as if one word slid easily into the
other, as if there were no space between liberalism and democracy.
They speak as if there should be no space, as if democracy were accept-
able only when accompanied—or corrected—by liberalism. Liberalism
would guarantee rights and establish the rule of law. Liberalism would
protect the rights of minorities and dissidents. Liberalism would pro-
tect democracy from demagoguery and tyranny. A liberal democracy
would have regular, transparent procedures.
The problem with liberalism is that it does both more and less than
it claims.
The most admirable of these liberal claims belongs not to liberalism
but to democracy. Liberals faced with democratic critiques of liber-
alism fall back on the claim that rights belong to liberalism. In this un-
derstanding (or lack of understanding), democracy is the brute power
of the people, indifferent to the rights of individuals and vulnerable to
the ambitions of demagogues. Liberalism is the name for the contracts,
constitutions, rules, and procedures that secure rights and limit the
people in their passions and appetites.
If rights were the gift of liberalism, liberalism would command our
allegiance. They are not. Rights follow from no contract, no covenant,
no law. They are not made by a particular set of procedures; they do
not depend for their existence on the ratification of a state or any legal
order. They are ours, born in our flesh and held from birth to death.
Rights belong to the people.
Rights are a democratic demand, not a liberal gift.
Liberalism, republicanism, and constitutionalism were once
presented as supplements to democracy in the simple sense: additions
and procedures—norms—that would protect the rights of minorities
and dissidents; protect democracy from demagoguery and the tyranny
of the majority. This line of thought gave us the Bill of Rights. It has
108 Wild Democracy
also given us a welter of procedures, a plethora of laws, and a maze of

institutions, most designed to ensure that the people do not rule.
Liberalism comes from fear and gives fear power. Fear of the
people—that is to say, fear of ourselves—is at the heart of liberalism.
Liberals fear the masses. They are—we are—the “great unwashed,” full
of appetite and ignorance, lacking knowledge, lacking civility, lacking
breeding. Liberals fear the anger of the people. They know that people’s
most fundamental rights are violated daily. They know that people are
silenced and powerless. They know that people are hungry. They know
people lack homes, education, access to the knowledge and tools they
need. They know that even those who have these things and more are
burdened by inequality and deprived of freedom. They know, perhaps
they prefer, that people are taught to desire and to defer to wealth. This
fear generates laws and political institutions that hold the masses—that
is to say, the people—in check.4 Holding the people in check leashes
us all.
This fear generates bureaucracies, procedures, institutions, and
practices—(perhaps worst of all) “best practices”—that extend and
enhance the powers of states, corporations, and other forms of con-
solidated power.5 Liberalism thus operates as a supplement not only
in the commonplace sense but in the sense Jacques Derrida gave it.
Liberalism adds only to replace.6
The replacement of democracy by the liberalism that pretends to
supplement and secure it takes two forms. First, the apparatus of order
and procedure, taken initially as the guarantor of rights and govern-
ment by consent, comes to be seen as its substance. Second, that legal
and bureaucratic apparatus that Max Weber aptly named the Iron Cage
retains its generative power, extending its reach ever more thoroughly
across the state and into people’s lives.7
Liberalism retains and enhances fear. The more liberals strive for
order and protection, the more intensively they govern. Concern for
rights gives way to concern for safety. Fears of the unknown, of the
other who might be friend or enemy, of the mass of the people in which
one is always both a part and apart, cannot be eliminated. They belong
to the human and, more markedly, to the democratic condition. They
require us to show some courage.
In my own country, liberalism has made people more fearful and

less democratic. Americans committed to liberalism are inclined to go
to courts for recognition of rights. They are reluctant to try to persuade
their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is because they hesitate to press their
views on their fellow citizens. If so, they should consider their views
more closely and be ready to change their minds if those they talk to
persuade them. Perhaps they have contempt for others, thinking that
they are too foolish, too bigoted, or too self-interested to listen to
reason. That would be both tragic and shameful. Perhaps in choosing
the courts as a field of battle, they feel they will have an advantage over
their opponents. That too would be tragic and shameful. Perhaps they
are afraid. Perhaps it is simply too much trouble.
Whatever the cause, too many liberals have come to fear open debate
and discussion. Liberalism has inclined too many to believe that they
cannot trust the judgment of their fellow citizens. Rather than seeking
to persuade those who do not agree with them, they try to enforce their
will through the courts. The faith in courts and expert opinion creates
a desire for willful and immediate domination in citizens. Our disdain
for each other can make us tyrannical.
Reliance on law and the courts for the enforcement of rights is un-
democratic, disrespectful, lazy, and cowardly. The courts have a duty,
as all branches of government—all people—do, to secure and protect
the rights of each and all. Free people should not rely upon them alone,
or even primarily. We are fools when we rejoice too much in this or
that legal decision. Laws without the support of the people will not be
well executed. They may not be enforced at all. When we acclaim legal
judgments, we may erode the will to change the people. We assign the
task of doing justice to a few people who may be neither good nor wise,
who are subject to little oversight, and who are committed to seek not
justice but legality. We become lazy. We mistake law for justice. We
mistake liberalism for democracy.
Fear of the people endangers democracy. Derrida feared demo-
cratic elections so profoundly that he supported a military coup. He
and other French intellectuals, panicked at the prospect of a possible
election victory by the Front Islamique du Salut flew to the protec-
tion of authoritarian rule. They clothed ambitious Algerian generals
in the guise of saviors of democracy. Those generals would cling to rule
110 Wild Democracy
until their hands were withered with age. The French had no right to
choose who would rule Algeria, yet they defended military rule there.
Democracy, even liberal democracy, is still à venir in Algeria. Coups
in Bolivia, in Egypt, in Turkey, in Chile, and in many more embattled
places have presented themselves as necessary to save democracy. They
attack what they pretend to save.
In Catalonia, movements of the Catalan people to separate from
Spain were met with violence and the hard hand of an unrelenting state.
In responding to the movement, Spanish officials showed a telling con-
fusion of the democratic, the liberal, and the constitutional. The Catalan
secessionist movement was “undemocratic,” they argued, because it did
not follow the rules, because it set aside the Constitution. They avoided
the question of popular support for secession, that is to say, the consent
of the governed. Their objections were legitimate procedural questions,
but they did not touch the question of democracy. The proposed Catalan
referendum of November 9, 2014, may have been unconstitutional. To
be sure, it violated national norms. Yet neither of these means it was
undemocratic. On the contrary. If the Spanish government was com-
mitted to the democratic rather than the liberal, it would have let that
referendum proceed. Instead it took ever more undemocratic meas-
ures against Catalan independence. Catalan politicians were arrested,
forced into exile, and later tried. People in the streets were attacked by
police brought into the province from outside. Spain then witnessed the
absurdity of Felipe Borbón, called King Felipe, declaring to an inter-
national congress of legal experts in Madrid, “It makes no sense, it’s un-
acceptable to appeal to a so-called democracy that is above the law.”8 He
may have had a receptive audience in lawyers. Nevertheless, the state-
ment is fundamentally wrong. The rule of the people is always above
the law. Without their consent, there is no law that can justly command.
In a democracy, wherever the people rule, the law is not the final au-
thority. The people make the state, the constitution (if there is one), and
the laws. They remain the laws’ master.
The undemocratic character of the Spanish state response is still
more evident if one considers the possible outcomes of the projected
referendum. The secessionists might have lost dramatically, though
that appeared unlikely. They might have won dramatically, though that
was far from certain. The referendum might have done no more (and
no less) than confirm the presence of a large proportion of Catalans

who wished to leave Spain. If those opposed to secession had won
dramatically, Spanish national unity would have been confirmed. If
the secessionists had won, or simply demonstrated their strength in
Catalonia, Spain as a whole would have been obliged to acknowledge—
and respond to—that alienation in order to secure the unity of Spain.
The state did not wish to do so. The Spanish state could not wholly suc-
ceed in silencing the people (people have many ways of making their
opinions known), but it could demonstrate the state’s indifference to
the people’s vote and affirm that the unity of Spain rested on something
other than popular consent in Catalonia.
The Spanish response to the Catalan independence movement was
not simply opposition to the possibility of secession. Nor was it simply
the elevation of procedure over substance. It was a firm and multifac-
eted affirmation of the state’s fundamental indifference to the will of
the people. In that sense, it was entirely appropriate to make a king the
messenger of the state. Monarchists are not, however, the only ones
who reject the rule of the people.
Liberals and liberal theorists are among those who have feared
democracy the most profoundly and constrained it the most effec-
tively. From Locke to the present, they have directed their energy at
preventing people from ruling themselves. Their reasons? They fear
the anger of the poor. They fear that those who have little will take from
those who have more. This is the most common justification for lim-
iting democracy, yet it is demonstrably untrue. The fearful fear insta-
bility. They fear, above all, the loss of privilege and power. For some
privilege and power come from wealth, for others they are licensed by
a claim to higher knowledge. They believe that their expertise, the rule
of experts, would be better for people, if only they knew. All these fears
have at their heart the old claim “I am worth more than you.”
The late philosopher John Rawls, writing in The Law of Peoples,
contrasted “liberal” and “decent hierarchical peoples” in the search for a
just “Society of Peoples.”9 Rawls was twice mistaken. First, liberalism is
not sufficient for justice. Second, the distinction between liberal and hi-
erarchical peoples is deceptive. Those Rawls cast as “liberal democratic
peoples” have not yet satisfied even the standard of liberalism, much less
that of democracy. The great liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and
112 Wild Democracy
eighteenth centuries set forth ideals still beyond our reach. The “liberal
democratic peoples” that Rawls sees as the foundation for a just “Society
of Peoples” look far more like “decent hierarchical peoples.” They are
marred by the remnants of historical injustice. They still hold—and still
defend—structures of exploitation and inequality, not least, as many
critics noted, hierarchies of sex and sexuality, race and ethnicity.
There are many hierarchies that live in those countries Rawls saw
as liberal. They change their forms, they shift, but the hierarchies re-
main. Hierarchies of race and sex, the arbitrary raising of some bodies
over others, the belief that wealth should command deference and ex-
ercise power, are neither just nor decent. Rawls was wrong in a third
sense: there are no decent hierarchical peoples.
The limits of liberalism are shown at its foundations. Locke’s formu-
lation “life, liberty, and property” placed property at the heart of liber-
alism. There is both right and wrong in this. For Locke, property was
not simply something to be bought or sold. Property, in the first in-
stance, was the body and the rights held within it. Those rights enabled
people to make things in the world their own by hunting, gathering,
building, and making. This was, and remains, defensible. The construc-
tion of a “sacred right of property” by Locke, Rousseau, and genera-
tions of liberals moved rapidly from the person and the person’s rights
to possessions. Property lost its connection to the body and the rights
sheltered within it and became another word for possessions. This was
a degradation and set further degradations in motion. The defenders
of slavery in the antebellum United States claimed that the sacred right
of property enabled them to hold their slaves. The defenders of eco-
nomic inequality in the present claim that the sacred right of property
entitles the wealthy to power beyond the reach of others. The rich can
buy speech and silence. They can buy influence. Perhaps they can buy
elections. Power of this kind is antithetical to the democratic. No free
people can accept it, for if they do, they will be ruled by wealth.
37. Populism is a democratic force.
“Populism” has been used to name a strange collection of parties and

politicians throughout the world. Argentina’s Juan Perón, America’s
Huey Long and Donald Trump, Hungary’s Victor Orban, Turkey’s

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Greece’s Golden Dawn party, the French
National Front and National Rally are all called “populists” by scholars
and the media. These scholars and pundits see populism as marked by
intense nationalism, hatred of foreigners, fear of immigration, and a
distrust of elites. They see populism as the enemy of liberalism.
The people they deplore are not populists. That name was stolen.
The theft is a symptom of greater crimes. There is a populist party: the
People’s Party of the nineteenth-century United States. None of these
people belongs to it, none of the parties have any ties to it. The true
Populist party is small now, but its positions remain strong in currents
of the Democratic Party in the United States and throughout the Latin
American left.10 In many respects, populism remains the dominant
current of political thought where it first originated, in the American
Midwest. Populism emphasizes equality of worth; respect for those
who labor in fields, in factories, on building sites and on the roads, in
schools and hospitals; and sharing wealth among the people. This is in
stark contradiction to elite European accounts of populism.11
American populists are not hostile to pluralism, they are at home
with it. Their politics caught fire from those who grew up on the land
and those who moved to it. They had absorbed waves of refugees
from failed revolutions in Europe. Irish Rebels and English Chartists,
Germans forced to flee after 1848, all found a home in the Midwest.
Those who came and those who welcomed them found common
ground not only in the belief but in the practices of equality. They did
not distrust pluralism; they were pluralism. French, German, Italian,
Polish, Swedish peasants from every corner of Europe came and sent
their children to school together. They married across cultural and re-
ligious lines but kept much of those cultures alive in the kitchen, in
clubs, churches, and synagogues. Pluralism was not a problem for
them: they lived it. Those who were political refugees did not leave
their politics behind. They believed Americans had the rule of the
people at heart. They made themselves American in this. They brought
Chartism from the United Kingdom to the United States. They brought
Finnish miner radicalism to the mines of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
There were immigrants farming, mining, keeping shops, brewing
beer, making bread. They were soldiers. John Peter Altgeld was an
114 Wild Democracy
immigrant, brought to the United States as an infant. He lied about

his age to serve in the Union Army (with my immigrant ancestors).
He became governor of Illinois. As governor, Altgeld advocated—and
secured—stricter child labor and workplace safety laws. He pardoned
three men unjustly convicted in the Haymarket riot. He made Illinois
more just, more democratic, more equal. In the American Midwest,
throughout America, immigrants strengthened both pluralism and
populism.
The identification of populism with racism that has become pop-
ular in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has its un-
seemly origin not in antiracism but in hostility to equality. Those who
fear populism fear the depth and longevity of the populist insistence
on redistribution and the populist ethic of equality. Were there racists
among nineteenth-century American populists? No movement, not
even abolition, was wholly free of that taint. There were, however,
more efforts at cross-racial alliances in labor than in management, in
farmers’ alliances than in finance. There was unity to be forged across
the racial divide in opposition to the power of wealth. The historic
populist commitment to equality threatens racial as well as economic
hierarchies now as it did then.
There is also a strong vein of populism in Latin America. Here, too,
populism comes into being as resistance against the dominion of the
wealthy. Here, too, populism has often, if not always, gone hand in
hand with pluralism. Evo Morales of Bolivia, José Mujica of Uruguay,
and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, aong others, sought to expand
the political to embrace the formerly disenfranchised: the indigenous,
women, and (always) the poor. The rise of populism in South America
fueled the rise of democracy there as Europe and the United States saw
their democracies attacked.
The ability of European scholars to erase this history of the Americas
in seizing the name “populist” testifies to the persistence of European
imperial arrogance. Populism is what they say it is, though those they
call populists did not take that name for themselves. Those who did
take that name—parties throughout the Americas—receive little or
no attention from European scholars. Imperial arrogance persists
long after the empire is gone. Europe and those Umberto Eco called
“Europeanized intellectuals” have proved indifferent to how parties
and movements name themselves, and the policies and histories

that accompany them. “Populism” becomes a code word for bigotry,
and part of the history of people’s struggles to rule themselves in the
Americas is erased.
Populism belongs not to the Old World but the New. There are, how-
ever, two characteristics that unite at least some of those the Europeans
call populists with the true populists of the New World. They distrust
elites and they demand equality. Populism remains a democratic de-
mand founded in the conviction that people have the right to rule
themselves, and to live their lives.
Commentators were quick to label the Gilets Jaunes of France
populists, but they were slower to hear their demands as an indictment
of the growth of radical inequality. Where distrust or intolerance of
immigrants could be found among the dissatisfied, the deprived and
the démunis, it could distract attention from the core demands of the
Gilets Jaunes. That intolerance was more fully and effectively mani-
fest among elites, evident in Nicolas Sarkozy’s expulsion of the Roma
and his denigration of Islam; in the novels of Michel Houellebecq and
the work of Alain Finkielkraut. Elites, it appears, are entitled to their
hatreds; they are deplored only when they appear among the poor.
Popular demands for dignity, for respect, for the ability to live a de-
cent life have a long history. They echo through ancient bread riots and
slave rebellions to the uprisings of the present. Populism belongs to
that history. The willful distortion of the name and history of populism
has served the interests of the privileged. It is long past time that these
democratic demands, those who make them, and the history they
carry receive not only respect but fulfillment.
38. Institutions alone cannot ensure that

the people rule.
Institutions are tools. There is no tool that can be used only for good.
The courts can protect minorities or serve the powerful, defend rights
or pervert them. The legislature can advance the rights and prosperity
of all the people or serve the interests of the powerful, protect the en-
vironmental commons or serve the interests of polluting industries.
116 Wild Democracy
The executive can seek personal glory, wealth, and power or serve the
common good. The executive can be the tribune of the people or a
corrupt demagogue. The military can hold to their oath to defend the
Constitution or become an institution that undermines democracy.
Institutions, like other tools, are breakable. They lose their sharp-
ness; they rust and decay. They are shaped by one set of needs and
conditions and may work quite differently in another. Institutions
have to be built and maintained, but they must also be continually
questioned, often corrected, and occasionally remade.
Americans are in such a moment as I write. The institutions and
practices that Americans regarded as furnishing defenses against
totalitarianism—and other forms of authoritarian domination—have
failed us. We have had confidence that the free market, modern sci-
ence, and technological innovation would protect democracy and pre-
vent the concentration of power in the hands of a few. We have had
confidence that guarantees of free speech and the power of a free press
would advance the truth upon which democracies depend. But the
concentration of media in a few hands made it the tool of oligarchs.
The role of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in
social media installed invisible censors in a field too many saw as free
and ungoverned. Our confidence was hardly rash; it was supported
by a theoretical canon, by the disciplines of history and political sci-
ence, and by the common sense—and experience—of many genera-
tions. But it is tragically misplaced in the present. These institutions
have not only failed to defend us; they have become another form of
totalitarianism.12
Reliance on the free market to spread wealth (and power with it)
has concentrated power in private hands. The free press, under the
conditions of a market free in name only, has become gatekeeper,
censor, and agitator. Rather than serving as a vehicle for the expression
(much less the contest) of diverse ideas, the media has come to define
political views that lie outside a small range of opinion as inadmissible
and absurd. Profit seekers in social media direct their readers to ever
more extreme and violent opinions. The truly absurd is given an artifi-
cial but compelling centrality.
Science and technology, including the social sciences, which were
once thought to be ungovernable and so the means for permitting
individuals to escape governance, have instead become the means

for confinement and regulation, not only of acts but of thought. The
institutions that the Enlightenment presented as undoing private
power have come instead to consolidate it. The institutions presented
as the means for the liberation of the people have become the tools of a
more effective domination.
There are other dangers to democracy now. Sheldon Wolin has
asked, “What if democracy instead of being prone to license were to
become fearful . . . submissive rather than unruly?”13 Contemporary
American citizens (how inappropriate the name seems!) have become
fearful and submissive. That fearfulness, that anxiety about external
threats once was a defense against tyranny. Now it is the means for
licensing tyrannical authority and securing submission to it. It is easy
to see, in the distances that open between 9/11, the security regime
of the Bush years, and the present, how fear has produced a reliance
on surveillance and a restriction of civil liberties and a more docile
and complacent citizenry. It is easy to see citizens who have become
submissive.
What is to be done? How are we to find our way back to the struggle
toward democracy when the institutions we once relied on fail us?
Those institutions are not sacrosanct: they can be changed. The work
of democracy requires that people are always thinking about what will
serve democracy best: what institutions will secure power in the hands
of the people and enable people to use power well and wisely. There
will come a time, many times, when people need to refuse institutions
that no longer serve them well and craft others to take their place. That
is democratic work.14
39. How free people might choose their leaders.
Many of those who present themselves as experts in the comparative

study of democracy or democratic theory argue that democracy can
be assessed by consulting certain metrics. Are there elections? Have
offices changed hands? Has the party in power changed? They do not
ask “Do the people rule themselves?” That is the only question that
matters.
118 Wild Democracy
In what follows I set aside debates over representation as a diminu-

tion or even abandonment of democracy. I take the use of representa-
tion, for all its faults and dangers, as a defensible choice for free people.
Free and fair elections are one of the strongest tools for any democ-
racy that relies on representation. At their best, they allow people to
choose who will perform the tasks they assign. They can choose on
whatever basis they think best. When they consider candidates, they
judge. When they campaign, they act. When they go to the polls, they
judge. They decide issues in referenda; they decide ballot questions.
They change regulations; they make law. Each election demands con-
sent to ruling and to being ruled, and offers the opportunity for judg-
ment and dissent. Those who vote assume the duty of rule. Those who
stand for election need the courage to step forward and be judged by
their people. Those who win feel the power of rule and the burden
of responsibility. Those who lose, face the future with courage and
equanimity.
Elections call forth courage, but they are not perfect instruments.
They can be designed to maintain injustice and inequality. They can
be undermined by money, a flawed press, or more brutal means. At
their best they are, as Weber argued, a monstrous amalgam of two op-
posing forms. They are lawful, rule-governed, and orderly. They en-
tail assessments of the merits of the candidates and the needs of the
moment. They are collective acts, in which the many decide and indi-
viduals judge for the whole. Yet they are also acts of grace. Each indi-
vidual, in the silence of their own heart, decides who is to be elected.
Grace calls to grace: the incalculable grace that may call from a candi-
date to the people, the grace the people confer with their choice.
Election is not, however, the only way for free people to choose
leaders. One can rotate offices among the people. Leaders can be
chosen by lot.
The idea of choosing representatives and officials by lot strikes
terror into most people, myself included. For all our criticisms of
public officials, we appear to believe that they are more likely to be
qualified and dutiful and to have more integrity than someone chosen
at random. Yet lot was one of the most common ways in which ancient
democracies chose their leaders. Perhaps we should consider lot with
cooler heads and more courage.
Whether or not we choose by lot, we should act as if we do. People

who choose their leaders and representatives by lot should have confi-
dence that their fellow citizens are well-educated, that they know our
history, both good and bad. We must therefore work hard to ensure
that all are educated. We also have an interest in seeing that they have
the common good at heart. We who live with our enemies know that
their conception of the common good may well be mistaken and cer-
tain to do us harm. We should cultivate courage in ourselves and limits
in our government. We will need to face our enemies, and we should
ensure that whatever harm they do will be limited in time.
There are other tools. There are, I suspect, other forms and methods
and tools for ruling ourselves that we have lost or forgotten. There are
others we may yet develop. We will be able to harness techniques of
mass consultation. We will learn how to rule together. None of these
tools will be perfect. All can be turned against the people. Each will
have its uses.
Perhaps we will find that people need far less rule and no leaders
at all.
40. The people, steering.
Written into the Old Norse word for “the rule of the people,”
folkestœring, is an affirmation not only of the right but of the ability of
the people to take their country into unknown and dangerous places.
The image of a single man holding the rudder of the ship of state did
not fool those who knew sailing well. A ship was a ship. A people gov-
erning themselves was another matter. Ships, sailing, and steering
capture many aspects of self-governance, but not all. Experience with
sailing did not persuade the Vikings that executive power belonged to
one alone.
Then again, perhaps it was sailing that taught the Vikings. Rudders,
like stirrups, belong to a later historical moment. Perhaps the Vikings
held an older knowledge. Long before rudders, those who went viking
had learned that people rowing together can steer a ship, changing
their course as they choose, if they work together. Perhaps that knowl
edge stayed with them. In any case, it is there for us.
120 Wild Democracy
Carl Schmitt’s much-quoted claim “Sovereign is he who decides on

the exception” need not detain us long. Exceptions are made every day,
by those in power and those without it. When an exception is made in
one’s own favor or self-defense, it may be called an evasion. Evasions
are one of the most important “weapons of the weak.”15 To secure their
lives, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness, those without power
are constantly required to make exceptions. When those in power are
unjust, their rule is arbitrary. Every act is an exception, for there is only
one rule: the rule of the powerful. When those in power are just, they
recognize that law does not always secure justice. Mercy and magna-
nimity make exceptions. These may be signs of greatness, but they do
not determine sovereignty.
Sovereignty belongs to those who make and unmake governments,
who rule others and themselves, who make and unmake peoples. They
rule, they steer, together.
41. Without free and courageous people, there are

no democratic governments.
This thesis is both true and false. It is false because people, in their
moments of greatness, can overcome themselves. They may not be
ready to rule themselves, but they may have the courage to assume
that burden in the hope that they can rise to meet it. It is false because
people are never wholly democratic. At their best, they work for de-
mocracy, work in democracy, work on democracy. They struggle to
rule themselves, constantly facing the dangers in that rule and, worse,
the forces that erode it. They find freedom, strength, and protection in
the anarchic space that is both a part of and apart from the democratic.
This thesis is true because what elements of the democratic we have
in the present, and the democracy we work for in the present and the
future, are grounded in our capacities, our virtues, and our desires.
They are made by our work.
Those who intend to rule themselves collectively must be able to
rule themselves individually. Democracy demands the discipline to
meet the unknown future and the known enemy with courage. People
who rule themselves cultivate both solidarity and self-reliance. They
depend on themselves and step forward to help their people. They sac-
rifice for the common good and regard it quite correctly as no sacrifice
at all.
42. Decentralization protects the ability of people

to rule themselves.
When Michel Foucault offered a theory of power that saw it not as con-
centrated at one central point but instead diffused throughout an order,
many readers were filled with fear. They saw themselves constantly
under the gaze of power, controlled at every point. Power surrounded
them. They had nowhere to turn. Those people who already knew
themselves hemmed in on every side found this analysis liberating,
for it enabled them to see the structures they had only sensed around
them. They could begin to find their way through, though they too
were daunted by the extent and pervasiveness of power spread so
broadly.
When people struggle to rule themselves, the more power is spread
the safer they are likely to be.
When times are hard, decentralization is to institutions—and to
rule—as guerrilla war is to conventional war. Attacked in one place,
people can regroup in another. The emergence of a would-be author-
itarian in one region need not threaten the whole. The failure of one
practice or institution need not place all at risk. Nothing depends upon
a single leader.
In more ordinary, peaceful, times, decentralization cultivates quali-
ties that make the people’s capacity to rule themselves more deft, more
sure, more adaptable, more daring. They are more willing to exper-
iment when failure is less threatening. If the experiment fails in one
venue, others are safe. They watch people in other places do things dif-
ferently and see what they might improve in their own.
The connection between local communities and the capacity of
people to rule themselves runs deep in political thought and deeper
still in the minds of people with a sense of place. Many institutions—
the practices of African villages and the Haudenosaunee longhouse,
the Russian mir, the Indian panchayat, the New England town
122 Wild Democracy
meeting—are praised for their democratic character and for their inti-
mate, organic connection to the lived experience of the people.
Intimate communities and close ties are no longer confined to living
on the land. There are many of us who have our closest ties with people
who live far from us. People have become ever more adept at creating
community. Our local communities may be manifold. We may be
close, we may work together with the people who live near us. We share
common dangers and common hopes: fear of hurricanes, perhaps, or
hope for a good fishing season or fewer wildfires. We have to learn to
live together in the ordinary aspects of life: walking and driving and
riding bicycles, keeping sidewalks clear of snow. Yet these people,
nearest to us in space, may not be nearest to our hearts or minds.
There are intimate communities on the internet, bound together by
common experiences, common passions, common aims. Political life
takes place here as well. Alliances are formed, solidarities are earned,
strategies are crafted, and people learn from long discussions and
debates with one another.
People craft still other communities. These are far from the com-
munities that grow in and from a place, far from the intense immate-
riality of the internet. These are old forms of community, cultivated in
writing and episodic meetings, in moments taken out of time. They are
common among scholars.
Those who write of the political value of community, who craft
institutions designed to create or cultivate community, who write of
democratic deliberation seem to consider only communities of place.
That is not how people live. That is not how politics is experienced.
People have been adept in creating communities in many forms. All
promise ways in which people can rule themselves. All run the risk
of becoming stifling or oppressive. Communities protect only when
they can be abandoned, only when other communities are found to
shelter the democratic, only when we leave enough ungoverned space
for anarchy.
Not all decentralizations are geographic. The same logic applies to
levels and methods of governance. What is used successfully in one
system can be adapted for use in another. It is not enough to peti-
tion the center: people who want to accomplish something need first
to consider multiple ways the problem could be resolved and decide
which would be easiest and most effective. They are asked to think stra-
tegically about power and to use their own judgment constantly. They
learn multiple ways to exercise power, and they become more adept at
each. They become better at steering.
In a wilder, more anarchic democracy, decentralization ceases to be
a description of institutions and becomes an ordering principle and
an ethic. There are elements of this in my country. Who holds power?
The president? The president is bound by law. Congress can govern the
president. The Supreme Court can govern the president. No branch
has the final word, no branch—and certainly no person—has power
that cannot be countered. Their power, moreover, flows outward and
can be dammed or diverted. It depends on the judgment of all those
officials and citizens who put law, regulations, executive actions, mil-
itary commands into practice. Above all, the president, the Congress,
the Supreme Court, the judges, soldiers, and sailors are sworn to the
Constitution, and therefore to the people. This is only one dimen-
sion. There are states, counties, cities, and townships, each with its
own institutions, practices, and ways of life. There are jurors who can
decide cases and nullify law. There are citizens who have the right to
vote, to sit on juries, who judge the laws and practices of power as they
walk through the world, who make and unmake governments. There
are people, empowered by no more and no less than the rights born
in them. Sovereignty belongs to the people: to each as well as to all.
In an anarchic democracy, power moves always and inexorably to the
people.
Politics is not the same as government. The practices of a people
ruling themselves are not confined in government buildings or limited
to elections. Politics is practiced at home and on the street, in writing
and in the broad, irregular spaces of the internet. All of these have uses
and value. Any one of them may save us in hard times. Multiplying
the planes and possibilities of politics advances and protects the
democratic.
Think, for example, of people who discover that they have lead
in their water. If their water supplier is a private company, regulated
only by the market, they must appeal to the company. If the company
fails them, they may have nowhere to go but the nearest unpolluted
source—or back to the market for a water purification system. The
124 Wild Democracy
same applies when the water is supplied publicly without oversight.

Even now most people have far more resources than that. They can go
to the supplier, to any public office that regulates water. They can call
on their local or national officials. They can do this, usually, not just on
one level or to one branch of government but many. They can appeal to
the press and publicize their problem in the media. They can assemble
and protest. The proliferation of levels and networks gives people ac-
cess to more strategies, more ways of seeking help, of making injustice
visible, and of solving their problems. Their task will not be easy. They
will have obstacles to negotiate and defects in their institutions to over-
come, but without the proliferation of approaches to political power
their task can be made impossible.
When politics is confined within a narrow space, limited to a small
set of actors or institutions, power is intensified and confined to the
few. That is the case not only for governmental institutions but for pri-
vately owned political venues. Consider the media. Long ago people
learned to doubt and distrust media that was under the control of the
government. They quite sensibly questioned whether media controlled
in this way would give space and voice to an opposition party, to rebels
or dissenters. Those dangers are no less true of media concentrated in
private hands. Private owners, families, corporations all have interests,
all may choose to silence or diminish opposition. Silvio Berlusconi’s
control over Italian media distorted and corrupted Italian politics long
before he held office. Rupert Murdoch distorted and directed poli-
tics on three continents. The tabloid press, intent on profits, has often
shown itself indifferent to truth: willing, for the sake of money, influ-
ence, or the preferences of its owners, to field lies. Mark Zuckerberg’s
Facebook has famously sold its members’ data without their knowl
edge or consent, enabled the manipulation of electorates, encouraged
the intensification of partisanship and violence, and permitted the
public circulation of lies by political candidates. In all these cases, the
absence of alternative ways to communicate and other sources of in-
formation has limited the political possibilities and resources available
to the people. Rather than the media providing information and giving
clarity, they too often cause us to fumble in the dark with paths and
obstacles hidden from us, directed into channels chosen by the pow-
erful and profit-seeking.
People who recognize that power over the media is concentrated

in a few hands look elsewhere for information: the internet, their
friends. News, knowledge, and information are often fragmented.
Conspiracy theories offer more. In the place of fragments they offer full
explanations that cover all the aspects of a story and more. They offer
detailed, rational explanations. They often have all the apparatus that a
searching public has learned to look for: references, citations to books
and articles, quotes from scholars and public figures. If the scholar
is not competent or respected, if the public figure is a fraud, who’s to
know? Conspiracy theories describe (in detail) a world in which a few
hold power. That, at least, accords with the readers’ experience.
Multiplying the planes and possibilities of politics also depends on
time. The ability to change an official, a rule, a regulation, a law, an in-
stitution increases the strategic possibilities of politics.
No tool serves only one hand. Laws, institutions, constitutions have
changing effects as the political order changes around them. The ability
to change, to sail where there is no firm, certain, and unchanging
ground is necessary for those who would rule themselves. Their polit-
ical structures must be changeable if they are to serve them well.
When a people choose how they will govern themselves, it is im-
portant that they leave space for anarchy. In choosing how to govern
themselves, people need to consider not only how to govern but how
governance is to be avoided. They need, in James Scott’s phrase, “the art
of not being governed.”16 They need to leave space for anarchy.
43. People can always recall their representatives,

servants, and officials.
In Insurgent Universalities, Massimiliano Tomba revives the concept

(and our hopes) for a revival of the practice of the imperative mandate.
The imperative mandate, Tomba argues, is profoundly democratic. In
it, people assert their right to recall their representatives at will. The
imperative mandate, Tomba writes, was a medieval European insti-
tution that emerges again—revived, rediscovered, or simply discov-
ered anew—among the sans-culottes and communards of the French
Revolution, in soviets and workers’ councils, and in the practices of the
126 Wild Democracy
indigenous and the Zapatistas.17 This may sound legalistic or archaic.

It is not. I saw it in a set of handwritten electoral rules that came from
a slum in India.18
In their work on electoral practices among the Indian poor, Tariq
Thachil and Adam Auerbach found that slum dwellers were not passive
fodder for party machines. On the contrary, they were political people,
who sought to elect those who would advance their common interests.
They sought knowledge about the candidates, they recruited, they or-
ganized, and they voted. They not only voted; they governed the voting
processes that would give them local leaders. Thachil reproduces a
handwritten set of electoral rules from one of these slums. There are
ten rules. The ninth rule is “If the president is found guilty for doing
any wrong an immediate meeting will be called and he shall be sus-
pended or punished.”
The imperative mandate, despite its rather elegant and esoteric
name, is nothing more or less than the right of the people to remove
any officer, any leader, at any time. It does not belong to a lost golden
age. Those people in an Indian slum who wrote and acted upon this
principle proved that it is not utopian but accessible.
One is not elected, or otherwise granted the power to represent, to
speak for, or to speak as the people, to remain untouchable for a length
of time. On the contrary, the right to represent or to act for the people,
or some group of people, depends on that investiture being constantly
renewed. What people give, they can withdraw.
The imperative mandate—the ability to recall a representative at any
time—is democracy unleashed in time, the work of free people who
refuse to keep the democratic to a schedule.
44. Executive energy belongs to the many as well

as the one.
Many who write on constitutions argue that executive energy can be

found only in the leader, never in the people. This belief was an article
of faith for monarchs and autocrats. In the United States, Alexander
Hamilton’s effort to build a stronger presidency was fueled not only
by personal ambition but by the vision of a single, willful man, free
to act quickly and decisively. In recent decades, Schmitt’s “Sovereign

is he who decides on the exception” has become an article of faith for
theorists on the left as well as the right. Scholars nominally committed
to democracy or socialism argued for the necessity of a leader. George
W. Bush claimed, “I am the decider.” Were they deaf to the sound of
those words echoing over the ruins?
The idea that concentration of power in a single executive produces
swifter, more decisive action is fundamentally mistaken. It presumes
that the decision, once made, goes into effect. There are few executives,
even those who have dictatorial powers, who can singlehandedly ac-
complish what they have decided. They depend on others to put that
decision into practice. The patrón orders; the peon obeys (or disobeys).
The king commands, and liegemen and servants scurry off: to follow
his orders well or badly, to remember or forget, to hurry or to drag
their feet. Whether we acknowledge it or not, executive power is al-
ways diffuse.
The ruins of postwar Germany (but not only Germany) testify to
the hazards of placing faith in a single leader. The ruins of Katrina and
the World Trade Center testify to the ability of people to act with en-
ergy in times of emergency. When the planes struck the World Trade
Center, the American president was far away, reading to schoolchil-
dren. No warning had been issued, and whatever plans were in place
were overcome by the extent, gravity, and shock of the attack. Long
before any federal response came, the people of New York had begun
the work. Firefighters, police, and ordinary people with special skills,
or simply hands and a mind, gathered to rescue those they could. They
were fast and they were effective. The city was their city; the people
were their own.
In every large natural disaster, the people first on the scene are often
neighbors. The person who takes you off your roof in a flood might be a
firefighter, but they might also be a neighbor with a boat. In hurricanes,
tornados, and earthquakes, people respond. They do not wait for the
energetic executive. They begin the work themselves. After Hurricane
Katrina, the energetic executive was slow to respond, and the response,
when it came, was inadequate. The people of New Orleans lacked ad-
equate resources, but they had energy; they knew their neighbors and
their city. The people of Puerto Rico lacked the resources necessary to
128 Wild Democracy
respond to Hurricanes Irma and Maria, but they showed the same en-
ergy, tenacity, and local knowledge in their responses.
Even when the attacks are expected and a central authority has
plans in place, the responses to attacks and disasters often come from
those who are there. Britain planned for the Blitz and had mobilized
to respond to it, but in doing so the British relied on a system of neigh-
borhood wardens to warn of air raids, get people to shelters, put out
fires, and rescue people from the ruins. The instruction “Keep Calm
and Carry On” became emblematic of the British. It captures an as-
pect of response that is often absent in discussions of executive energy.
In natural disasters and the most unnatural of wars, success depends
not only on decisive action but on qualities of composure, steadfast-
ness, and resilience. The Palestinians, who have lived in crisis for gen-
erations, have learned to value their own steadfastness, for it is on that
quality that their endurance depends.
Crises are addressed not only in the moment of decision or the
long endurance of hardship but in carrying out the work the crisis
makes necessary. The quick, spontaneous response, without leaders or
instructions; the steadfast courage that maintains people in crisis; the
ability to continue to build themselves—these are necessary if people
are to rule themselves.
All attacks, all disasters, all crises are local. Though they may
threaten everyone, everywhere, they will hit in a particular place and at
a particular time. They will hit particular people. The fastest response
will come from those who are present at the site. The crisis will require
not action in the abstract but action in this place, this time, among
these people. Those who share that place know it best. They will be able
to act swiftly, where people new to the place must hesitate. They can
make judgments newcomers may not be prepared to make. They can
make those judgments quickly. It is the people, spread throughout the
country, who can respond most quickly and most decisively.
They have another invaluable quality in a crisis: they are slow to
leave. The people they rescue are their people. The place they struggle
to repair is their place. They will be steadfast when another crisis draws
away the attention of central authorities. The people, unlike a single
energetic executive, can respond to more than one crisis at a time,
act in more than one place at a time. They are faster, their reach is
further, their knowledge more intimate, and their commitment more

profound.
We cannot place our faith in the energy, intellect, judgment, or de-
cisiveness of any single person. We depend, whether we acknowledge
it or not, on the energy, intellect, judgment, and decisiveness of those
who are present. We rely on them to respond to the crisis as it happens.
We rely on them to act wisely, to maintain their composure, to be
steadfast against the forces that attack them.
Perhaps those who pull people from the wreckage are the many
hands of the sovereign people. Perhaps anarchy offers not only shade
but the freedom to act in a crisis. Perhaps they recognize their own
precarity, their own mortality in the damaged people they see before
them. Perhaps they are simply people seeing a need and acting. In
those moments they are people with the courage to rule themselves.
VIII
Force is the enemy of the free
45. Military power is a danger to democracy.
Armed force is a threat to any people. An invading army can enforce

its will and, in the course of that, kill and maim. For this reason, people
who rule themselves will need to protect themselves against armed
force and military attacks. That is not enough. They need to do more.
A look at the history of revolutions will show, all too clearly, the
hazard that military force poses to free people. Those countries that
throw off imperial rule or a despot of their own will find it hard to avoid
falling prey to military rule. Gratitude to the general who brought the
victory and fear of the former ruler often persuade people to settle for
an exchange of tyrants rather than ensuring that the people rule. Few
leaders are clear-sighted enough to see the enduring damage done
by military rule. Fewer still have the courage to trust the people they
have led and hand over power. Those who do, make demigods of their
people and themselves.
Even among people fortunate or brave enough to have avoided mil-
itary rule, the military poses a continuous threat. Rule can always be
imposed by force. The early United States tried to forestall this threat by
forbidding, in the Constitution no less, the establishment of a standing
army. The newly independent states were to rely instead on militias.
That proscription lasted less than a generation, despite its presence in
the Constitution. It has, however, proved more resilient in the princi-
ples of American soldiers.
All soldiers are taught that it is their duty to refuse an unconstitu-
tional order or one that violates the code of military conduct. A ded-
icated commitment to the teaching of ethics in the service academies
has given us officers who have the discipline that protects the demo-
cratic. They are sworn not to a person or a flag but to the Constitution.
They are sworn to the people and to the text in which the people craft
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Force is the enemy of the free 131
a constitution for themselves. No one, not a sergeant, not a general,

not the Commander in Chief, can require them to perform an uncon-
stitutional act. They have a military code of conduct which requires
them to refuse any order that violates that code. With rare exceptions,
they have recognized that they are not a sword for their leaders but a
shield for the people, and they have kept their honor. Nevertheless, the
danger remains.
There are temptations for soldiers and temptations for civilians.
Military excellence is conventionally proven in wars. Ambitious
soldiers hoping to excel may be a little too eager for conflict. Perhaps
this comes to be balanced by a more intimate sense of the costs of war,
but the lure of glory can be very great, and the criteria for promotion
more compelling still.
Civilians and military alike may be tempted by the deceptive ease
and finality of force.
Civilians may come to see the military as their servant or their sur-
rogate and avoid the responsibilities that fall on all people who rule
themselves. This is especially true where the decision to go to war is
made not by the people as a whole but by their representatives. Those
who make the decision to go to war must do so in the full knowledge
that they are sending their children and their husbands and wives. They
must make the sacrifices they ask of others. They should be willing to
go themselves.
46. Free people go to war together or not at all.
People who rule themselves cannot fight wars as others do. Under
kings and dictators, liberal or authoritarian regimes, wars are declared
by the ruler or by the government and fought by some arm of the state.
That may be a standing army, a volunteer force, a militia, or merce-
naries hired by the state. When people rule themselves, they are both
ruler and ruled. They make the decision to go to war, and they must
bear its costs. The closer they are to democracy, the more costs they
must assume. When the people rule, the people bear the costs of war.
Those costs are many.
132 Wild Democracy
It is both just and prudent for the people—all the people—to bear
the costs of war. It is just because those who make the decision to go
to war should be the ones to bear war’s burdens. That is rarely the case.
The wealthy, the privileged, the powerful rarely fight the wars they pro-
pose. Those wars are likely to serve their interests best, but they are
more likely to get certified for bone spurs than to see active duty. There
are privileged people, fortunate sons in nations who struggle toward
democracy, who fight and die for their country. More often, the deci-
sion for war is made by the more powerful, the war fought by the less
powerful. That is unjust. War should weigh upon us all.
Ensuring that all bear the burdens of war is prudent because their
virtues may lead democratic people into unjust or unwise wars. People
who love their freedom want others to have it too. People who recog-
nize that rights belong to all people, that they are held in all the bodies
of the living, will defend those rights in others. They are angry when
they see rights denied and people not permitted to rule themselves.
They see the cause is just. They are brave. They are daring and they take
risks. Those who call for military intervention may get an easy hearing.
We believe, we who long to be free, that we are not for ourselves or our
people alone, but for all people.
This has an honorable origin, but it can lead to dishonorable acts.
We believe that all people have the capacity to reason and to rule them-
selves. We believe they have the right to rule themselves as they choose.
If their rights are denied, we see that is wrong and believe that the
wrong should be fought. Why not by us? There are dangers here. Too
often we fail to fully consult the people we intervene to help. Because
we all have rights, because we all have reason, we may think we do not
need to ask if our intervention is wanted. Of course they want to be
free; of course they want their rights. We are all reasonable human
beings; we can recognize their needs. When we meet objections from
those we hope to help, we may make the mistake of thinking we know
better. We fail to recognize the limits of our knowledge; we fail to im-
pose proper limits on our will. We forget that they have the right to
decide when and how and with whom they will rebel. We forget that
they have the right to choose whom they will be and how to govern
themselves together.
The danger of setting consent aside is where the perils of a generous

arrogance begin, not where they end. When people think they fight to
secure the rights and the freedom of others and find the others less than
receptive to their generosity, they may not immediately recognize their
mistake. After all, those people are oppressed. They may be resisting
aid because they are not free to join and support those who want to
fight for them. They may be resisting because they are deluded, still
bound by religious or political ideas that prevent them from seeing or
choosing freely. The more they resist, the more their resistance may be
read as evidence of their oppression. The vehemence of their rejection
becomes evidence of their need. This form of justification for wars and
military interventions became commonplace—and widely accepted—
in the latter part of the twentieth century. It has caused untold harm.
There are other dangers. If the costs of war fall on others, it is easier
to call for war. If the costs of war fall unevenly or on the few, it is easier
to call for war, easier to use an army of volunteers or those mercenaries
some dishonestly call “security contractors.” This is neither honorable
nor decent. If you are not willing to bear the costs of war on your body
and the bodies of those you love, you cannot ask others to bear them
for you. There are times when it is honorable to say “I will die with you
in this cause,” but it is never honorable, never even decent, to ask an-
other to die for you. It is indecent to ask another to die in a cause you
choose while you stay safe at home. This applies to women as it does to
men, to the old as well as to the young. Where people are free, all bear
the burdens of war, all place their bodies at risk.
When the American colonies declared their independence and the
British sent an army to deprive them of it, people came from France
and Poland, from the German states and Britain itself to fight with
them. They believed, as we do, “that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” and
that when those rights are denied, the people have the right to make
a new government for themselves. After independence was secured,
Americans went out into the world: to France with Paine and Lafayette,
to Poland, and to Greece to fight with others in their own struggles to
rule themselves. This practice began at the beginning of the republic
and continued well into the twentieth century. The Lafayette Escadrille
134 Wild Democracy
fought with the French in the First World War, before the United States
joined in the alliance. The Lincoln Brigade fought with the Republicans
against fascism in Spain. They acted honorably.
Those who think that their people, their state, their army, or some
mercenaries hired for the purpose should fight in a foreign country
should think again. They cannot justly ask others to fight for them. If
they think the cause is worth a death, they should offer theirs.
47. Private weapons are offensive to free people.
In undemocratic states, power is secured primarily by force. Secret

police who kill in the night, show trials and public executions are the
marks of totalitarian regimes. Tyrants rule by violence and the threat of
violence. Imperial powers conquer, subdue, and occupy.
Within a democratic country, armed people can claim a similar ty-
rannical power. They can kill and maim many people with little effort.
In doing so, they not only do great physical harm, they have set aside
any pretense to equality and any regard for the freedom, rights, and
well-being of others. Armed people easily fall prey to this temptation
to power. They exercise it not only when they fire the gun or toss the
grenade. They exercise it when they carry a gun openly. Carrying the
gun is a claim to absolute power over the lives of others.
There is a powerful case for arguing that the people should be
given the means to resist their government. Liberal resistance to the
right of revolution indicates how much they value order, how dismis-
sive of freedom they can be. Those who claim to defend this right in
the United States point to the Second Amendment. Most scholars of
constitutional law favor the view that this amendment aims solely at
the maintenance of “a well-regulated militia.” Many defenders of gun
rights argue for the right to defend oneself or, in good liberal terms,
one’s property. Sanford Levinson has made a more historically and
politically powerful argument: that the amendment was, in the strict
sense, revolutionary. The Second Amendment, he argued, was an “in-
surrectionist” amendment. It had little to do with the militia, and less
to do with self-defense. The amendment aimed at preserving not only
the right but the ability to make a revolution.1
When the Constitution was debated, written, and ratified, the

Revolution belonged not to historical memory but to experience. “The
framers and the founders” knew, none better, that they did not agree
with one another about the shape of the state to come. They knew that
any government might decay into tyranny. They had the courage to
place a defense of rebellion and revolution into a document meant
to forestall these. Neither Levinson nor I, however, sees the Second
Amendment as providing a defense for the “gun rights” advocates and
self-proclaimed militia men of the early twenty-first century. They are
not acting as free people: they are acting as dictators. Their aim is not to
rebel against tyranny, their aim is to install their own.
Nor is the possession of a gun (or an armory of guns) adequate
for revolution. There was a time when the possession of a rifle or two
offered security against the possibility of a tyrannical government.
Those times are gone. States possess more sophisticated weaponry.
States possess more weaponry altogether. More importantly, success
at repression, like success at war, depends more on technologies of sur-
veillance and control than it does on weaponry. Effective resistance to
state repression requires more and less than weaponry. It requires the
right and the ability to evade surveillance and access to the internet
outside the control of the state. It requires (as it always has) food and
shelter and the provision of other basic needs.
We have reason to doubt not only the tactics but the strategies and
motives of those who form militias or assemble arsenals. These are
rarely about defending their liberties. They are about diminishing ours.
People who claim the right to automatic, semi-automatic, and as-
sault weapons, who stockpile rifles, hand guns, grenades, and other
elements of a private arsenal argue that they need these for their own
protection, either against their fellow citizens or against the govern-
ment. They mark themselves as enemies of their fellow citizens. They
show themselves willing to do as tyrants do. They have disdained all
forms of discussion or debate with those they target. They refuse to
submit to any will but their own, and they insist on imposing their will
by force on all others.
Private arms are authoritarian in their intentions and effects. They
are intended—and used—to intimidate others, to provoke fear, to give
dominant power to those who arm themselves. In acquiring these
136 Wild Democracy
weapons, people who arm themselves give clear evidence of their

willingness to use violence against their own people. They have given
themselves not the means to rebel but the means to impose their will
on others.
These weapons do little or nothing to preserve the right of revo-
lution or to ensure that people have access to it. The right to revolu-
tion is inalienable. The technology of revolution has changed. Make
computers and computing universal; enable people to prevent surveil-
lance; remove the internet from the control of private individuals and
the state and make it a commons: you will do more to defend the right
to revolution than any gun can do.
Those who insist that they need guns “for their own protection”
do the same on a smaller scale. They don’t want protection; they want
special privileges. They want the power to kill if they choose. It is not
surprising that we find these weapons used not for revolution but for
murders motivated by private aims and pathologies. In every debate,
in any quarrel, faced with any shame, armed people want to feel, nes-
tled in a pocket or a purse, the weight of a weapon that will settle any
question. They let the people around them know they carry a weapon,
relying on the presence of the gun to make others defer to them. The
members of Congress who refuse to give up their weapons or walk
through metal detectors are not afraid of insurrectionists: they sided
with the insurrectionists. They want their colleagues to know they
are armed.
Those private citizens who live in suburbs or gated communities
and insist on having a weapon betray their fear. They are not afraid of
the state. They are afraid of their neighbors. Make no mistake: those
guns are aimed at us. These people lack the courage of those who walk
through the world unarmed and unafraid. They are not brave enough
to be free.
48. Punishment demeans the free.
Simone Weil writes, “There is nothing so marvellous as a punish-

ment.”2 Nothing could be more hostile to the free. Punishment—just
punishment—demeans both those who punish and those who are
punished. Unjust punishment is a shame too great to mention. Those

who are justly punished bear their shame with their punishment; they
have demeaned themselves. Those who punish are demeaned by their
failure. They acknowledge that they live among those who do wrong
and they could not prevent it. They are obliged to do what they can
to remedy that wrong. Punishment should be superfluous. The greater
people are, the more decent their common life, the lighter their
punishments will be.
Weil believes that punishment is “marvellous” because “[w]‌hen
a human being has, by committing a crime, placed himself outside
the current of Good, his true punishment consists in his reintegra-
tion into the plenitude of that current by means of suffering.” In this
passage, Weil ignores the difference between crime and wrongdoing.
There have been—there are—many good and honorable acts charged
as crimes. These do not place human beings outside “the Good.” Weil’s
capitalization suggests that she speaks, as she acknowledges, of the di-
vine. Yet she too easily elides the distinction between law and justice,
between the state and the good.
Weil believes in an obedience so profound that one must see “the
perfection of inert matter as the perfection of obedience.”3 Perhaps
obedience, especially the mindless obedience of the inert, is not the
fulfillment of a divine will. Perhaps we are called not to reduce our-
selves to inert matter but to raise inert matter. If this is so, labor need
not be a form of suffering and divine punishment but a repetition of
epiphanies, small manifestations of the divine.
Weil seeks “the radiance of this perfect Obedience.” I think it un-
likely that free people will find themselves—or the divine—in that.
Whether they do or not, they will be diminished when they punish, for
in punishing they require an obedience that is compelled by force, and
force is a tool that rarely serves the free.
49. Free people are not policed.

IX
Unfinished revolutions
50. We are not democrats yet. We do not yet rule

ourselves.
There are places, many places, where people struggle to rule them-
selves. They elect representatives, propose and vote on referenda. They
hold town meetings. They make the case, among the people, for the
right of people to rule themselves. They march. They protest injustice.
They go to the streets. They resist coups. They fire revolutions. They
write constitutions. They make laws. They design institutions. They
experiment with governing. They attempt to forestall the efforts of
autocrats to take power, aristocrats and the wealthy to retain it. They
endure defeats, time after time. They win victories, small and large, and
as they do, they build the foundations for democracy. They clear away
a few more obstacles; they widen the space for the democratic. They
approach democracy, but they are not democrats yet.
There are times and places where people rule themselves. There
are countries where the people can claim that their government is
one they chose, one they choose in the present, that they make their
own laws. There are countries where people have become accustomed
to judging: where they turn their demanding gaze on the conduct of
officials, of the press, and of the laws themselves. These places can
be found on every continent. They are clustered in Scandinavia and
the Antipodes, but they can also be found in Africa, Asia, and the
Americas. Yet all of these places are, at best, imperfect democracies. In
no place are the people free to rule as they choose, unhindered by the
power of wealth and the fears of elites.
As Jacques Rancière writes, “We do not live in democracies.”
We live in states of oligarchic law, in other words, in states where the

power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular
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Unfinished revolutions 139
sovereignty and individual liberties. We know the advantages of

these states as well as their limitations.1
In a few places—no longer in America—people know there will not

be tanks in the street the morning after an election. We know if we are
taken to jail, we can call a lawyer. We know our rights and know that
they are held within bounds. This cannot be enough for us.
51. Self-rule is a discipline.
The rule of the people is not limited to revolutions, to the moment

of contract (mythic or actual), or to those fugitive moments when a
people act as one to alter their common course. The rule of the people
belongs to the ordinary, to the everyday governance of common
matters. Nations and peoples are shaped by the slow working of the
people. The evolution of customs, the accretion of conventions comes
like a coral reef, from the many who build. These are made from the re-
peated actions of many people, acting together even as they act alone.
That will happen in a kingdom or a democracy, where people rule and
where they are oppressed, where they know their power and where it is
hidden from them.
Change comes differently when people know their power. Those
who rule themselves come to recognize that they rule in all times and
places. They are called upon not only to make the law but to obey it.
For many liberals (as well as authoritarians), obedience to the rule of
law has primacy. Those who believe that the people rule recognize that
the people are also required to judge the law. They are called on, every
day, in the ordinary course of their lives, to decide if an offense against
the law is serious or trivial, if enforcing the law would be just, officious,
or brutal. They decide whether to obey or disobey. They enforce order,
and they dispense mercy, often without recognizing that they hold
this power.
The rule of the people is not only, not primarily, a matter of citi-
zenship, of governments, laws, and institutions. The rule of the people
is the governance of the streets and the land, of one another and of
themselves. People who are capable of ruling and being ruled must
140 Wild Democracy
have discipline and self-control. People who are willing to take on the
hazards of self-rule must have the courage and the strength to take risks
and see them through. Those who have the discipline to rule them-
selves have the strength to refuse to be ruled. Those who live among
the free and the self-ruled are free to refuse to rule.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who devoted himself to the proj
ect of self-rule in every sense, taught that the overcoming of foreign
rule depended on the capacity to rule oneself. If Indians were to end
British imperial rule, they had to first win through to self-control.
Gandhi knew the power of small things. He thought people who
were to rule themselves needed to prize their independence if they
were to win it. They would need to be self-sufficient. He taught his
people to make their own salt, to spin and weave their own cloth, to
grow their own food, to clean their own latrines, and to live simply.
They needed to be able to face the enemy with courage—whether that
enemy was the British Empire, someone of another faith or caste, or the
wolf in themselves. He taught them to face violence without flinching.
The core of satyagraha is not only the refusal to use violence but
the willingness to endure it. Those who practice satyagraha hold stub-
bornly to the truth. They do not give in when faced with violence.
Gandhi’s satyagraha could be achieved only by the courageous and the
steadfast. It depended on people willing to face their enemies—and the
violence of their enemies—without fear.
The idea that the people are creatures of passionate appetite, like
animals in their desires and appetites, driven by all the passions from
greed to revenge, should have fallen away long ago. It is not the people
who are driven by their passions and their appetites; it is the privileged.
The wealthy rule because they can. They have means denied to
others. They need to learn little about rule because their power depends
on force and bribery rather than politics. They can give positions to
their friends and punish their enemies. They can practice nepotism.
They can establish dynasties. They do. They can use their positions to
capture funds from the public purse. They can reward those whose
wealth and privilege support their own. They do. They can indulge
their appetites, protect their reputations by bribery, by suppression of
investigations, by financial control of the media. They do.
Gandhi schooled himself and his people in poverty because pov-

erty teaches self-rule. The rich can eat what they please, when they
please. The poor deny themselves so they can feed their children. The
rich can buy what they please, when they please. They can replace the
lost and the broken. They can waste things. If they do, they will not
be harmed. The poor must ration and share. They learn to discipline
their appetites. They must consider every purchase, weigh the price,
and measure every need. If they waste, they suffer for it.
Poverty is not the only teacher of self-rule. Religions have relied
on fasting and prayer, on the demands of ritual, on the demand for
adherence to text and law. Too often they rely on fear and the desire
for dominion, but at their best, they aim toward ethics and blessing.
Learning, sports, and all the arts require discipline. Here, discipline
is rewarded with pleasure. At their best, these practices of discipline,
great and small, hand their lives to the living. This is what Foucault and
the Greeks called askesis, or, in Nietzsche’s words, how one becomes
what one is.
52. We are not yet finished with revolution.
There is a passage in the Qu’ran where Muhammad is reminded that

over and over again prophets have called the people to pray and give
to the poor. So it has been with justice. Over and over again, people
demand freedom and equality, the right to rule themselves, and live as
they choose, yet they remain chained. Many of the wrongs we believe
we have defeated haunt us in other forms.
The West, in the Old World and the New, is haunted by the feudal.
Feudalism seems, for most of us, to belong to another time, to other
places. Historians insist that feudalism describes a specific period and
set of governing social and political arrangements. They debate the
chronology and contours of the feudal. In popular culture, Hallmark
movies, and the quotidian, feudalism persists as a romantic imaginary,
the politics of fairy tales and Disney princesses. For some it is a lost
past of faith and chivalry, its cruelties softened by time. The present
has inherited cathedrals and castles, illuminated manuscripts, icons,
142 Wild Democracy
carved statues and altarpieces, Gregorian chants and a host of other

artifacts of great beauty.
These imaginaries fix the feudal as “once upon time” in a past that
has already been overcome. What does it matter if states keep their
monarchs and their aristocracies, if a few people remain who are called
by archaic titles? They have become mere ornaments and artifacts.
Feudalism is still more alien to Africa and Asia, where the claims
of inherited power go by other names. Many scholars, Alexis de
Tocqueville and Louis Hartz among them, have argued that America
has never known feudalism. They are wrong.
The historian Kathleen Davis points out that the term “feudalism,”
or (in this early use) féodalité, emerged at the moment when French
revolutionaries believed they had put an end to it.2
Perhaps feudalism has been broken, but if so, we still walk among its
shards. Perhaps it began and ended in Europe. Yet the breaking of that
system was not an ending but an explosion that spread its structures
like shrapnel. Feudalism survives. Those whose titles seem nothing
more than empty and archaic survivals still command the power of
wealth. More important, feudalism survives not in some lord or comte,
graf, or contessa but in structures of law and right and in an altered
form of power in the blood.
In the United Kingdom, feudalism has survived the transition from
kingdom to constitutional monarchy, country to empire, feudal agri-
culture to industrial capitalism. The feudal presence can be read on the
surface in the survival of titles, the monarchy, and the House of Lords.
The survivals are less obvious in those former colonies with avowed
commitments to equality, especially Australia, Canada, and the United
States. They are, however, present and powerful. They were written
into law.
Karen Orren, in her brilliant work, Belated Feudalism, observes
that the United States contains, “at the core, a belated feudalism, a
remnant of the medieval hierarchy of personal relations, a particu-
larized network of law and morality—a system of governance—that
the word ‘feudalism’ conveys.”3 The new United States and, later,
Commonwealth nations ruling themselves incorporated great swathes
of the feudal order into avowedly republican legal systems.4 Labor law
in those colonies that imported British common law, remained based
on the law of master and servant, and kept the hierarchies character-
istic of the feudal system. The laws that governed—that still govern—
factories, shops, corporations, understood employees to be servants.
They are not, as we so often assume, people who have signed a contract
to work in a certain place for certain wages. They are servants in the
ancient eyes of the law.
There is nothing antique about this. This is law in the present.
Law and the practices of the workplace enable employers to silence
workers. They are not permitted to speak as they please at work, even
about politics. To our shame, we take that for granted. The silencing of
workers does not stop there. They can be asked, coerced, or forced to
sign nondisclosure agreements. This is a violation of the right of people
to speak freely. There is nothing about work that can set the rights of
the people aside. They cannot be silenced. As we bring our bodies to
work, so do we bring our rights. They are inalienable. They cannot be
separated from us.
The denial of natural rights in the workplace is indefensible. Where
the body is, there rights are. While these rights are denied, people do
not rule themselves. While these rights are denied, no one who works
is free, and democracy is fenced out of the times and spaces of work.
While there are bosses, there are masters. We do not yet rule ourselves.
There are other, more intimate, and perhaps more devastating
inscriptions of feudalism that remain with us. They have taken root at
the sites we are accustomed to seeing as most our own: our bodies, our
racial and sexual identities.
Feudal titles were inscribed in blood and law. The text of entitlement
was written in blood.5 The nobility held title by descent, in the blood
of their ancestors, that most intimate inscription. The expectation of
deference shaped their bodies to the form and habitus of entitlement.
Sumptuary laws made those claims more visible, more legible, even at
a distance.
Power in the body did not pass away; it merely changed its form.
The authority written in the blood and worn on the body was more
economically inscribed on the body itself. The stigmata of race and sex
marked a new form of power in the blood, a new title to dominion in
the body. The title to command was no longer “I am your lord” but “I
am white,” “I am a man.”
144 Wild Democracy
Racial and sexual hierarchies function as those of the feudal estates

once did: as categories outside of and prior to law and politics. Status
was given. Status was inscribed on the bodies of those who ruled and
those who were ruled. One was born a lord or a serf. Race and the
status that went with it were written in the blood.6
These enduring structures of dominion inscribe themselves on our
bodies and in our conceptions of who and what we are. The persistence
of elements of feudal law in the maintenance of sexual hierarchies is
familiar indeed: confinement in the household, limits on the holding
of property, the licensing of male violence against women, and unhin-
dered male access to the bodies of women in the legal possession of
men. It is noteworthy that all of these apply to servants and slaves as
well; that is to say, all these can be regarded collectively as encompassed
within domestic—familiar—forms of enslavement.
Racial and sexual hierarchies function as those of the feudal es-
tates once did: as categories outside of and prior to law and politics.
Status was given. Status was inscribed on the bodies of those who ruled
and those who were ruled. Race, and the status that went with it, were
written in the blood.
The invention of race was accompanied by the insistence that
differences in race were given and biological: the work of nature, or
of Nature’s God. Race was the work of nature, not of human beings.
No one could be held responsible for these hierarchies. No one could
question them. Because racial categories—and hierarchies—were bio-
logical, no one was at fault. Because they were given, responsibility was
occluded. No one could be charged with the creation of hierarchies that
were seen to be the work of God or nature. Perhaps they were divinely
ordained. Perhaps they were the work of an impersonal nature. Claims
of racial superiority and a right to rule were not political claims but
affirmations of the sacred or the work of an objective science. Race was
placed outside politics and beyond political debate. Responsibility for
claims of racial superiority was evaded and the role of the state elided.7
The feudal order haunts the West in the all-too-present, all-too-
material forms of race and sex, in the bodies we inhabit and the work
we do. The West is not alone in this. Every continent has its followers
of Iblis, who claim that they are worth more than other people. From
a distance, the sheikhs and mansas, maharajahs and obas look as
decorative and harmless as European aristocrats. Yet here too, in caste

and class and other hierarchies written on the body, people make the
claim to power in the blood. Here too some command the work of
others. Here too the few silence the many.
Before we can become free people, we must finish the work other
revolutions began. We must put an end to all that licenses claims to
power in the blood, to the rights of the few against the many, to the
claims that some lives are worth more than others.
53. Democracy is not an idyllic state; democracy is a

struggle.
Max Weber called politics “strong and slow boring of hard boards.”8
Politics is hard labor, but democracy is harder yet. I do not expect to
see the rule of the people accomplished in my time, but I hope to see
the work advance. In that work, I may catch sight of the greater work
to come.
There is no country in my time that can truly claim that the people
rule. In my country we have prisoners to free, prisons to close. We have
people to teach. We have wars to end. There are houses to save, people
to heal. There are reparations to be made. We must work until “justice
rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Our
house is not yet finished. Our work lies long before us, but it is work
we can do.
Americans usually understand our history in one of two ways.
First there is the history some read in John Locke and Alexis de
Tocqueville: Americans are born to freedom, born equal. In this his-
tory, God or a benign history gives freedom to us as a gift. This is
not true.
In the second history, America is on a road toward freedom. In this
history, democracy gradually overcomes obstacles. Freedom is con-
tinually expanding. Working men get the vote, the slaves are freed,
women get the vote, antisemitism and the old prejudices against
Catholics are overcome, and African Americans move steadily toward
equality and inclusion. This is Langston Hughes’s history, a history of
“promises that will come true”:
146 Wild Democracy
The plan and pattern is here,

Woven from the beginning,
Into the warp and woof of America.9
This is the history that won my heart as well, but I no longer believe it
to be true.
There is a third history, harder and less triumphal. In this history,
the American struggle for freedom is not a history of constant prog-
ress. In this understanding, freedom wars against the desire for do-
minion generation after generation. There is no certainty of victory.
In this history, people are not born to a predestined triumph. We are
born to struggle, to the long “slow boring of hard boards.” The rule of
the people, the achievement of justice, the protection of equality, the
preservation of the ungoverned and the ungovernable require constant
and unceasing work.
This history asks more of us and promises less. This history calls
people to take up the burden of past wrongs.
Tzvetan Todorov, writing of the early colonization of what would
become the United States of America, dedicated it to the memory of
“a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.”10 This moment of colonial cru-
elty stands for many more. People who have thrown off empire and
made themselves anew often believe that in that revolution they have
freed themselves from the sins of their past. Perhaps they will find,
like us, that they are still haunted and burdened, still facing the work
of overcoming that past. Cruelty may live in them, even against their
will. This is the history, not of America perhaps, but of American em-
pire. This is the history of the crowded holds of the Middle Passage,
of slave trading and the Klan, of the plantation and the overseer. This
is the history of conquest: of the decimation and confinement of the
First Nations, the Trail of Tears and the emergence of the reservation
system, of immigration restriction and border vigilantes, of raids on
undocumented workers and the imprisonment of children. This is the
history of the prison system. This history records Japanese internment,
the Cold War, Hiroshima and My Lai, McCarthyism, Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo, torture, and a culture of surveillance. In this history, im-
prisonment follows in the footsteps of empire. In this history, greed
makes use of violence. This is the history of Haymarket and the Tulsa
Race Massacre. This history testifies against an easy, natural alliance

between capitalism and democracy.
Forgetting these histories is neither just nor easily done. Yet there
are dangers in recalling them. In remembering this darker history, we
fall too easily into seeing a conflict of convictions in which good wars
against evil and that the enemies of the democratic remain constant.
That is not true. On the contrary, the enemies of democracy in one his-
torical moment may be its friends in another.
Consider the idea of “states’ rights” in the United States. It was asso-
ciated, for about a hundred years, with the preservation of slavery and
with white supremacy. Yet in the early years after the Revolution, states’
rights were more often associated with preserving freedom rather than
taking it away. In those early years, many of the states recognized more
rights than the federal government did, and an insistence on states’
rights helped, ultimately, to expand these rights to all citizens. In the
late twentieth century, it was the states that first recognized the rights
of gay people to live freely and to marry. At the opening of the twenty-
first century, it was the states that sought to combat climate change,
to stand fast against federal agencies and a president captured by the
wealthy, the irresponsible, and the ignorant.
Another danger of this dark history is that we forget the moments
of triumph. Imperial power has been accompanied in our time by the
steady (if uneven) overcoming of racial discrimination. When I was
young, there were many signs of the inequality of Black and white.
People used racial slurs openly in the North and West where I lived.
I remember Civil Rights marchers at Selma and Birmingham, Chicago
and Los Angeles. I remember the fire hoses. I remember the dogs.
Those who watched the Civil Rights movement cannot forget
those dogs. We saw them made weapons against African American
marchers. We saw photographs in the newspapers that froze the snarl
of the dogs and enabled us to count every tooth. We saw the forward
lunge of the leashed dog on television. We saw the marchers thrust
back as sharply as they had been by the fire hoses. We saw the uni-
formed man that held the dog and urged it forward. The television
captured the sound and movement of the march and the attack. The
images circulated. This memory persuades some that a history of such
evil cannot be overcome, that this is what their nation and their people
148 Wild Democracy
are. This is what we have been. This is part of what we are. We are called
to bear that.
But this is not what we belong to. This is not what we will be. We
who watched were changed by that time. We saw the strength and
courage of the marchers. As we watched, we learned something about
justice and the rights of man. No one who saw this, who saw Emmett
Till’s mother beside his ruined body, who watched the marchers
cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, can fail to remember that greatness
of soul.
There is a passage in the Republic where Plato takes up the question
of the just man. How would one know the just man? Plato proceeds
to treat the just man like Job: “he shall be stripped of everything save
justice,” and in that naked deprivation the reader is to see what jus-
tice is. Antonio Negri saw the labor of Job in his prison cell. We saw
it in the photographs from Mississippi and Alabama. The marchers,
stripped of the protections of the state, held their rights still. They be-
came rights and right incarnate, and the rights they stood for stood or
fell with them.
Americans once found their soul in those who affirmed, “We shall
overcome, someday.” The Civil Rights marchers kept open the possi-
bility of an America that is not yet. They reminded us of the meaning of
the words “We hold these truths to be self evident.” They held out to us
the possibility that we could be greater than we had been, greater than
the founders imagined, far greater than we are.
The slaves, longing for freedom, gave us a greater dream of freedom
than did the founders. The Civil Rights marchers—disenfranchised,
impoverished, brave—recalled us to that dream. I lived to see my city
dance in the streets at the election of a Black president. I lived to see
white supremacy rise up again. I lived to march with my people in the
city of brotherly love, affirming once again that Black lives matter and
that all men are created equal.
Knowing that tragic and disheartening events occur in every age, in
every time, among every people, we must reject the idea that democ-
racy progresses inevitably toward freedom. The work is not done. The
memory of hardship and shame dedicates us to the cause. Memory of
the triumphs enables us to keep our hands on the plow.
54. Democracy is fugitive.
Many of those who have taught me, and those with whom I have
worked, have followed Sheldon Wolin in seeing a fugitive democ-
racy. They see democracy in those moments, great and rare, when
the people rise up and see themselves as a people: living and acting
together in the present. I see democracy growing in the crevices of the
everyday, yet I still turn to those moments. Those who have experi-
enced revolutions often write of feeling that they had been born again,
or that they were creating a novus ordo saeculorum, a new world order.
Perhaps these fleeting moments were moments of madness, perhaps
they were moments of wisdom, but whatever they were, they were
filled with a fragile joy that could not last.
These moments of democracy are fugitive, evanescent. They are
also generative and transcendent. In these moments, people recog-
nize themselves as a people. They see their fellow people as their own.
They see something beyond themselves, and they reach for it together.
For a moment, an idea is made flesh in them. That ecstatic recognition
does not remain in its immediacy or in its fullness, but the experience
of transcendence alters them. What they see, what they learn in those
moments sets them on a course to the future. This is how one becomes
what one is.
In the time since Wolin wrote, the idea of a fugitive democracy has
been deepened by the work of Black scholars and theorists. They heard
the echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in the idea of fugitive democracy.
Surely democracy is fugitive when a government forces free people
back into slavery, when the law aligns itself with wealth against rights.
Surely democracy lives among those in flight.
Fugitive democracy is not, however, quite as fugitive as it appears.
These moments of fugitive joy shape a people, shape people, fill their
minds and fire their hopes. The practices they develop in those times
can shape their laws and institutions. The strength they hone then will
make them democrats.
Perhaps free people are always fugitive, running to ungoverned, un-
governable spaces. Perhaps democracy does fly to anarchy. Perhaps it
should.
X
Canon fodder
55. Forget Athens. Forget democratic genealogies.
Democracy is said to have a clear and confirmed genealogy. This is

puzzling for a form of life that has had so little presence in the world.
Nevertheless, students are confidently told, year after year, that democ-
racy began in Greece, among the Athenians. It is from the Greeks that
democracy takes its name, and in Greek history that it is said to find its
limits.
If Athens gave us democracy with one hand, it has taken it away with
the other.
Athenian democracy was a political practice bounded on every side.
Only Athenians could vote, hold office, and decide the fate of those
brought before the people for judgment. One could live a lifetime in
Athens as a foreigner. Those people, however fully they were bound in
the life of the city, however well they served, remained outside its poli-
tics. Athens was a slave society, supported by the labor of the enslaved.
Politics, as Aristotle observed, required leisure, and slaves had no
leisure. Their time, like their bodies, belonged to their masters. The
women of Athens, though they grew up in the same land, shared the
same ancestry, spoke the same language as their brothers, husbands,
and fathers, were also fenced out of politics. Politics, Aristotle argued,
was necessary to make one fully human. Women, slaves, foreigners,
and immigrants were not free, not wholly Athenian, not judges or
lawmakers, and therefore not fully human. They had no place in dem-
ocratic practice. They had no share in democratic power.
The demos was thus small, smaller by far than Athens. It was also
tribal. There are tribes who embrace foreigners, taking them in,
making them their own. Many of the indigenous tribes of North
America made themselves greater in this way. The tribes of Ghana, a
proud Ghanaian told me, take immigrants of every race as their own.1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0010
Canon fodder 151
The Athenians did not. Their demos, divided into tribes, remained
closed to immigrants. They deferred to divisions of descent and family,
acknowledging their constitutive importance and retaining them as an
ordering principle.2
The memory of democratic Athens was, for much if not all of the
West, filtered through the vivid and varied imagination of the impe-
rial British. Athens proved democracy too wild, too demanding. There
were those like Bryon and Shelley who saw something of the demo-
cratic promise beyond the limits of Athens, but they died young. British
democrats fought for Greek independence, but British diplomats
would saddle Greece with an imported king and, worse, with the king’s
debts. The British, and those they educated, would not remember bur-
dening Greece with the expense of their newly installed Bavarian king
or debts to their imperial rulers. Athenian decline had proved the ne-
cessity of Roman order and Roman militarism. The British Empire saw
the need for a monarch. Athens was a rich inheritance, but a metal too
soft for tools or swords. As they hived off the friezes of the Parthenon
and carried them away as plunder, so the British would lay claim to
Athenian democracy only to enlist it in the service of aristocracy and
empire.
Athens was used thereafter to prove that democracy was a Western
inheritance. If democracy began in Athens, then it was Western and
all other peoples had it only as the gift of the West. Athens was not the
wellspring of democracy; it marked democracy’s limits. The Athenian
origin of democracy was also used to prove its fragility. If Athens, the
home of democracy, could not hold it, how could others?
Democracy has been haunted by this Athenian legacy. Democracies
must be small, because Athens was; ethnically homogeneous, be-
cause Athens was. Democracies could have slaves, because Athens
did. Democracies could not include foreigners or immigrants or those
whose ancestry was mixed or uncertain, because Athens didn’t. The
myth of Athenian democracy made the inclusion of women appear
unnecessary, perhaps absurd. That legacy has lasted into the present
and in areas where reason alone ought to have excluded it. Political
scientists enamored of taxonomies and other so-called scholars of
democracy act as if the exclusion of women from voting was, if not
natural, inevitable, and dismiss the late inclusion of women as a small
152 Wild Democracy
imperfection in otherwise admirable democracies. Athens excluded

women, after all, and Athens was a democracy.
Remember Athens and forget democracy, because Athens proved
that democracies cannot last.
Forget Athens; there are other pasts. The American revolutionaries
looked to the English country party republicans and to the troops who
sat down on the field at Putney to decide how they were to rule them-
selves. They looked to the Dutch republicans and the brief experiment
of the Poles. They looked to the practices of the Haudenosaunee, the
Iroquois Confederacy, and other tribes on the American continent. So
too do David Graeber and David Wengrow, who show the impact of
the thought and practice of the indigenous on their colonizers.3 We
can look elsewhere as well. Massimiliano Tomba has written on the
practices of people ruling themselves. He looks to the French com-
mune and the Zapatistas, to the Russian mir and the Mexican ejido.4
There is no shortage of places where people work to rule themselves.
Set the practices of the Vikings against those of the Athenians. This,
like the old uses of Athens, has an element of hope and fable in it. The
things and althings of the Viking-era Norse were open to all free people,
men and women. The things and althings were simply assemblies of the
people. Each person, man and woman alike, had a vote, and all votes
were equal. There were no distinctions of wealth or status in the polit-
ical power of the citizens. There were no distinctions of race (which
did not yet exist) or ethnicity. There were law readers at the Icelandic
althing. These people recited the entirety of the law over a pe-
riod of three years. The law was made and judgment given by the
people assembled. This is not, as the British and even contemporary
Icelanders like to claim, “the world’s first parliament.” The althing was
not a parliament at all, except, perhaps, in the old sense of the French
word parlement, a place of speaking. The althing was an assembly of the
people, without hierarchy, without representation. The Icelanders have
a greater history than they know.
This Viking past is an origin story without the haunting memory of
tribes. This is democracy untroubled by the inclusion of women, those
said to be foreign, or those of mixed blood. This is a better past, a better
memory for democrats. It belongs, too, to people whose lives taught
them courage and drove them outward. The Vikings sailed off not sure
Canon fodder 153
of where they would arrive. They developed techniques of navigation,

and they dared to go beyond their reach. They ventured constantly into
the unknown, as all people who rule themselves must venture. Though
we are usually on land, we democrats, we are always at sea, rarely in the
same place, always traveling, often sailing into uncharted waters.
I once asked a Norwegian scholar what they called democracies be-
fore they knew the Greek word “democracy.” Without hesitation she
replied, “Folkestœring.” This is conventionally understood as “popular
organization.” My ear heard “the people, steering,” and etymology con-
firmed it. Written into the word is the recognition that when we rule
ourselves, we go constantly into the unknown. Steering belongs not to
one man but to the people.
There is, however, no more need for the althing than there is for
Athens. It is heartening to learn that practices we are told are impos-
sible had a home in the past, to see customs and concepts we can use in
Africa and the Andes, but it is not necessary. People need nothing for
democracy but themselves. They need to think and speak and act to-
gether, in conflict and in common. People can take what they like from
Athens. They need no ancestral title to do it. The people can, the people
should, plunder the past like pirates. Things that the wealthy and the
privileged kept to themselves can be shared out. Things that were once
locked up can be carried to new places. Steal the best of politics, and
share it out.
There are those who will regret the lost memories of democratic
Athens. The democratic Athenians, in love with the new, never yielding
for long to tyrants, victorious over empires, shine in a dark past. If
I have taken that away from you, I offer another Athens, an Athens of
the more recent past, perhaps of the present and the future. This is an
Athens of men and women of mixed ancestry or no known ancestry at
all, an Athens big enough to include working people and the poor, an
Athens where people take to the streets to challenge wealth, privilege,
and the dictates of powers that have no democratic warrant. Better to
riot with Loukanikos than feast with Alcibiades.
Forget Athens, forget the Vikings, the Germanic tribes, the pan-
chayat, the Isle of Man, the Sumerians. We do not need any past at all.
Think instead of the Greeks resisting austerity, the people of the Levant
struggling for the democratic in the ruins of empire, the indigenous
154 Wild Democracy
defending the sacred rights of the people and the earth, of ubuntu.
Whatever the place, whenever the time, whoever the people: democ-
racy can begin there. We have all that we need in ourselves.
56. The canon of Western political philosophy was

forged against the people.
There are few—if there are any—universities or colleges throughout

the West (and well beyond it) who do not teach some version of the
Western canon of political philosophy. That canon begins with the
Greeks (in some cases with the Old Testament) and (generally leaping
over the medieval period) moves through the writings of Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, possibly Kant, probably Hegel, Marx, and
some selection of Mill, Nietzsche, or Weber. There are no women (with
the still rare exception of Wollstonecraft or Arendt), no one outside
the European heartland. There are no Scandinavians, no Spaniards,
no Greeks past the fifth century bce, no Huns or Magyars, no Eastern
Europeans, no Turks. This canon is too small for Europe. It is far, far
too small for humanity.
The canon, presented as a civilizational treasure, crowned with the
laurels of democracy, has little that is democratic in it. Scandinavia,
with its long history of popular rule, and the city states of France and
Switzerland with their republican institutions, leave no mark. Medieval
philosophy, with its many defenses of the commons, disappears under
the rubric of religion. The canon moves, as Hegel wrote of History, to
central Europe, reaching its apex in Germany. We should pause here,
in memory of the dead, to consider the full irony of a Western canon
with its heart in Germany. The rule of the people remains an ideal to
struggle for throughout the West, but Germany came late to liberal de-
mocracy, and though it is prospering now, it has had a short, hard life
there. There are a few satellite sites. France gives the canon Rousseau,
Montesquieu in some periods, Montaigne and Bodin for connoisseurs.
Italy gives us a few Romans and Machiavelli. For academics and the
cognoscenti, there is Vico, and perhaps Beccaria. The English claim
some space with Hobbes and Locke. The West of the West—the once
Canon fodder 155
colonized Americas, Australia, and New Zealand—have no presence

at all. The “Western canon” is not Western. It is not even European.
The canon leaves its defenders with two claims that are hard to rec-
oncile. The West is said to be the creator or inventor of democracy.
Whether it begins in Athens (as is generally taught) or among the
Germanic tribes, democracy belongs to the West. The Western canon
of political philosophy is said to be the wellspring of critical thinking
and (for the most arrogant) the source of the West’s intellectual pre-
eminence. Yet there is no full-throated defense of democracy in the
canon. For virtually all the canonical thinkers, democracy is a danger
and an absurdity. For the most liberal, the people are nothing but a
problem to be managed.
Too many of those we count among the canonical were simply in
the service of tyrants. Plato served the Tyrant of Syracuse. Aristotle
served Alexander. Machiavelli served the Medici. Locke and Hobbes
tutored the children and enjoyed (or bore with) the patronage of the
rich. Over time, the patronage of kings and aristocrats gave way to
professional employment. Hegel and Nietzsche worked as professors,
Freud as a doctor, Marx as a journalist. Here, too, the need for food and
shelter and the limits imposed by newspaper editors, deans, and other
administrators (not to mention university donors, the patrons of our
age) have limited what one can and cannot say in defense of the right of
people to rule themselves.
Those philosophers seen as the sources of liberalism—Hobbes and
Locke, for example—regard the rule of the people not an ideal but as a
danger to be avoided. Hobbes opens the gate to the rule of the people
but closes it as quickly as he can. There is no surer grounding for a gov-
ernment than the consent of the people. Yet for Hobbes the right to
consent to one’s government lapses with the imposition of order. The
sovereignty of the people belongs to one people alone, in one moment,
for one act only. Only the dissolution of order can call their sovereignty
forth again.
Locke establishes the right of the people to rebel against rulers who
infringe on their natural rights or who violate the law of nature. He
raised the question “Who shall judge?” when rebellion is justified, and
answered, “The People shall Judge,” yet he too feared the people.5 The
156 Wild Democracy
desire of the people to rebel against tyranny, to consent to rule imposed

upon them is admirable and it is just, but it is also a problem to be
solved, a danger to be managed.
Marx, whose work transformed both scholarship and rebellion,
praised the transformative effects of imperialism.
This is no democratic canon. These are not the writings of our eman-
cipatory ancestors. These are the writings of our enemies.
There are resources for democrats in the interstices of the canon.
Those who long to see the people rule can hunt them down and bring
them forward There is always something lawless and transgres-
sive about this. We seize on Machiavelli’s messages to the people like
slaves passing notes of a possible escape route from one to another.
We plunder Hobbes and Locke like Diné raiders. Hobbes gives us
the Leviathan. We stop at the moment he says the people choose to
place themselves under a government and that they make a contract
or covenant to secure their own welfare. Locke gives us money. We
refuse it. We stop at his description of the commons, where all can take
what they need if they leave “enough and as good for others.”6 Marx is
redeemed in the service of anticolonial revolution. There are defenses
of the democratic to be found in the canon, but they are accessible only
to pirates, raiders, the disobedient, and the irreverent.
I was educated in the canon and have worked in and upon it the en-
tirety of my working life. The more I have read, the more I have come
to see its virtues and its inadequacies. There is great thought here, and
I will feed off it until I die, yet its claims are too large and its reach too
small. The claims of the canon to offer the thought of political philos-
ophy as a whole, or—more modestly—Western political philosophy,
are too large for the small number of books and figures that even a gen-
erous counting of the canonical would offer. There is far too much in
the canon that serves tyranny and imperialism. The canon is confined
like a prisoner in so small a space that those within it are unable to
speak to others. Their ties to other places, to other currents of thought
are broken. They become civilizational thinkers, not human ones, and
they are diminished. Above all, over and over again the canon speaks
for the rich against the poor, for the powerful against the people.
Contemporary political theory is little better. Though most people in
the West would describe themselves as democrats (social or Christian),
Canon fodder 157
republicans, or liberals, there are still few to be found who do not fear
the idea that people should rule themselves. Rawls, who spoke and
wrote the common sense of many liberals, concerned himself with
just outcomes and neutral procedures. His proceduralism, like that
of Habermas, still sees the people as Aristotle saw them: vulnerable
to demagogues and tyrants, lacking the intellect or education to rule
wisely. As critics noted in the wake of A Theory of Justice, Rawls’s ac-
count assumed human beings who too closely resembled white Anglo-
European men.7 Derrida sought to still the seeking for democracy by
a double strategy. Democracy was suicidal, “auto-immune,” destroying
itself (as generation after generation of theorists and philosophers
had argued) from within. The people were dangerous. Democracy
belonged to the eveningland, the land of death, and it should be left
there in the realm of the infinitely deferred. Habermas, whose early
work showed a love for as well as an anxiety concerning democracy,
grew ever more concerned with the technical requirements of commu-
nication. Where, then, does our veneration for democracy come from?
Where are those who speak for the rule of the people?
There are at least three answers to this, and all are true. The Western
canon of democracy has resources for democrats. There is truth in
that, but it is insufficient and misleading. There is no canon of democ-
racy. There are pamphlets and manifestos, court records, poetry, and
songs that record the struggles of the people for justice. The right of the
people to rule themselves has been forged not in the texts of the wise
but in the practices of the many. That is the canon we have neglected.
We might pause to wonder what the canon would look like if we
turned to the places where democracy has prospered.
Tomba’s Insurgent Universality brings some of those forgotten
democratic practices before us. Tomba looks not at the practices of
statesmen, official documents, or the memoirs of “great men” but at
how people have ruled themselves. Russian villagers adapted the mir, a
long-established, traditional form of peasant life, in which the peasants
governed their land in common. This was quite distinct from—and
ultimately in opposition to—collectivization. The mir differed both
from private possession and from collective ownership, and each suc-
cessive system had sought to eradicate it. The land was held not by a
collective but in common, which is to say it was not owned at all. Most
158 Wild Democracy
importantly, it was governed democratically. The mir, not the state,

allocated land. Land was given to households, which were then free to
decide how much to plant, what to plant, and where to plant it.
The revolutionaries of the Commune tried one experiment after an-
other in the short weeks of their rule.8 They knew the past had failed
them. That knowledge freed them to look beyond the inherited past
to practices that had been lost or scorned. It freed them to take the
paths that had not been chosen and see where those would lead them.
It freed them to leave the past behind and find their own way. We watch
as one revolutionary uprising after another struggles to find new ways
to make decisions together, to act together, to build a more just order
where they stand.
There is a democratic canon. There are books and speeches, man-
ifestos and petitions. They are records of debates. There are the trials
and confessions of those who advocated the right of the people to rule
themselves, even under torture. There are the records of those who
were thought unimportant: slaves, the subaltern, the poor. The slave
narratives collected under the U.S. Works Progress Administration
in the Depression, the work of the subaltern studies historians belong
to this democratic canon. E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Thomas
Holt, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker have re-
corded the histories of working people and dissenters, rebels and ban-
dits, opening the way to a canon of the many rather than the few.
This canon is not settled; it is unsettled and unsettling. We make and
unmake it, and as we do, we learn of more people we can study. This
canon has no home. This canon draws from every corner of the world.
This canon is intimate and familiar, alien and cosmopolitan.
Our hope lies not in the silence of the powerful and the learned but
in the convictions of the people. Though both our educations and our
institutions speak against it, there are still people who believe that they
have the right to rule themselves.
Our time lies in the past, present, and future.
XI
Democratic times
57. Democracy is episodic.
The people’s rule is omnipresent as a source of legitimacy, a point of ori-

entation, and a presence that governs the conduct of all. It is experienced
as a constant presence in mind and as an episodic presence in the lives of
the people. The revolutionary moments that bring the people into being,
and the moments when the people make themselves anew, are fugitive and
fleeting. They live in history and memory, in the knowledge of the ideals
they change, the standards they set, and the worlds they build, but their
presence thereafter is partial and allusive. Revolutions follow no set cal-
endar, no predictable cycle. The rule of the people can, however, also be ep-
isodic. The people can agree to call themselves into being on a regular basis.
Whatever institutional forms the rule of the people takes, that rule
will always be interrupted.
58. The time of democracy is a time of celebration.
One of my teachers, Aristide Zolberg, Holocaust survivor and refugee,

an immigrant and an authority on immigration, wrote that revolutions
are marked by “moments of madness.” He was thinking not of the rabid
insanity of the crowd that so many have feared, but the transcendent
joy that people feel in moments of revolutionary change. He quotes
Simone de Beauvoir writing of the liberation of Paris from the Nazis.
They were, she wrote, “swept away by joy.”
Day and night with our friends, talking, drinking, strolling, laughing,
we celebrated our liberation. And all those who celebrated it as we
did, nearby or far away, became our friends.
What an orgy of brotherhood!1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0011
160 Wild Democracy
In these moments, Zolberg argued, politics becomes prophetic. People

believe that “all is possible.” They are ecstatic. They say of themselves
that they “live a dream more beautiful than dreams, a dream which
they have not imagined,” that they inhabit a moment of “volcanic hap-
piness,” of “absolute magic.”2 Henri Lefèbvre wrote:
The Paris Commune! It was first of all an immense, a grandiose fes-

tival, a festival which the people of Paris offered to themselves and
offered to the world. Festival of spring in the City, festival of the
disinherited and of the proletariat, revolutionary festival and festival
of the Revolution, total festival. . . . [I]‌t unfolds first in magnificence
and joy.3
People who experience revolutions write of being born again, of

their joy at being one with the people around them. Lefèbvre, writing
of the Commune, concluded, “For a few days, this utopia, this so-called
myth, was actualized and entered into life.”4
Many people look at these moments of popular celebration and
democratic joy as simply fugitive: moments of transcendence that, like
joy itself, cannot endure. Lefèbvre saw it otherwise. When he looked
at the Commune, he saw more than a celebration: he saw a proof. The
communards were not simply celebrating an evanescent moment of
triumph and freedom. They had proven their hopes: “For a few days,
this utopia, this so-called myth, was actualized and entered into life.”
The brevity of that life was beside the point. Like a scientist who, for
a brief moment, produces electric light or a surgeon who performs a
heart transplant on a patient who lives only for a few days, Lefèbvre saw
not a fugitive moment but an opening of possibilities. Things thought
impossible had become possible. That brief interruption had set aside
“layers of sediment: the State, bureaucracy, institutions, dead culture.”5
People saw that it could be otherwise. Their sense of the possible was
changed. It was no longer possible to say that the people could not
govern themselves or live without bosses. They already had.
They did so, moreover, in a manner that confounded fears of popular
violence. Tocqueville had feared the downfall of the July Monarchy,
feared (as so many have, as so many do) the violence of an unleashed—
a free—people. Yet as he walked through the streets he was struck
Democratic times 161
instead by a peace as profound as a Sunday morning and the atmos-

phere of fraternity that joined defeated soldiers with the young citizens
who had disarmed them. Tocqueville, as any reader knows, was a man
preoccupied with loss, but also a man who could see and judge fairly,
overcoming his fears:
When I came to peer attentively into the deepest reaches of my own

heart, I discovered there, with some surprise, and a certain relief, a
sort of joy mixed with all the sadness and all the fears which the rev-
olution was bringing to life. This terrifying event made me suffer on
behalf of my country, but it was clear I did not suffer on my own be-
half. . . . I was breathing more freely than before the catastrophe.
Nor was he alone. He notes that the “priests, the old aristocracy, and
the people were meeting in a common sentiment.” They were not
afraid. Even for the defeated soldiers, “all other feelings seemed to
be absorbed by the pleasure of finding themselves free. They walked
without care, stepping lightly.”6
Everyone sees the joy, the festivity of the revolutionaries. This is not,
however, simply a moment of release, a kind of political Saturnalia in
which, just for a day or two, the world turns upside down and people
feel that all is possible. There is a strong note of practicality in these
popular celebrations. For one thing, people clean up after them-
selves. Anyone who watched the Egyptian Revolution unfold in Tahrir
Square, or the Lebanese uprising, could see the people organizing
themselves to pick up rubbish and the debris of demonstrations.
They went further; they scrubbed the place clean. When the Egyptian
revolutionaries were asked about their pails and scrub brushes, they
answered that it was their country now, and they would keep it clean.
The people of Tahrir Square, men and women, rich and poor, secular
and religious, organized food and medical care for themselves. The
secular protected the religious while they prayed. Revolutionaries may
be filled with an evanescent joy as they see their people around them
and know themselves as rulers together, but they also know the en-
during joy that transforms mundane acts. They are transfigured as they
come to power, and the world is transfigured for them. Their ordinary
work has become divine.
162 Wild Democracy
59. The time of democracy is a time of danger.
The rule of the people is always dangerous. The canon of every philos-
ophy warns, over and over unceasingly, of the hazards of democracy.
The people, statesmen and philosophers warn, will rob the rich to feed
the poor. (Though I will bless them if they do, I see no evidence of
this.) The people are licentious. Once they are free to rule, they will
give in to all their appetites. (Decadence seems to me to be a problem
more of the privileged than the people.) The people are passionate.
Once they are free to rule, they will do whatever they please, and do it
with a passion that no one can stand against. (Considered against the
whims of dictators, the passions of the people may seem less threat-
ening.) Except possibly for the last, none of these dangers are more
to be feared in democracy than in another form of rule. The last is
different.
When the people are free to rule, they will indeed do what they
please. Perhaps (it is my hope) they will do it with a passion that no
one can stand against. For some this is a threat. For others (I am among
them) it opens up a horizon of promise and possibility that I cannot
dream of seeing in my time (though still I hope).
What will the people do? Ask instead: What do people do? Do they
forget the past and rush headlong into utopian projects? Sometimes.
More often they look to the past for guidance. They seek to recover
goods they have lost. They try to emulate those they admire. They seek
to preserve what they love and honor in their own history and experi-
ence. They are more likely to regard the past in the rosy glow of myth
and memory than they are to abandon it. Will they then lose the drive
to exploration and invention? Some never have that. Others always
do. In the darkest times, in places of the most abject poverty, there are
thinkers, inventors, and explorers. There may be those who choose to
be comfortable, to live like Patrick Henry’s citizen and enjoy “the fruits
of his labor under his own fig tree, with his wife and children about
him, in peace and security.”7 They can live, sheltered and fed among
the people, and the people can be proud that such are safe and content
among them. People have learned that those who live peaceful lives,
cultivate their gardens and their families, can make good neighbors
and good friends. Some, like Wendell Berry, have written of them as if
they were the guardians of something precious to us all. Perhaps they

are. Perhaps they are the gardeners of our common country.
Will people turn on one another and try to re-create a world free
from their enemies? Will they kill one another? Sometimes. They do
that now, seized by a demonic myth of religious or racial superiority,
by a conviction of righteousness, by mere greed, or in great fear. These
killings take place in all places and times I know, though they take
place least where the people have more power. Mindful, as Hobbes and
experience have taught us, that anyone may kill anyone else, we cannot
wholly escape the danger we pose to one another. We cannot escape
the need for courage.
60. The time of democracy is a time of creation.
One of the great contributions of the social contract theorists was their
recognition that people make the sovereign, make the state, make
themselves.
When the people rule, they build. They build in common. They
build as individuals. Free from the fear of coercion and dependence
on the powerful, they can live as they choose, think as they choose.
Their thoughts—and their ambitions—will have more range and more
focus. People who are free to speak and write as they choose can write
honestly. They can explore the past, examine the present, and plan the
future with clear eyes.
They build in common. They will debate, as they should, the virtues
of different plans and projects. Some will see the virtues of highways,
others of mass transit or the hyperloop. They will argue over sources
of energy. They will have more to argue over because the inventiveness
that independence unleashes will open unexpected possibilities. Those
with a passion for planning will be limited in their ambition to order,
and in their power, by the anarchic.
People who rule themselves, who secure freedom and equality
among themselves, open reservoirs of creativity dammed up by
autocrats, by aristocracy, by inequalities of wealth and power. They are
more just and more honorable, to be sure, but they are also more in-
ventive and more daring.
164 Wild Democracy
61. Democratic time is sacred time.
St. Augustine saw that sacred and secular time could exist, did exist,
in the same place, at the same moment.8 We are at once body and
soul. The time of the soul and the time of the mind are not the same
as the time of the body. The time of the body seems inexorable to the
mind: too slow for the young who long for adventures and power, too
rapid for the old who have fallen in love with the world. The mind is
not bound wholly to the time the body inhabits but wanders through
the past and into the future. Has the soul the timelessness we claim for
it? Perhaps. One who belongs to a people belongs at once to the time
the body inhabits, the time of the surrounding world, and to the time
of that people: to the past of the people and to the people’s future.
Those moments when people, knowing they are the eyes and hands
of the sovereign, bring a people into being, are sacred times. They are
moments removed from the mundane, moments out of time. The dead
call to the living and the living to the dead. Living and dead call to those
yet to come. Law and custom vanish, and the sacred enters.
62. Democratic time is before, after, and now.
The placement of democracy in Athens, or among the Haudenosaunee,

in medieval city states, among the Vikings, or in some other place is
both true and false. There were people at these sites, and many others,
who struggled to ensure that they ruled themselves. There is a demo-
cratic past—indeed, there may be more democratic pasts than we have
yet discovered. The conviction that a people can rule themselves is
strengthened by the example of those who did so in the past, however
brief their success. When we struggle to rule ourselves, we can look to
those who struggled before us, learn from their errors, and honor their
memory. Episodic, fractured moments of political courage give us a
time before. That time serves not as an anchor but as a proof, securing
confidence that what has been done before can be done again.
Perhaps the people will not rule themselves, fully and honorably, in
my time. For me, then, the time of democracy is the time to come. The
rule of the people in its fullness belongs to a future I may never see.
And yet it is mine. This is the call that animated King’s speech the night
before he died: “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with
you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the
promised land.”9 That is my country, the longed for country that is not
yet, the only country that commands my allegiance.
The promised land opened to King not because he dreamed of the
future, but because his dreaming was fired by “the fierce urgency of
now.” Democracy belongs to those who struggle to rule themselves in
the present. Democracy is made by—and in—those ordinary moments
of judgment in which people make, follow, question, critique, reject,
and disobey the laws. Democracy is made in those frustrating, seem-
ingly futile moments when people struggle to use the worn, blunt tools
they have. The vote cast for a disappointing candidate, the unsuccessful
campaign, the books and articles, the email sent to an unresponsive
senator, the unpublished letters to the editor, the marches in the sun
and the rain, the seemingly fruitless organizing, are all working toward
the people’s rule. Each testifies to the person’s commitment. Each offers
a hard training in the discipline of being ruled. Each demonstrates the
will to speak, to be heard, to rule. Each binds an uncertain future to the
fierce urgency of now.
XII
The direction of the democratic
63. Democrats are conservative, progressive,

and radical.
The idea that the people rule remains a radical idea. It goes to the root.
In advancing it we “lay the axe to the root and teach governments hu-
manity.”1 Yet anyone who looks at what people do, what they ask, what
they long for, will find that they are not ready to abandon the past.
Paine’s great antagonist, Edmund Burke, is remembered as a conserva-
tive, but his conservatism had a profound respect for the wisdom of the
people. Burke’s belief that we should defer to custom and convention
has a democratic cast; it speaks to democratic history and democratic
sensibilities. At the very moment when the American Revolution
caught fire, the Declaration noted that people endure hardships and
evils for the sake of stability, that they change unwillingly. When people
decide important matters, they turn to the past. They look to history
and custom, they consult the advice, the wisdom and the dreams of the
past. They are not bound by the past, but they bear it in mind. The past
does not rule them, but they go forward mindful of those who came
before.
Many people see the rule of the people as rooted: rooted in custom,
rooted in history, rooted in their communities, rooted in the life of
people who have a shared life in a place they hold in common. Wendell
Berry wrote that the commonwealth, “household, neighborhood, and
community,” is “the foundation and practical means” of democracy.2
Those from Tocqueville to the present who admire the New England
township, those who write wistfully of the villages of England, Kenya,
and Rajasthan hold to this as well. There are left Burkeans to be sure,
and there are also conservative Gandhians: people who hold to the
virtue of the old ways of small communities and ancient crafts.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0012
The direction of the democratic 167
People see the boundaries of their common life as enfolding both

the living and the dead. They believe they owe something to the past.
They protect things they treasure in museums. They remind them-
selves of people and events in the past. These are often, but not always,
people to be honored. There are memorials of many kinds: the Maison
des Esclaves on Gorée Island; the graves in Westminster Cathedral;
Yad Vashem; the tombs of unknown soldiers in Paris, Washington,
and Delhi; the Lincoln Memorial in the United States; the Panthéon
in Paris. Statues are put up and taken down as what is honored and
what is rejected changes in the eyes of the people. The Stolpersteine
in Germany are small bronze caps, each covering a cobblestone, re-
cording the names of people who were taken from their homes during
the Holocaust. They are called Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones,” be-
cause they are meant to stop you for a moment, to interrupt a steady
pace with a moment of recollection.3 Museums of lynching and
slavery in the United States, the bullet-riddled walls in the heart of a
restored Beirut recall past wrongs that are not to be repeated. There
are monuments, museums, and exhibits that record a more troubled
and uncertain history. The pyramids in Egypt and Mexico recall a his-
tory of glory and exploitation, achievements and suffering. India’s Taj
Mahal is a building of surpassing beauty, but it also recalls a history
of conquest, religious strife, and discrimination. People seek to record
and remember not only their victories and achievements but their
self-betrayals and injustices. This speaks powerfully for their integrity,
their honesty, and their commitment to rule themselves.
The decision to take down or put up monuments is not a sign of fri-
volity or lightmindedness. It is the result of thought, debate, and delib-
eration. This is what happens when people look around and ask “Who
is honored here? What is remembered here?” and then “Is this just? Is
this who we are? Is this what we honor?” This is the work of people who
examine their life together.
Conservatism, like all political positions, has the vices of its virtues
and the virtues of its vices. At its worst, conservatism is no more than
a small-minded love of one’s own, a belief in one’s superiority, an indo-
lent indifference to the intellectual riches of the world, a fear of change,
an acceptance of inequality if not a love for it, and the willingness to
hold others back against their will. At its best, conservatism respects
168 Wild Democracy
the judgment of ordinary people over generations; reminds us of our

failings, our frailties, and our errors; cautions us against arrogance; and
honors the ancestors. At their best, conservatives protect the learning
and the arts of all people, not only their own. At their best, they may
be, as Patrick Henry called himself, conservatives for liberty, com-
mitted to a set of principles and a discipline that keep the people ruling
themselves.
People who rule themselves look to the future as well. The desire to
go forward willingly into the unknown, the daring that greets the fu-
ture as its home, belong to all those who struggle to rule themselves.
Those who rule themselves have already committed themselves to a
dangerous and uncertain journey. Progressives believe that journey is
inevitably a journey forward, a project that struggles toward a future
and a future people, that surpass the plans and dreams of the present.
There are hazards in the vision, in even the idea of progress. Those
who know those dangers may hold to a vision of progress nonethe-
less, for there are virtues in it as well. The idea of progress reminds a
fallible, imperfect people that they have work to do. The idea of prog-
ress reminds them that they can be better than they were, better indeed
than anyone has ever been. The will to make progress drives people be-
yond the limits of the present and the past. They recognize the simple
truth that the past is not the limit of the future, that history is not a
boundary wall. For them, the only limit is an ever-receding horizon
that draws them forward.
Progressivism, like conservatism, can bind people to both the dead
and the unborn. The commitment to a better future is easy to see: it is
declared in every progressive plan, poem, and manifesto. The commit-
ment to the past is more subtle but very much present. Progressives
see the course of the people like an arrow shot toward a distant target.
They see their people on a hard journey to a promised land. They see
their commitment to progress as keeping faith with that past. They see
themselves as following in the footsteps of their ancestors, continuing
the work of those who came before them.
Progressives recognize the inadequacy of the present. At their best,
they recognize their own fallibility. They drive forward knowing their
failures, their inadequacy, their limits and striving to overcome them.
They have an iron discipline and transcendent hope. At their worst,
they fail to see that the limits of the present are their limits as well.
Blind to their own fallibility, indifferent to the virtues of others, they
insist that they know what is best, and their drive to a better future
becomes a forced march to an iron cage.
The belief that progress is predestined, that we shall overcome
someday, gives comfort in hard times. Those who suffer injustice rest
in the hope that better days will come. Those whose courage and virtue
are not matched by those around them move like horses running for
home, fueled by the hope that the country they call their own can still
be reached in their time. Their strength can become the strength of
their people.
Those who do not believe that progress is inevitable, who distrust
promises of either a heavenly or an earthly paradise, who have no faith
that we shall overcome one day may still take heart from those who do.
For us there is no promise but our promise, no redemption but in our
own work.
Those who believe that the people should rule themselves, who
agree to rule and to be ruled in turn, hoping for none to be ruled at
all, who are convinced that all men are created equal, that everyone
has a life to live, are radicals all. They go to the root. Everybody, every
body walking on the earth, living and breathing, hungry and thirsty,
thinking and planning, has a life to live. I ground rights in the needs
and demands of those bodies and the souls they shelter within them.
This is the ground of equality. The right to live freely, to live life apart
and in common, is rooted here.
The right of people to rule themselves is radical in another, more
common sense. Much must be changed to make that possible. There
are institutions to take down, rules to break, laws to disobey.
Praise of the conservative preservers and the progressives on
their predestined progress neglects the revolutionary power of the
uprooted and the rootless. These, exiles and refugees, dissidents and
heretics, are how newness enters the world. The world has failed them
or launched them into the unknown. Nothing holds them. They are
unbounded.
Conservative or liberal, progressive or radical, democrats are al-
ways fugitives. They are pursued on every side. Those who distrust
the people fear that they will unleash the mob. Those who want to
170 Wild Democracy
rule are always trying to corral them. Liberals and conservatives

want to tame them, make them calm domestic animals who submit
to their betters.
Yet even when the people rule, they find themselves on the run.
They are always seeking something more. They struggle to escape the
dead hand of the past. They will not accept that history fences them in.
They fly from the errors, the defects, and the limits of the present. They
fly to utopian visions, to experiments, to the ever-receding horizon of
their hopes, their curiosity, and their will to discover more.
They fly.4
64. Democracy moves upward.
The rule of the people, Whitman saw, comes out of the ground
like grass,
a uniform hieroglyphic, and it means

Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones.5
It remains close to the ground. The right of the people to rule, the
power of the people to rule, is present in each of them, no matter how
poor, no matter how abject. The conviction that the people should rule
draws them upward. They stand tall, metaphorically but also in prac-
tice. When the people rule, they walk without fear. They stand firm in
the knowledge of their right to rule.
Democracy begins among the people and spreads, far too slowly,
upward, until the arrogance of the rich and privileged is shamed.
The rule of the people moves upward in another sense. The people
build. The spread of equality gives power to the creativity of the many.
Where a few once invented, discovered, explored, many do. The con-
centration of wealth in a few hands is often defended by arguing that
a fairer redistribution would stifle creativity and limit invention. The
opposite is true. The capacity for invention, research, discovery—yes,
“wealth creation”—is not concentrated in the hands of a few. When
people are given tools and education, the freedom to invent and exper-
iment, many create wealth where few did before. That wealth is spread
more broadly, and as it spreads, more people are freed and inspired
to build.
The demands of self-rule raise standards of conduct. In asserting
this, I am, of course, directly contradicting the greater part of the
canon of Western political philosophy. I do so proudly. That canon was
written in the service of tyrants and for the advancement of the few.
These men claimed that free people would give themselves up to ap-
petite and license. We have seen that the closer people come to ruling
themselves, the more responsibility they assume.
When people follow tyrants, demagogues, and autocrats, they
abandon their pride, their responsibility, and their self-discipline. The
autocrat’s misconduct licenses every offense, every vulgarity, every
abandonment of responsibility. The followers abandon ethics for the
guidance of the corrupt, abandon responsibility for indolence, pride
for the pleasures of abjection.
It is otherwise with free people. The more responsibility they as-
sume, the more carefully they govern their own conduct. They learn to
judge, and they turn that judgment on themselves. Little is required of
them but much is asked. They learn to fend for themselves and to pro-
vide for others. They learn discipline, and they learn power. They learn
to stand up for themselves and for others.
They rise.
People who rule themselves reach upward to the divine.
65. Democracy moves downward.
Democrats rise, but in the common phrase they remember where they
came from. This is our common sense: the sense, held in common, that
we are all mortal, we are all fragile, we are all at risk. The rule of the
people looks to people in their simplicity: as mortals with all the needs
and frailties of embodied beings. Mindful that everyone has a life to
live, democracies direct their resources downward. Democracy has
the poor in its heart. People who rule themselves ensure that all are
fed, all are sheltered, all are cared for in times of need. Mindful that
they will not only rule but be ruled, they ensure that all are educated,
that all have the tools they need to cultivate their talents, that all have
172 Wild Democracy
the means to resist when resistance is necessary, that all have a place
to shelter in hard times, and, at all times, places where they cannot
be ruled.
The rule of the people moves downward in another sense. Power,
even the power of the ruling people, is not to be concentrated at a
single site, certainly not at the top. The decentralization that extends
democracy and shields the power of the people in hard times moves
downward. Power moves through the whole of the people, living, dead,
and yet to come, but it flows most powerfully among the living people.
Democratic rule depends on the presence and the lived experience of
power in all people. Every one of the people should know their power
and seize their right to rule. Every one of the people should be willing
to submit to rule by their own people.
Everyone must resist unjust rule, even—especially—among their
own. “The people shall judge” applies not only to the right of revolu-
tion and the need for it but to the ordinary conduct of a common life.
The people judge. They execute the laws they judge to be just in the
ways that they think best. Everyone must be ready to correct injustices,
great and small, and to call for revolution when revolution is necessary.
Each person builds their world, making it anew at every moment of
their common life.
People work to ensure that “justice rolls down like waters, and right-
eousness like a mighty stream.”6
When the people rule, they will make mistakes. They will try strat-
egies that fail. They will have plans with catastrophic consequences.
Even when they move wisely, they will encounter obstacles. They will
advance, and they will fall back. They keep the faith. They keep their
hands on the plow.
XIII
Democratic spaces
66. People preserve the anarchic and nurture

the democratic when they assemble.
The people are never visible as a whole, for the people include in their
understanding of themselves the living, the dead, and those yet to
come. When the American people speak in the Constitution, we es-
tablish a government “for ourselves and for our posterity.” All people
move forward. When they come to know themselves as a people, they
look both to those they take as their compatriots in the past and to
their own presence, the presence of their children and their children’s
children, in the future. A people in its wholeness is thus hidden from
us. The closest we come to that vision of the whole is of the people
assembled. The sight of people stretched beyond the line of vision calls
up the vision of the people we cannot see. In that assembly we see the
people whose power and whose right to rule stands before and beyond
law and government. It is for this reason that demonstrations still serve
to call governments to account. Demonstrations remind governments,
institutions, officials that they serve at the pleasure of the people and
that they must answer to the people.
When people assemble they call up the people, but that call will
be judged by their compatriots, living and yet to come, perhaps even
by the dead. Their assembly calls people to ask: Do they stand for the
people? Do they stand for me? The answer to that question shapes the
constitution of the people.
National assemblies, congresses, and parliaments gesture visu-
ally toward the presence of the people. They are, in themselves, the
work of the people’s will in choosing their forms of governance and
the representatives themselves. The spectacle of deliberation and
debate—especially debate—makes two aspects of popular rule visible.
Representatives, and those who watch them, confront the differences
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0013
174 Wild Democracy
and enmities among the people. They are reminded that though the
people are one people, they are also many people. We differ pro-
foundly, in practice and in principle, in our interests and in our ideals.
Only in the simultaneous presence of likeness and difference can the
people be seen.
67. Democracy lives in the city.
Cities intensify. There is more art, more commerce, more crime, more
law enforcement, more politics, more scholarship, and more religion
in the cities than there is among the farms and ranches of the country
or the malls and developments of the suburbs. The weight of govern-
ance is felt more heavily. Every level of a decentralized government is
visible and active in the city. If government is centralized, it will be in
the city that its power is greatest. If it is decentralized, it will take on
myriad forms in cities. If it is liberal, the city will be hedged about with
regulations, which will be endlessly debated and modified. If it is auto-
cratic, it is in the city that the full weight of dictatorial rule will be felt.
The work of government will be visible to all: in buildings, in meetings,
in posted regulations. No one will be able to walk the streets without
seeing it. The work of the governing people is visible there and in the
contests surrounding issues and events. Sovereignty shows itself in the
city. Power shows itself in the city.
The simplest aspect of cities may be the most important. There are
more people. Cities are magnetic. They attract people who are looking
for jobs for there are many jobs, far more than are to be found in the
countryside. They attract people who want to study. There are uni-
versities in the country, to be sure, but the city has not only colleges
and universities but art schools and conservatories. People bring
their pasts, their hopes, their interests, and their ideals with them to
the city. People flee to the city from places where they felt lost, alone,
abandoned, or alien. They mix with others like and unlike themselves.
They are confronted by new ideas, new questions, new possibilities.
The pleasures and dangers of living with other people, unknown, dan-
gerous people, are familiar to them. They can acquire the common
Democratic spaces 175
courage that comes from living with difference, in and among the
unknown.
68. Democracy lives in the countryside.
Eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even twentieth-century democrats have

tended to favor the country over the city. Jefferson envisioned the
yeoman farmer in a fertile country furnishing people with food and
shelter and thereby securing their independence, and the farmer’s
own. These agrarian philosophers, and those who followed them, also
saw life close to the land as offering more freedom, more leisure, and
thus more opportunities for politics and learning.
The agrarians, like the striking textile workers of the Northeast,
saw that people need not only bread but roses. They need time: time
to study and time to organize, time to deliberate and time to argue
with one another about the issues of the day. Some forms of farming
and ranching give people that time; most demand as much intensive
labor as any factory. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries the demands of labor made time shorter still. If one could read
when the fields were fallow, one might be hard put to find the books to
read. People who read might well read and think and debate in solitude
for neighbors were far away, and the nearest neighbors might not be
drawn to the same books. The time to reflect and debate that Jefferson
valued was made greater by distance, and candidates, like books, might
be hard to come by. Time was both an aid and an obstacle to rural pol-
itics. Candidates might not travel to far-flung farms, and the court-
house lawns where they made their speeches might be a long ride away.
People might meet in church, but churches are notoriously poor places
for political debates.
It was this that made the granges so important. The granges were to
farmers as the union halls were to dockworkers, miners and factory
workers: they provided a place for rural people to meet, talk, and or-
ganize. They were places where books and pamphlets could be shared,
candidates and ideas debated. They made political organizing pos-
sible. They kindled a prairie fire. They made the reforms of the People’s
176 Wild Democracy
Party and the Progressives possible and fueled them with the urgency
of need.
The country is a place of solidarity and solitude. People help one an-
other. There is often nowhere else to turn. They combine, as they did in
granges, ranging themselves against the absent powers of banks, other
corporations, and the state. They learn to provide for themselves. They can
grow, hunt, fish, and forage for their own food. They learn to build. They
learn skills people in cities may never need. They strive to be free from de-
pendence on others, yet they give to their neighbors with an open hand.
The country can also be a place where anarchy spreads its branches,
where people live as they choose, and new ways of life are born and
take root.
There is a simpler way to state the preceding two theses: “In the city
the people rule” and “In the country the people rule.” One of the
shortcomings of the word “democracy” is its concealment of this
simple idea. I wrote the theses as I did because each holds a political
history within it. “Democracy belongs to the city” calls up the many
efforts to cast cities as places of sin and degradation. Many of the state
constitutions written after the American Civil War gave cities less rep-
resentation, and less power, than rural areas. Trump’s characterization
of Baltimore as “a disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” echoes a
long history of hostility to cities and their people. “Democracy belongs
to the country” counters a history of portraying rural people as igno-
rant and parochial. It recalls a neglected history of Midwestern radi-
calism in the search for justice. Both are charged with a predilection for
violence: the gangs of the city, the vigilantes of the countryside. Both
are feared as places of anarchy.
Let them be.
69. Free people carry the democratic with them.

They carry it into the factory, the shop, the school.
We Americans call ourselves democrats and republicans, but we have

steadily eroded the reach and power and responsibility of citizens—
of all people—in the United States. We speak of our republic and our
democracy, but we have diminished ourselves, fencing our principles,

our rights, and the democratic practices we have into smaller and
smaller spaces. We say we believe in free speech, but no one in America
thinks they can speak freely at work. Politics, we are told, belongs out-
side of work. It appears we have our rights—to assembly, to free speech,
to freedom of religion—only in those hours of the day that we are not
working (one job or two or three) or eating or sleeping. We don’t have
them when we are shopping, for malls are private spaces and we are not
permitted to assemble or speak freely there. We don’t have them on the
streets, for the streets are policed and assemblies require a permit.
This is absurd. We carry our rights within us.
Forget these boundaries. Refuse these restrictions. Rights are born
in us. They are inalienable. Whether they are recognized or not, rights
remain with us always. They are carried into the schoolroom, onto the
shop floor, into the church, into the office, onto the streets.
This is no easy business. This is no simple project. Anyone who has
worked in a subordinate position knows that to speak at work is to
speak not as an equal but as someone who can be fired and who needs
that job.
Schools, masjids, temples, and churches have hierarchies and
inequalities as well. These are not, in general, as burdensome or as un-
just as the inequalities at work, though there are shameful exceptions.
This is not simply because they are, as many have argued, “natural”
and “just” inequalities. The teacher who looks out on the class should
think, my teachers taught me, that there is someone in that class who
is smarter than you, and someone who is more moral. Perhaps they all
are. If they are not now, they may come to be so. In teaching, the bril-
liance and the goodness of these students is revealed. This is a source
of both humility and joy. No one can teach and not be reproached, day
after day, by students who silently (but not always silently) remind
you how much you do not know, how much you have to learn. No one
can watch people learn and not be awed by their transcendence, their
transfigurations.
In all the religious traditions I know, something similar is present.
There may be (there usually is) a hierarchy. There may be norms of
deference to authority, and rules enforcing doctrine. There may be
customs and rituals arguing silently and insistently for the powerful,
178 Wild Democracy
but there is something more. There is grace. There is prophecy. There

is saintliness. Grace, mana, baraka, whatever name it bears, comes
without warning, to the great but more often to the poor and the
scorned. In the midst of the Peasant Wars, Thomas Müntzer, a brave
priest who defended the peasants when too many priests ranged them-
selves with the lords, reproached those who wrote that the times of
prophecy were past and it was “fantastic and fool-headed, and that it is
most impossible.” Müntzer insisted, even under torture, that “now, in
our times, God also sends his light into the world.”1
The democratic is carried into the world, fought and secured, in
each human body. The sovereignty of the people is decentralized, dis-
seminated, scattered through the world, in the bodies of those who
make up the people. The people, together and singly, are the voice and
hands of the sovereign. The ethical, democratic, acts of the people, far
more than institutions, secure democracy.
70. Democracy cannot be fenced out of the economic

realm or separated from the social.
Political theory and political practice have divided the world again.
Statesmen and theorists have taught that there are separate realms,
public and private, ruled by different regimes. Where rights are con-
cerned, these divisions must be considered carefully, used carefully, for
they are a weapon that can turn in the hand. The distinction between
public and private can protect the people. The idea that some space
is private, that it cannot be entered by the state or by others can give
people shelter: shelter for their beliefs, for their practices, for whatever
they choose to keep to themselves. Holding that space, caring for what
lies within it, teaches them to rule. We have learned, however, that the
distinction between public and private gave some people unjust, ty-
rannical power over others. For women, for slaves, for servants, even
for children, the private realm has been made a prison. The idea of the
private, holding homes and corporations, has concealed the power of
the wealth and the persistence of feudal power in the aptly named ec-
onomic realm.
Businesses and corporations have claimed the right to govern

spaces that would otherwise be public: places where people meet, dis-
cuss, debate. The shopping mall might seem open, but it is a private
space. Politics is fenced out. The owner decides who will enter and who
can be forced (by guards with guns) to leave. You can speak freely to
your friends about political issues, but if you speak too loudly, if you
speak to the people around you, if you speak without the permission of
the owner, if you speak for something the owner opposes, you can (and
you probably will) be silenced. Freedom of assembly is denied. Within
that space, people are not free, not equal. Some people are denied en-
trance altogether. The visibly poor are treated like unwanted wildlife,
captured and persuaded to leave. Members of a minority race or reli-
gion, even the wealthy, find that they are excluded. The bell they ring
does not admit them, or they enter only to find themselves unwelcome.
In these places of commerce, the few can buy what they choose. The
many are denied. The few are taught that their wealth makes them free.
The many learn that they are not. All see, whether they acknowledge
it or not, that the people do not rule in these spaces. Rights are not
recognized. There is no democracy there. These are spaces of auto-
cratic power.
The idea of the private has made the spaces of banks and businesses
curiously immune to protest. Occupy Wall Street protested against the
power of the 1%, the power of corporations whose careless rapacity
made millions homeless. The protesters occupied Zuccotti Park and
held it against several police efforts to evict them. The park was a “pri-
vately owned public space,” a privately owned space the owners are
required to keep open to the public (more or less). The Occupy move-
ment spread from this curious liminal space to streets and plazas
around the world. The protesters did not occupy the businesses they
protested. They could not, for these are fortresses. They are more dif-
ficult to enter than, more closely guarded than, and as dangerous to
breach as the state buildings of any other dictatorship.
Make no mistake, these are dictatorships. They may have boards,
as dictators have advisers. They may have shareholders who vote, in
which case the dictatorship is oligarchic. They may be large, bureau-
cratic, totalitarian regimes of rules and surveillance. Except in the rare
180 Wild Democracy
cases where those who work in the company own it as well, there is
nothing democratic here, nothing republican. This is alien territory for
people who intend to rule themselves. Here, the boss rules.2 This is true
for Goldman Sachs and Santander, Nando’s and McDonald’s, for the
man who owns a corner store and the man who owns Amazon. For
generations, for hundreds of years, people who believe themselves to
be democrats, who have built republics and struggled to establish at
least representative institutions have spent most of their lives under the
rule of one boss or another.
Is there anyone reading this who has not worked under a boss?
There are few, I expect, who have not worked under a bad one.
There are places, of course, liberal or striving toward the democratic
(even some totalitarian orders) where the boss is constrained. Slavery is
forbidden. Children under fourteen or fifteen or still in school are for-
bidden to work, or are allowed to work only when the work is not haz-
ardous. The hours a person can work are limited. Working conditions
are regulated for safety. Some workers are allowed to unionize. In lib-
eral places, places where people have worked to introduce elements of
democracy in their institutions, these constraints were won only after
hundreds of years of struggle and suffering. They are still evaded or
ignored.3 And though in music and art, in every medium, people rec-
ognize that the boss is a tyrant, the company’s rules foolish, and the law
powerless; though people talk, quietly and discreetly, in the corners of
the workplace, the rule of the boss is accepted, even praised, as essen-
tial to capitalism and wholly consonant with—perhaps even necessary
to—democracy. This is wrong.
Rights are held in the body, in your body, in our bodies. There is no
invisible process that strips them from you, silently and thoroughly, as
you enter the workplace. There is no boundary that that rights cannot
cross. The powers bosses claim and states license are illegitimate and
indefensible.
The idea that the workplace can be democratic may seem absurd
and unimaginable. Yet there have been many times when people not
only struggled for their natural rights in the workplace; they expected
them. The young women hired in newly established New England tex-
tile mills assumed that they carried their rights to speech and assembly
into the mills. They assumed that decisions about the mill would be
made democratically. After all, were they not still in a democracy? That
claim was answered with brute force, yet their question remains.
If people are to rule themselves, then they must do so everywhere,
not just outside the workplace and not for (allowing for eating and
sleeping) something less than six hours a day.
The same should be said of that amorphous zone called “the social
order.” Hannah Arendt argued, in “Reflections on Little Rock,” that
segregation was permissible in the United States because it belonged
not to the political but to the social order. Arendt believed that there
were no rights outside politics, indeed no rights for any people without
a state. The condition of the stateless thus was, for her, one of complete
abjection. They could make no demands, for they had no rights. Rights
came from laws. Rights came from states.4 She could not bring her-
self to ask for more for the stateless than “the right to have rights.” In
making the argument that the social order stood apart from politics,
Arendt made her politics smaller. She denied that politics takes place
outside law and governance. Politics observes no such boundaries. The
denial of equality and power to a slave or a wife in the home is political.
Caste and racial hierarchies are no less political because they are “so-
cial distinctions.” Hierarchies of wealth and poverty are no less political
because they are social (or economic). Arendt, Wendy Brown notes,
laid every sin of modernity at the feet of the “overtaking of everything
by the social.” Arendt praised the American Revolution for avoiding
“the social question in the form of the terrifying predicament of mass
poverty.”5 Arendt’s imaginary of an American Revolution raised above
concern for poverty conceals the revolutionary importance of the Dorr
Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, the continuing pressure for vet-
erans’ pensions, and the text of the Declaration. Equality grounded the
revolution. Equality grounds democracy.
71. The rule of the people lives and is endangered

in each person’s body.
Where the people rule, each person carries the right to rule. More than
this, each person does the work of judging politics every day. They
make law together. They judge the law, they judge offenders, every day.
182 Wild Democracy
They execute the law, obeying when they think it best and ensuring
that others obey. The work of politics is thoroughly decentralized.
Responsibility belongs to every person.
The people are always present, not only in the form of an idea but in
the flesh. They do not simply “hover above the world,” as Tocqueville
wrote. They are in the world, doing the work that belongs to us all.
That presence, however, is only a partial one. Each of us is a part of the
people. Each of us stands apart from the people. We are partial to those
we love, to a place perhaps, or a party, to a particular set of sentiments
and ideas. We carry with us a particular set of experiences, of love and
loss, victories and frustrations. We carry knowledge and memory,
tastes and dispositions. We have some skills and not others. We learn
some things and make some errors. Yet it is in us, through us, and as us
that the sovereign people is present in the world.
It is in the thoughts and practices of particular people that the idea
of the people is called forth in the world. It is in and through the actions
of particular people that the people act.
Donne’s observation “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am
in involved in mankind” becomes more intimate and more political
here. There is only one way in which the people appear in the world.
The people appear in the people. My people appear in me. I am called
to act for, to act as my people in the world. There is no other way to call
a people into being. There is no other way for a people to be born, to
live, to thrive, to decay, to be lost except in its people.
There is, I have been told, a Hasidic belief that there is a person in
every generation who has the potential to become the Messiah. The
democratic call is broader than that. This is not a question of the possi-
bility of greatness in one. All are called, and all are chosen. All bear the
universal within them. Each person is a gate, and through that gate the
future comes into the world. When we belong to a people it is through
us, in us, as us that the people live or die, suffer or thrive.
XIV
Friends and enemies
72. Equality is proper to democracy.
Say this, as Wendy Brown has, in the clearest way: “Political equality
is democracy’s foundation.”1 When Americans declared their inde-
pendence, they began here. They addressed not their overlords but all
mankind. They began not with their grievances but with truths anyone
could hear and understand. First among these was equality: “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Those
words have returned to us from the Diné, the Muscogee, the Lenape;
from African Americans and Asian Americans; from Filipinos and
Puerto Ricans; from the interned, the deported, and the tortured. The
words are greater than we are. They set an enduring truth before us, be-
fore all. They command us.
When the great army that brought down the English monarchy saw
Charles Stuart captured, they sat down in the fields outside London
and began to debate what form of government they would have. These
debates, the Putney Debates, are one of the most heartening moments
in history, for they show us a people willing to make themselves anew.
There is much that is admirable in these debates, but one moment
has come to stand for the whole: Rainsborough’s declaration “I think
the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, as the greatest he.”2
Everyone has a life to live. Everyone is bound within the small compass
of a single body. Everyone has a need for food, for shelter. Everyone has
been born. Everyone will die. If we are born and live and die in the soli-
tude of the body, yet we know that all people do the same. Our rights to
life and liberty are grounded in the strength and fragility of the mortal
body, and the mind and soul sheltered within it.
Every person has uncertain potential; each has immeasurable
promise. Rainsborough might have said with the Talmud, “Every
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184 Wild Democracy
death is the loss of a world.” This is the equality that is proper to democ-
racy: that each person is of incalculable worth.
The British set equality aside, preserving monarchs and aristocrats,
building an empire. Nevertheless, the words remained, driving the
British beyond empire and toward justice.
Americans set equality aside when they held slaves, against the princi-
ples of the Declaration. We have not succeeded in overcoming the effects
of slavery or the other inequalities that diminish us as a people and as a
people. Nevertheless the words remain, driving us toward justice.
The struggle for freedom in Europe’s colonies, in Ghana and Algeria,
India and South Africa, fired the hearts of people far away. The demand
that the equality of each person be recognized could not be separated
from the demand that people be free to rule themselves as they chose.
The demand for freedom and independence was grounded in the rec-
ognition of equality.
73. Inequality corrupts democracy.
Inequality of wealth is inequality of power. It is therefore a constant ob-

stacle to people who will rule themselves. They may overcome that ob-
stacle, they may endure the burdens it places upon them, yet it remains
an obstacle to their freedom and an offense against justice.
In many ways inequality of wealth may seem to be a trivial con-
cern. It does not trouble me if my neighbor drives a Lamborghini or
wears a large diamond. I have enough to live the life I choose, and
I have never been fond of cars or diamonds. There are other uses for
wealth that should trouble us. Wealth robs us of our rights. We all have
the right to speak freely. The wealthy have the ability to make them-
selves heard. We can write a letter to the editor. The wealthy own the
newspapers. They can decide who or what appears there. We can voice
our concerns on the streets and in public meetings. The wealthy own
radio and television stations. They can decide who is seen and heard.
Money buys voice. We are silenced, but this inequality of speech does
more: it prevents us from hearing what others have to say. Money
buys power. Where bribes are taken, influence and power are bought
directly. Where bribery is forbidden, there are other avenues of influ-
ence. A campaign contribution of sufficient size buys access. Indeed,
wealth alone buys access. Even the uncorrupted bow before wealth.
The friends and enemies of the democratic 185
They know that wealth is power and believe that in order to serve the
common good they need to court the wealthy.
Wealth divides. We do not see the very wealthy; they have set them-
selves apart from us, but we know that they are there. We know that
there are those who could not spend their wealth in many lifetimes,
but we do not see them. We see the poor. We know that there are those
who have so little that their lives are shortened, their creative abilities
stunted, their potential fenced in at every turn.
If wealth does not trouble us, poverty should. It should trouble us all
to see people begging on the streets.
C is a contrast, revolting but true

Want with the many, excess with the few.3
Our eyes find this excess revolting. What of our minds? That excess
should appall us. Spare us the dangers posed by the poor. Consider the
greater dangers posed by the rich. The contrast revolts our eyes and our
minds; it is at once ugly and unjust. The longer it remains, the more it
is seen, the more culpable we are for failing to do our duty, for failing
to refuse this.
There is no common, no democratic life when people are divided
between rich and poor, when voice, action, and justice under law have
become commodities for purchase. A common life, a democratic life,
requires equality.
74. Friendship teaches people to live as democrats.
The Greeks, and the old Norse who surpassed them in democratic
ethics, both valued friendship. “In antiquity,” Nietzsche wrote of the
Greeks, “the feeling of friendship was considered the highest feeling,
even higher than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient sage—
somehow as the sole and sacred sibling of this pride.”4 The Hávamál
holds, “No man is whole,” and offers the practical advice:
If you know you have a friend, and that she is true

And that you will get good from her,
share your mind with her, exchange gifts,
and visit her often.5
186 Wild Democracy
Friends, as Aristotle wrote, have everything in common. In friend-

ship we learn to practice holding things in common. In friendship we
learn that individuality prospers in the commons. It is with those with
whom we hold a commons that we are most fully ourselves. Friendship,
however, is predicated not only on similarity but on difference. Friends
are sought for the lacks they remedy. Aristotle distinguished between
the friends of need and convenience and “true friendship,” which arises
between different people seeking understanding not yet within their
reach. These friendships are marked by pleasure in the other’s distinct,
otherwise unknown and alien thoughts and insights. The pleasures of
friendship are the pleasures of diversity in a common life.6
Some philosophers have been wise enough to value friendship far
more highly than companionate marriage or sexual love. Sexuality, after
all, belongs to many beings. A bond rooted in sexuality may be intimate
indeed but, like the bonds between those Aristotle so evocatively called
“peers of the mess” or “companions of the cupboard,” it is not linked to
the political.7 It is language that binds us in the highest forms of friend-
ship, language that enables us to become political and, thereafter, fully
human. Friendship trains us in democratic ethics: in respect, in dignity,
in risk-taking. Friendship trains us for politics. Friendship teaches us
a solidarity that will not be impaired by debate. Friendship makes us
at home with diversity. A friend is never wholly one’s own, never one
flesh, never wholly like us. Each encounter with a friend is at once fa-
miliar and astonishing, intimate and alien. The friend is always known
and unknown. The friend opens another world. Friendship teaches that
diversity may be not only a threat but the greatest gift, not only a danger
but a source of power and joy. This is a relation of equals.
75. Who are the enemies of democracy? What is

to be done with them?
The enemies of democracy are the fearful: those who seek glory,
autocrats, aristocrats, and all those who claim that their lives are worth
more than others’.
What is to be done with them? The fearful can be taught not to fear.
Children learn to overcome many fears: the darkness, loud noises, the
new school, strange foods, and the monster under the bed. That ca-
pacity remains in all people. The fearful can learn. They can learn to see
foreigners as people who, like them, are hungry and thirsty, who need
shelter and protection. They can learn to see them as people with useful
strengths and skills. They can learn to look with interest and curiosity
at the strange appearances and practices of foreigners. Perhaps they
can do more. Perhaps the fearful can learn the courage of the explorers.
They can learn that new places, new people, new things, new ways can
be useful and pleasurable rather than threatening. They can learn that
the one they feared can be a fellow worker, a colleague, a friend.
Perhaps they can learn, as soldiers must, to face the enemy calmly.
Faced with those who truly threaten them, they can pretend to set their
fears aside and, as they do, find a courage to fill their pretense. Those
who fear change can be taught to be at home with it. Like a person who
has never sailed, they can learn to shift their weight on the deck, to
tack, to jibe, to feel pleasure rather than fear when the boat heels.
Aristocracy, Tom Paine wrote, is infantile and silly, “it talks about its
fine blue ribbon like a girl, and shows its new garter like a child”: “The
world has seen this folly fall, and it has fallen by being laughed at.”8 In
Paine’s time there were still those who held in their hands the lives of
the untitled poor, who claimed wealth and privilege and power on a
claim no stronger than that of a purebred dog. In Europe, that claim
would still hold fast, for a time.
Aristocracy fell so far and so hard in America that Paine could say,
“If I ask a man in America if he wants a King, he retorts and asks me
if I take him for an idiot?”9 That strength has held fast. No one wants a
king. Claims to the privileges or trappings of a lord would be mocked
unmercifully. Yet elements of the feudal order remain very much with
us, embedded in the law. The old law of master and servant lives dis-
guised in the laws that govern employers and employees.10 The idea of
power in the blood, preserved in hierarchies of race and sex has been
hard to dislodge. Racial and sexual claims to power over others are
among the shards of feudalism. There are still men who demand def-
erence simply for being men, with men’s bodies. There are still women
who are beaten for not accepting this. There are those who insist
people bear the bodies they were born with. There are, we have learned
to our sorrow, still people who long to claim title in their ancestry, who
188 Wild Democracy
believe that “whiteness” is a title to power. This is the whiteness of the

empty page, the whiteness of old bones. It bears a family resemblance
to the claims of aristocracy, in the absurdity of its claims and in the cru-
elty of its exactions. We cannot yet ridicule the claims of race; we are
too close to the bodies hanging from the trees, the bodies shot in the
street. We cannot yet claim to have ended the subjection of women or
the persecution of the queer. We remain under the tyranny of regimes
of sex and sexuality. We will not be free of the feudal until we end the
claims of power in the blood.
Those who seek glory look for a more honorable way to make the
claims aristocrats made. Their efforts are as silly as those of any aris-
tocrat. The prizing of a number of “Facebook friends” or hits on social
media, the self-exposures of celebrities and others famous for being
famous are as easily dismissed as claims to an illustrious ancestry or an
ancient title.
We have more to fear from those who long for money and power.
There are still ambitious people ready to lead (they always mean to
lead) their countries into empire, who persist in the acquisition of
wealth beyond all reason and the exercise of the personal power that
goes with it. We have learned, to our great cost, that there is no limit
to the appetites of the wealthy. They will amass as much power as they
can and use it as they wish. We should be prevent them from using it
to rule others.
We have learned that it is not the passions and appetites of the
people that are to be feared, but the passions and appetites of would-
be autocrats. Our capacity to rule ourselves depends on our ability to
stand against these, to learn the art of not being governed, to make
space for anarchy and in that space cultivate the courage and resources
to rule ourselves.
What do we do with the enemies of democracy? When the people
rule, nothing needs to be done with them at all. They will not become
dangerous in the passion for glory. They will not spread their fears.
They may be a nuisance, but not more. We can carry a few parasites.
When the people rule, they have the strength to carry the weak and
shelter the fearful. People with the strength anarchy builds can ignore
claims to superiority of blood or descent, race or sex or wealth. Such
claims hold no commanding power when everyone rules and is ruled,
when everyone has rights in common. People who rule themselves

learn to set their fears aside, to act with courage in times of crisis, to
place the needs of others before their desires—or their fears. People
who consent to be ruled learn to walk among their enemies unafraid.
We keep our ability to rule ourselves while we keep our courage.
XV
Democratic divinity
76. In ruling themselves, people become divine.
Alexis de Tocqueville is most often remembered not as one who

loved democracy but as one who feared it. Tocqueville’s writings are
filled with an anxious melancholy. He grieves for the lost glory of
aristocrats and Indians. He fears that art and philosophy, poetry and
statesmanship will prove hard to find among the untutored peasants,
smallholders, and frontiersmen of new democracies. His melancholy
envelops readers. His anxieties are read as prophetic. Tocqueville
feared that equality was the aim of democracy, the end of greatness.
The end of inequality seemed to him to entail the loss of glory, beauty,
and grace. He writes, “the sight of such uniformity saddens and chills
me, and I am tempted to regret the state of society that has ceased to
be.” Yet in the end, Tocqueville comes to think otherwise. Divine judg-
ment speaks for democracy:
It is natural to suppose that not the particular prosperity of the few,

but the greater well-being of all, is most pleasing in the sight of the
Creator and Preserver of men. What seems to me decay is in His eyes
progress; what pains me is acceptable to Him. Equality may be less
elevated, but it is more just, and in its justice lies its greatness and
beauty.
Tocqueville sees that it is his duty to understand “this divine view of

the world.”1
We who have seen democratic glory and beauty need have no
fear. We have read the poetry of Whitman and Ginsberg, Dickinson
and Merrill, the novels of Morrison and Melville. We have seen the
paintings of Eakins, Whistler, and O’Keefe, Johns and Rauschenberg.
We have learned to see that courage in battle lies not only in the
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197644348.003.0015
Democratic divinity 191
commander who stands apart but in those who fill the trenches. We
have learned, like e. e. cummings, to see courage in the conscientious
objector, “more brave than me, more blond than you.”2
All of us who long to rule ourselves have seen that greatness and
beauty escape and exceed wealth and privilege. Beauty belongs not
only to Blenheim and the Forbidden City but to the ruins of Chaco
Canyon, the simplicity of a wooden house rising above a klong on the
outskirts of Bangkok. There is Ming pottery, and there is Acoma pot-
tery. There are the paintings of Velasquez, and those of Diego Rivera.
The wisdom of Supreme Court justices falls before the hopes of slaves
and workers.
Beauty and grace, courage and wisdom are not found only among
the great, whether the great are aristocrats or common people.
Tocqueville saw that, in the sight of the divine, beauty belonged to
masses of people who are fed, sheltered, educated and free and who
have made that world together. There is great beauty in the sight of
people studying, working, moving, speaking freely. Beauty belongs
to clean cities with clean water, unsoiled by litter; to clear rivers, filled
with healthy leaping fish; to open beaches free to all.
Divine beauty, Tocqueville saw, belongs not to the few but to the
many, not to evanescent moments but to the constant and enduring
good in ordinary lives. People who live justly, who see that rights are
honored, that people are fed and clothed, cared for and educated, who
think and act freely, build a more just world. “In its justice lies its great-
ness and beauty.”
77. The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Accounts of divinity show us the presence of the people in the umma

and the work of ijma, in the Holy Spirit, in Pentecost, and in the con-
stant unceasing work of people whose homeland is the text. The
Muslim idea of the umma conceives of a people united by faith and a
commitment to a particular text and form of life. They do not, cannot
all live together, for they are spread across the world. The Prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, “My people will not agree upon
an error.”3 This hadith (a verified statement or act of the Prophet)
192 Wild Democracy
captures one of many moments in which the people are understood as

able to speak in accordance with divine will.
The canon gives us the sly, irreverent awe of Rousseau and
Machiavelli. When listing great lawgivers, Machiavelli turns not to
monarchs or statesmen but to the prophets. Rousseau writes, “Gods
are needed to give men laws.”4 When people give laws to themselves,
they become divine.
There are many qualities attributed to gods and other divine beings.
These are not always to be admired. They are said to be merciful, crea-
tive, generous with their blessings, cruel, and destructive. These qual-
ities can be found in animals as well as divinities. Certain attributes,
however, speak directly to the political. In divinity, beings transcend
the limits of time, space, and mortality. These attributes also belong
to people who have become political. Those who are part of a people
live in that people. They transcend the limits of their mortality. This
is not merely a matter of memory. Those people may be forgotten.
Nevertheless, they remain. They are and will always be part of that
people. They are divine in their transcendence. The social contract, the
agreement among people to become a people, transforms each indi-
vidual human being and “from a stupid and limited animal makes him
an intelligent being and a man.”5 Rousseau thought that the creation of
the human was done by man in the form of the divine. Is this another
theory of the Incarnation? Perhaps.
Justice and morality follow in the wake of divinity. There are many
monarchs—Solon and Augustus, Justinian and Alfred, Kanunî Sultan
Süleyman and Napoléon—who have given laws to their people. They
are remembered and venerated, but they are not divine. The capacity
to give the law to oneself calls forth the divine in one and in all. People
who rule themselves have divinity in them. That rule is democratic.
The dominant understandings of sovereignty in our time tend to be
radically undemocratic. The first is the notion, popular among lawyers,
that sovereignty is a legal question, to be settled by laws and experts. In
this view, sovereignty belongs to states (or international organizations)
and operates through existing institutions. This view has no place for
rebellion, and often no place for reform.
The second concept of sovereignty was developed by Carl Schmitt.
It is also, not surprisingly, popular with authoritarian political figures.
Monarchical, authoritarian rule is the form that animates Schmitt’s

concept of sovereignty, effectively eliding the distinction between the
sovereign and the executive. Schmitt erases the distinction between
executive and sovereign power. He and his followers are committed to
an understanding of sovereignty as decisionistic and personalistic for
political and religious reasons. Politically, Schmitt seeks to strengthen
executive power, to reinstall the powers of the sovereign in the execu-
tive and thus recapture what the revolutions of the Enlightenment had
stripped from monarchy. Religiously, Schmitt is committed to the pri-
macy of the Incarnation, to the presence of God’s divine sovereignty in
the person of Christ.
Schmitt’s religious imperative may be attractive to those Christian
evangelicals who, committed to the notion of a personal God in a
quite different sense, likewise insist upon the primacy of the incar-
nate form of the divine sovereign. It may be attractive to the partisans
of ambiguous secularization who wish to preserve the political the-
ology undergirding the not quite secular state. Schmitt’s political
imperative has also found contemporary allies for what American
neoconservatives call “a more authoritarian presidency” and “a more
disciplined democracy.” These commitments are hardly compelling to
democrats—or to republicans. But this is not the only reading available
within a secularized Christian theology, even within Schmitt.
In Political Theology, Schmitt gestures, briefly and allusively, to an-
other form of sovereignty:
In America, this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic

belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God—a belief that is
at the foundation of Jefferson’s victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his ac-
count of American democracy observed that in democratic thought
the people hover above the entire life of the state, just as God does
above the world, as the cause and end of all things, as the point from
which everything emanates and to which everything returns.6
If the installation of sovereignty within the executive is the seculariza-

tion of the Incarnation, we can look to the confluence of language and
diaspora in Pentecost and see a recognition of the sovereignty of the
people.
194 Wild Democracy
In Pentecost, the power and sovereignty of the divine comes not to

one but to the many. The divine comes not in the flesh but as the word.
The divine is sent not to one chosen people but to all peoples. The di-
vine takes form not as a man but as language. I do not mean this as a
return to Christianity alone. Belief in the divinity of language belongs
not to one faith but many. Jews call themselves the people of the book.
Muslims hold the word sacred. For all the children of Abraham, the
word is sacred.
The word is greater than this. Recognition of the divine belongs to
learning as well as religion. In language, people transform themselves.
Alone, in families, in villages, and under the rule of kings—or any au-
thoritarian ruler—people live as animals. They may, if they are for-
tunate, be well provided for. They might even prosper economically.
But they are not fully human. It is only in politics that people become
truly human. And politics is politics only when it is in the hands of the
people, when they gather, debate, deliberate, and give judgment.
Democratic politics is the politics of the word made flesh. People
debate with passion as well as reason, for language is meant to carry
both. Democratic people make laws and follow them; they rule and
are ruled in turn. It is in politics—democratic politics—that people be-
come fully human, for politics is conducted in language, and language
sets us beyond the animal and close to the divine. Politics permits us
transcendence and enables us to approach a common divinity.
In politics people live beyond the limits of a single life. In politics,
people may live according to ideas greater than their own. In politics,
people overcome their individual flaws and collectively find a wisdom
beyond the individual. It is for this reason that in many times, in many
places, and in many languages, people have recognized vox populi, vox
dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God.
In this understanding, in the political theology of a democratic
Pentecost, sovereignty belongs not to the one “who decides on the
exception” but to the people, whose spirit animates democracy like
tongues of fire.
When we are in the midst of the hard work of democratic
politics—building institutions, questioning them, correcting them—
democracy may seem very far indeed from the divine. It may seem
very far from the possible. In this long struggle, belief in the people is
hard to come by. The fire is kept alive in the ashes by memory and by
forgetting.
We must forget, we democrats, that kings and priests were said to
be divinely ordained, that the order of wealth and privilege was said
to be the work of God or nature or the market. Forget those myths
that furnished—that still furnish—the license for oppression. Power
lies in anarchist refusal: “No gods, no masters.” Forget that we have
been scorned and humiliated: walk like gods. Remember those times
when the people rose up and, for a moment, gave the divine speech and
strength and hands to work in the world.
78. The people sing.
I do not know why, but I know the people sing. This will come as no
surprise to those who have heard people singing “We Shall Overcome”
in dark times. The jailers who heard them in Selma and Birmingham
knew that what they heard was not only the voices of the imprisoned
but the voice of the people, the voice of God.7 The people who heard
them heard their own voice raised. So it has been with “Bella Ciao,”
“Glory to Hong Kong,” “Solidarity Forever,” and other songs sung in
hopeful and in desperate times. The people who sang called forth the
divine.
I do not know why the people sing. I know that when they sing, their
voices join. They speak, they sing with one voice. When the people
sing, their differences are lost in the sea of sound. It does not matter if
you sing well or badly, your voice joins with the others in that ocean.
Rich and poor, old and young, people of every sex and race sing. They
sing as one. Their bodies vibrate to that singing. Their voices come out,
join with one another, and as they do the surrounding people feel the
sound of those voices near their heart. They speak and they hear in the
same moment. They sing and they feel the sound. I know that when the
people sing, their bodies carry the common, and yet each one sings.
In singing, the solitude of the body is, for a moment, affirmed and
overcome.
196 Wild Democracy
79. The earth belongs to the living.
In the American democracy, Tocqueville wrote, “the people hover

above the entire life of the state, just as God does above the world, as
the cause and end of all things, as the point from which everything
emanates and to which everything returns.”
Tocqueville’s passage puts the embodiment of the people in doubt.
Are the people present on earth and in the flesh? Thomas Jefferson and
Thomas Paine argued that the earth belonged to the living, to the pre-
sent people in all their mortal power and fragility. Surely the consent
of the governed means the consent of the living people, who bear the
burden of rule. Yet I have learned that for the people themselves this
is not the case. All the people (and all the peoples) I know look to the
dead and the unborn, to their ancestors and to their posterity. They
see themselves as present in the past and the future. They gather in
those people of the past whom they believe belong to them. They look
to them for guidance. They feel a duty to their ancestors. They feel a
duty to the dead. They feel a still greater duty to those who are yet to
come. When a people makes itself in the world, speaks itself into being,
sees itself, the people who do the making see beyond the present. They
open to the future.8
Living people hold the past and the future within them. The tran-
scendent people, living and dead and yet to come, enfold and empower
the living people. This transcendent being, this ineffable sovereignty
is held in the bodies of living people. People hold the memories of the
past, visions of the future, the presence of the past, and the material
beginnings of posterity in their bodies. Sovereignty is inscribed in soul
and cell and synapse.
The presence of a people extends into their memories and their
records of the past, into their plans and hopes for a future they can
build together. Yet it is not in the past or in the future that we should
look for people ruling themselves; it is in the present.
The recognition that the earth belongs to the living is at once
a burden and a liberation. We are free to set the past aside. History
cannot bind us completely; the limits of custom and tradition can be
overcome. When we become people who rule ourselves, we can do
as we think best. The earth is ours, not as a possession but as mother
and child. We are held in it, we are fed by it, we care for it in our turn.
Because we are in this place and in this time we have a duty. We
are called to do justice in the present. That duty falls on each of us.
Everyone is called, every person living in the radical solitude of the
mortal body.
We live in the knowledge of death. As democrats, we know what it is
to face the prospect of our annihilation with courage. Because we are
before death, life is imperative for us. We have a calling. God calls, the
prophets call, the people in their divinity call to one another.
We may warm our hands before the ashes of old struggles. We may
fire our hearts with the desire for justice in the future. Yet it is only in
the present that we can rule ourselves. We are called not to endure but
to overcome. In the song of that name, it is not the refrain “We shall
overcome, someday” that we should sing; it is “We are not afraid today.”
Appendix of imperatives
Have courage. Fear is your enemy, courage your weapon and your
defense. Walk proudly among your enemies.
Keep the open spaces of anarchy.
We are all of equal worth. Act accordingly.
Every right entails a command, an obligation, a duty.
People have a right to self-preservation, to life. Therefore they have
a right to food, to shelter, and to healthcare. We are called both to
demand and to provide these.
People have the right to make themselves as they choose. They have
a right to education, to the tools for their work. They have the
right to move. They have the duty to open the world to others.
Undo empires. Decolonize.
Your rights are yours. They do not depend on legal recognition.
Seize them.
Your rights move with your body into the school, the factory, the
job site, the church, the masjid, and the synagogue, on the road,
in private and in public space. Do not ask permission to exercise
them. Obey their commands.
Assemble. In the flesh, on the internet. You need not ask permission.
Don’t begrudge taxes. Taxes are how we pay for the work we do
together.
Judge. Judge the laws, judge officials, judge others, judge yourself.
Defend the commons. Extend the commons.
Rule the law.
Support no war you will not fight in yourself. Do not ask anyone to
die for you.
200 Appendix of imperatives
Tell the truth. Democracy depends on truth.

Truth depends on democracy. No media or news source should be
concentrated in a few hands or controlled by any concentrated
power: not by the state, not by the wealthy.
Sing.
Acknowledgments
I have debts to both the living and the dead. The Declaration of
Independence, the writings of the Levellers, the Swabian peasants who
gave us their Twelve Theses, Langston Hughes, Vachel Lindsay, Philip
Levine, Allen Ginsberg, e. e. cummings, Sheldon Wolin, Michael
Rogin, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm: people I have known
in the flesh and people I have known only on paper are not among the
living, and yet they live for me. Though she is dead now, the deep dem-
ocratic sensibility of my mother lives in me, my sister, and my brother.
She was the daughter of a coal miner and farmer, granddaughter of
immigrant peasants from every corner of Europe, admirer of the Diné
way. She came out of the open prairie of Illinois and kept that intimate
immensity within her. She taught us democratic manners, a dem-
ocratic ethic, and democratic principles. My father taught me what
honor is among free people. He was a sailor who became an officer,
a captain of ships at war who came to mourn the lives he had taken.
When I saw him, I saw Hector, who took off his plumed helmet so it
would not frighten a child. I watched him live with courage and pas-
sion, love and generosity. He taught me poetry, Japanese aesthetics,
and the shape of stories, to give with an open hand, and to reach for
courage.
When I look back on what I have written I see Adolph Reed, Rogers
Smith, Asim Qureshi, Bruce Kapferer, Thorvald Sirnes, Neil Roberts,
Jane Gordon, Lewis Gordon, Drucilla Cornell, Uday Mehta, Jeff Green,
Michael Hanchard, Eve Troutt Powell, Jim Johnson, Jeffrey Tulis, Sami
al-Arian, James Scott, Joan Scott, Murad Idris, Rob Nichols, Wendy
Brown, Judith Butler, Joe Lowndes, Kevin Bruyneel, K-Sue Park,
Elizabeth Anker, Victoria Hattam, and Deborah Harrold in the pages
of this book. I know I have not done them justice or honored their
work properly. I fear there are those I have forgotten. Joan Scott, Laurie
Balfour, Aisha Ghani, Timothy Pachirat, Jeff Green, Rogers Smith, and
202 Acknowledgments
Jim Morone read versions of the book and guided me to its present
form. Ruth O’Brien and Angela Chnapko are sorcerors of publishing,
swift and daring. Didier Fassin, Bonnie Honig, Susan Buck-Morss,
and Seyla Benhabib, unsurprisingly, surprised me with wisdom at
critical moments. Massimiliano Tomba and Banu Bargu remade my
world. Together in Princeton, we shared food and thought, laughter
and struggle, work, transgression, and love for Teo. None of my work
will have their learning and scholarship, but it will carry their thinking
all the same.
Seminars at the University of California–Santa Cruz, the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, Deakin University, the
University of Bergen, Columbia University, the University of Virginia,
the University of Calgary, and the Center for Islam and Global Studies
at Sabahattin Zaim University contributed to this work in ways that
leave me in their debt. The Institute for Advanced Study gave me time,
a home, new thinking, and new people. I have never been at a better
place. That was the year of Brood X. The rising of the cicadas sounds
like the sea. They come out of the ground en masse, they change, they
fly. They renew the world. I learned from the cicadas as Whitman
learned from the grass.
The people closest to this book have been the graduate students
I worked with in these years, especially Andrew Barnard, Yara Damaj,
Rosie DuBrin, Mackenzie Fierceton, Ashley Gorham, Archana Kaku,
Juman Kim, Gregory Koutnik, Clancy Murray, Gabriel Salgado,
Miranda Sklaroff, and Kimberly White. They will light their time in
their own ways.
Notes
1. Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address

before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838.
http://abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm.
2. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002).
3. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic
Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 25.
4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed.
J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), vol. 2, part 4, chap. 1, 667.
5. Xenophon, “Hiero, or On Tyranny,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 7. Xenophon holds, against Derrida,
that it is tyranny, not democracy, that is “autoimmune” and inevitably calls
forth its own destruction.
6. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1979), 430, 431, 432–433.
7. Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1788,
in The Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution, ed.
Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 305.
8. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Broad-Axe,” in Walt Whitman: The Complete
Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1979), 219.
9. James Scott has written many important and fascinating books on the
power of the state and how people evade it. Two of my favorites are Weapons
of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1987) and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist
History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2010). Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century
Controversies (New York: Viking, 1996); Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1969;
New York: New Press, 2000); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
10. Hobsbawm, Bandits; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.
204 Notes
11. Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” 1958, https://www.woodyguthrie.org/

Lyrics/Pretty_Boy_Floyd.htm. Thanks to Jim Morone for this song.
12. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden
Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Colin Woodard, The Republic of
Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the
Man Who Brought Them Down (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007).
13. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran
(New York: Verso, 2006); Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the
United States (New York: Free Press, 2010), viiii.
14. Russell, A Renegade History of the United States, xii.
15. Vachel Lindsay, “Honor among Scamps,” in Selected Poems of Vachel
Lindsay, ed. Mark Harris (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 107.
16. “The demos is thus never very far away when one speaks of a voyou. Nor
is democracy far from voyoucratie.” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays
on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale- Anne Brault (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 64. I discuss Derrida’s position
in more detail in the chapter “Democracy” in On the Muslim Question
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 118–137.
17. Robert Burns, “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” 1795, http://www.robertburns.
org/works/496.shtml.
18. Sheldon Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33, no. 1 (January 1963): 15–28. This rather ob-
scure article is clear and prescient.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,
1956), 91.
20. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 86–87.
21. This thesis echoes an essay I wrote to honor Sheldon Wolin. I hope that
it carries within it my enduring respect and affection for that great dem-
ocrat and brings something of his clear-sightedness to those who read it.
Anne Norton, “Eveningland,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and
the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 161–170.
II
1. In addition to his effort to make Washington king, an offer Washington

refused, Hamilton made no secret of his ambition to make the new United
States an empire “to rival Europe.” Jay was a rich merchant who shared
Notes 205
Hamilton’s interest in fostering the growth of a wealthy elite and national

capital. Madison, whose ambitions were more moderate than Hamilton’s,
and who distrusted capital, was an early advocate of the American
Colonization Society, which sought to send African Americans back to
Africa.
2. Patrick Henry, quoted in Storing, The Antifederalist, 305.
3. Patrick Henry, quoted in Storing, The Antifederalist, 305.
4. Charles Tilly, “War-Making and State-making as Organized Crime,” in
Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and
Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 171..
5. Constitution of the United States of America, Article 1, section 8.
6. Washington’s Farewell Address is included in the collection of presidential
speeches available from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia,
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/septem
ber-19-1796-farewell-address.
7. The literatures on the indigenous and on settler colonialism are aston-
ishingly rich, and growing. I am especially indebted to the work of Kevin
Bruyneel, Glenn Coulthard, Pekka Hämäläinen, Robert Nichols, K-
Sue Park, and Patrick Wolfe and to conversations with the Pueblo and
Navajo Diné.
8. On the history of the Lakota, see Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A
New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2019). On Standing Rock, see their website: https://standwithstandingr
ock.net/oceti-sakowin/.
9. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books,
1991).Note the entanglement of the desire for glory with the subjection of
women in Roosevelt’s account, 13, 22, 24, 16.
10. Congressional Record: Senate, January 9, 1900, 704–712.
11. Congressional Record: Senate, March 7, 1900, 2620. See also 2616–2630.
12. Congressional Record: Senate, January 9, 1900, 712. Recognition of the
legacy of settler colonialism should not erase the work of those who op-
posed it.
13. “Bryan’s Address on Imperialism,” in William Jennings Bryan: Selections,
ed. Ray Ginger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1967), 66–67. See also Ho
Chi Minh, “Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam,” September 2, 1945, https://shafr.org/sites/default/files/Ho%20
Chi%20Minh-Declaration%20of%20Independence.pdf. It could have
been otherwise.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Prelude in Rhymes,” in The Gay Science, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Random House, 1974), 53.
206 Notes
15. Rudyard Kipling, “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” in Just-So Stories, n.d.,
http://www.boop.org/jan/justso/cat.htm. Kipling’s story is a version of the
myth of the social contract, particularly the version Carole Pateman called
“the sexual contract.” Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). This appears in its clearest form in
Rousseau’s “Discourse on Political Economy.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract, with the Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy,
trans. Judith R. Master, ed. Roger Masters (New York: Bedford, St. Martin’s
Press, 1978). Freud (himself a contractarian of sorts) called these “just-
so stories.” Kipling’s version follows Rousseau’s very closely but deserves
more attention for its treatment of the ambiguities of consent and for its
recognition of the possibility of the preservation of individual freedom.
16. Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1964), 37–39.
17. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 56.
18. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Murphy, Walt Whitman, 68.
19. Bob Marley, “Cornerstone,” on In Memoriam, 1974.
III
1. Summa Theologica, Article 7, Reply to objection 2 and passim.

2. Thomas Rainsborough, quoted in The Putney Debates (New York: Verso), 69.
3. Malik el Shabazz (Malcolm X), “Message to the Grassroots,” December
10, 1963, Black Past, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-hist
ory/speeches-african-american-history/1963-malcolm-x-message-gra
ssroots/.
4. Sternchenproductions, “Solidarity with the People of Egypt,” YouTube,
January 29, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hBV0ApIh_4.
5. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
6. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards
Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002), 43, 44, 4, 52.
7. Weil, The Need for Roots, 43, 44, 4, 52. Weil is astute in her recognition of
the destructive effects dependence on money has on individuals, and im-
perialism has on nations. Her preference for settler colonialism is less dis-
cerning. (“There is a minimum of uprootedness when the conquerors are
migrants who settle down in the conquered country” [44].)
Notes 207
8. Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Frederick

Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library
of America, 1994). See also David Owen, What We Owe to Refugees
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020) and Joseph Carens, Culture,
Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as
Evenhandedness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. Rogers Smith, “Living in a Promiseland?: Mexican Immigration and
American Obligations,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 3 (September
2011): 545–557.
10. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Common Sense, Rights of Man, and
Other Essential Writings (New York: Penguin, 2003), 90.
11. I am grateful to Danielle Hanley for sharing this piece of Talmudic wisdom.
IV
1. Legal Information Institute, Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A.

Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1865), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/
text/60/393.
2. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/
274us200. Oyez.com, “a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information
Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law—is a multimedia
archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States acces-
sible to everyone.”
3. See Kim Scheppele, “Facing Facts in Legal Interpretation,” Representations
30 (Spring 1990): 41–77.
4. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), https://www.law.cornell.
edu/supremecourt/text/323/214.
5. James Baldwin, “In Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966, https://
www.thenation.com/article/archive/report-occupied-territory-2/.
6. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),Second Treatise, II: 240,
p. 427.
7. “Freedom’s Plow,” in Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold
Rampersand (New York: Knopf 1994), 265–266. If you have not read this
poem, read the whole.
8. Didier Fassin, The Will to Punish (New York: Oxford University Press,
2018), esp. 120–125; Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The
208 Notes
Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2006).
9. I am grateful to Asher Wycoff for reminding me that people make laws not
only to achieve justice and the fullness of their rights but to make them-
selves. Alien laws do not command.
10. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 82, 81.
11. George Washington, “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport,
Rhode Island, 18 August 1790,” Founders Online, https://founders.archi
ves.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135.
12. ibid.
13. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 3.
14. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), book 3, chapter 11, 100–101. I thank Ashley Gorham for
reminding me of this passage. The attentive reader may find, as I have,
that this passage, echoed in Al-Farabi, can be read with a more demo-
cratic inflection. Aristotle anticipates objections to his arguments and
notes his own doubts about whether the excellence of the multitude might
equal (or surpass) that of excellent men, and whether there might be some
multitudes who are no better than beasts.
15. Al Farabi, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, trans. and annotated by
Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001),
Aphorism 57.
16. Al Farabi, Alfarabi, Aphorism 10.
17. Cade Metz, “Oh, the Monotony of Shifting the Tedium to A.I.,” New York
Times, August 18, 2019, Business sec., 1.
18. Metz, “Oh, the Monotony,” 5. For a fuller and quite different approach
to this question, see Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics,
Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2012).
19. William Jennings Bryan, or so the poet says that he said. I cannot find this
phrase in Bryan, so I credit Vachel Lindsay, in his poem “Bryan, Bryan,
Bryan.”
20. I am grateful to James Morone for pointing this fact out to me.
21. This thesis and the one that follows were prompted by Sophie Rosenfeld’s
Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
22. Bob Drogin, “ ‘The Great Successor’ Paints a Macabre Portrait of Kim Jong
Un,” Baltimore Sun, August 24, 2019, www.baltimoresun.com/great-succes
Notes 209
sor-kim-jong-un-anna-fifield-review-story.html; See also Anna Fifield,

The Great Successor (New York: Hachette, 2019); Julian Ryall, “The
Incredible Kim Jong-il and His Amazing Achievements,” The Telegraph,
January 31, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/nor
thkorea/8292848/The-Incredible-Kim-Jong-il-and-his-Amazing-Achie
vements.html.
1. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1968), 557a.
2. Plato, The Republic, 557c. Those translations, including Bloom’s, that give
the Greek as “fair” undermine the condemnation of surface beauty by
acknowledging the presence of justice.
3. It is Thrasymachus, an aristocrat with an aggressive, even tyrannical dispo-
sition, who objects to the simple life initially proposed in the Republic. His
objection moves the dialogue from the never rejected but much disdained
“city of pigs” to the elaborate, hierarchical, and rigid constructions of the
later Republic.
4. The democratic possibilities of revealed religion are visible in Michel
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Exodus and
Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986), in the writings of Thomas
Müntzer, in the Putney Debates, and in liberation theology, among many
other places.
5. Al Farabi, “The Political Regime,” trans. Fauzi Najjar, in Medieval Political
Philosophy, ed. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Collier
Macmillan, 1963), 51.
6. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay: 10.
8. Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasantry, in The Revolution of 1525: The
German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, ed. Peter Bickle, Thomas
A. Brady Jr., and H. C. Eric Midelfort (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
9. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(New York: Verso, 2006).
10. Philip Baker, ed., The Putney Debates (New York: Verso, 2007), 69.
210 Notes
11. Ireton was clear. It was only those “who had a permanent and fixed
interest in this kingdom,” that is to say, those with property, wealth,
or title, who should have any “interest or share” in governance. The
Levellers and The Putney Debates, ed. Philip Baker (New York: Verso,
2007), 69–70.
12. Plato, Republic, 557a.
13. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
14. W. E. B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk. See also Anne Norton, “Law
Breaker,” in A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Neil Roberts
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018), for an account of the role
of precarity in Douglass’s reconception of the democratic subject.
15. Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Politics & Society 18, no. 4
(December 1990): 427–454. See also Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
16. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, University of Chicago Press, 2004), 26.
17. The autocrat, Xenophon and Arendt variously remind us, breeds fear.
See Xenophon’s “Hiero” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000); Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
18. Plato, Republic, 463a.
VI
1. Deborah Harrold provided this clear and succinct description.

2. Langston Hughes, “Freedom’s Plow,” in The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994),
264.
3. Thomas Paine, “The Necessity of Taxation,” April 4, 1782, Thomas Paine
National Historical Association, https://thomaspaine.org/recently-dis
covered/the-necessity-of-taxation.html.
4. This is an ideal and imperative I was taught by the Diné, also called the
Navajo.
5. Anand Giridharadas discusses this with ruthless and revealing
clarity in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
Notes 211
VII
1. Al Farabi, “The Political Regime,” 51.

2. Hughes, “Freedom’s Plow,” 267.
3. The first reference is to the principle of ijma, an endorsement of popular
sovereignty and the capacity for judgment in the Muslim tradition. It is
echoed in the second reference, which comes from the Christian tradition.
4. For an account of this in the United States, see Sanford Levinson, Our
Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How
We the People Can Correct It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
5. See Wendy Brown’s brilliant critique of best practices in Undoing the
Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
This is a profoundly practical and democratic book.
6. Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
7. These processes have been usefully described by a number of theorists,
notably Michel Foucault. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the rhizomatic
takes on a darker and less emancipatory form in this context. Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
8. https://w ww.thelocal.es/20190221/spains-king-felipe-speaks-out-dur
ing-catalan-separatists-trial.
9. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 64–68.
10. One of the few who calls himself a populist and maintains the policies
and memory—and intellectual genealogy—of the People’s Party is Jim
Hightower of Texas (jimhightower.com). Hightower’s popularity in Texas,
along with that of the late Molly Ivins, should prompt people to reconsider
their view of Texas as a conservative state.
11. See, for example, Jan-Werner Mueller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
12. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of
Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
13. Sheldon Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33, no. 1 (January 1963): 15–28.
14. Levinson provides an example of how to do this in his book Our
Undemocratic Constitution.
15. Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
16. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 9.
212 Notes
17. Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality, 10.

18. Thanks to Tariq Thachil, who showed this handwritten set of electoral
rules to me.
VIII
1. Sanford Levinson, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” Yale Law

Journal 99 (1989): 637–659.
2. Weil, The Need for Roots, 296.
3. Weil, The Need for Roots, 296.
IX
1. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran

(New York: Verso, 2006), 73–74. As Rancière writes, our freedoms “were
won through democratic action and are only ever guaranteed through
such action.”
2. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 7. I take “feudalism,” as Davis does, as a
recursive political category and concur in her judgment that the term
“feudal” has functioned as a strategy of denial in a proud modernity, fixing
disavowed hierarchies in the past as it veiled their presence in the present.
3. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development
in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2.
Michael Hanchard suggests the term “feudality” to describe the enduring
laws, institutions, practices, and dispositions that carry feudal servitude
through the centuries into the present.
4. Orren, Belated Feudalism.
5. Anne Norton, Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh and
Revolution (London: Routledge, 2002).
6. The present moment is seeing an efflorescence of work on the genealogies
of race. Gabriel Salgado is giving a genealogy of race in Latin America,
charting how the blood purity laws of the Inquisition were transformed
into the racial regimes of colonial and postcolonial rule.
7. There is a large and powerful literature on race and science. I particularly
commend the work of Dorothy Roberts and Adolph Reed.
Notes 213
8. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in

Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946), 128.
9. Hughes, “Freedom’s Plow,” 267.
10. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Harper & Row, 1982), v.
1. I am grateful to the Ghanaian student who pointed this out to his as-
tonished classmates in my seminar some years ago. I am ashamed to say
I have forgotten his last name. His first name is Justice.
2. For a fuller and more scholarly discussion, see Demetra Kasimis, The
Perpetual Immigrant: Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
3. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New
History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 2021).
4. Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universalities: An Alternative Legacy of
Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). This book gives us
hope and reason for hope. It teaches what has been built and how it might
be built again.
5. John Locke, Second Treatise on Government.
6. Locke, Second Treatise on Government.
7. Famous correctives were offered by Carole Pateman in The Sexual
Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Charles
Mills in The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
8. Tomba, Insurgent Universality, 154– 159 on the mir, 71–119 on the
Commune.
XI
1. Quoted in Aristide Zolberg, “Moments of Madness,” Politics and Society 2,

no. 2 (1972): 183–207.
2. Zolberg, “Moments of Madness,” 185.
3. Henri Lefèbvre, La Proclamation de la Commune 26 mars 1871
(Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 11.
214 Notes
4. Lefebvre, Proclamation, 389.

5. Lefebvre, Proclamation, 390, 389.
6. Quoted in Zolberg, “Moments of Madness,” 195.
7. Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1788, 305.
8. I am grateful to Michael Lamb for his work on Augustine, and what it
taught me.
9. AFSCME, “ ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,”
April 3, 1968, 6. https://www.afscme.org/union/history/mlk/ive-been-
to-the-mountaintop-by-dr-martin-luther-king-jr. That which makes you
part of a people gives you a future beyond your life and opens the possi-
bility of political transcendence.
XII
1. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and Other Essential
Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Penguin, 1984), 142. Paine was
referring to Matthew 3:10.
2. Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of
Wendell Berry (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2003), 58.
3. The project was the thought and work of Gunter Demnig. It is one of the
most brilliant and thoughtful artistic works I have ever seen. This is demo-
cratic art: speaking of the many to the many, calling each passerby to judge.
4. Honor the stories and visions of the flying African. See Henry Louis
Gates and Maria Tatar, eds., The Annotated African American Folktales
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 73–83; Rhiannon Giddens, “We Could
Fly,” on Freedom Highway, 2017.
6. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech at the Lincoln Memorial,
August 28, 1963. https://www.archives.gov/files/social-media/transcri
pts/transcript-march-pt3-of-3-2602934.pdf. King is quoting scripture.
Amos 5:24.
XIII
1. Thomas Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes,” in Wu Ming Presents Thomas

Müntzer (New York: Verso, 2010), 4–5. As Müntzer noted, it is not always
the religious who are given this gift. Like Müntzer, I have heard many
Notes 215
claim to speak to God, or claim that God has spoken to them, or that they
have knowledge open only to believers, and watched as their conduct
convicted them.
2. For an excellent discussion of the boss, see Elizabeth Anderson,
How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2017).
3. Council of Europe, Commissioner for Human Rights, “Child Labour in
Europe: A Persisting Challenge,” August 20, 2013, https://www.coe.int/
en/web/commissioner/-/child-labour-in-europe-a-persisting-challen-1.
4. Rancière refuses Arendt’s distinction between political life and what
Agamben has called “bare life” in Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of
the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2–3 (2004): 297–310.
5. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 47.
XIV
1. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 23.

2. Philip Baker, ed, The Putney Debates (New York: Verso, 2007), 69.
3. George Cruikshank and (probably) William Hone, Political Alphabet,
a pamphlet published anonymously in 1820. Available from the British
Library. Quoted in Eric Partridge, Comic Alphabets (New York: Routledge
Revivals 2015), 35.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House Vintage, 1974), section 61. I discuss friend-
ship more extensively in Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 35–37. It is
telling that Jacques Derrida punctuates The Politics of Friendship with
the apocryphal “Oh, friends, there is no friend!” Politics of Friendship
(New York: Verso 2005), 1 and passim.
5. Havamal, http://www.publiclibrary.uk/ebooks/43/74.pdf, 5, 6. The Norse
account, like that of Aristotle, acknowledges a hierarchy of friendships.
I have changed the text slightly.
6. Aristotle, Nichomachaean Ethics, books 8 and 9.
7. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 36.
8. Paine, The Rights of Man, 183–184, 185.
9. Paine, The Rights of Man, 233.
10. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
216 Notes
XV
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed.

J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper, 1988), 704.
2. e. e. cummings, “I sing of Olaf glad and big,” in e. e. cummings: Complete
Poems 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, W. W.
Norton, 2015), 362.
3. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford
University Press 1962), 229–230. See also Nigel Coulson, Conflicts and
Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1969), 20–39.
4. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger Masters, Book 2, chapter 7
(New York: St. Martin’s Press 1978), 68.
5. Rousseau, Du contrat social, book 1, chapter 8 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 1972), 119.
6. Schmitt, Political Theology, 49.
7. I learned this from Colin Zelicoff, whose work on music in politics taught
me the power of singing in the civil rights movement. When he spoke to
the late Congressman John Lewis about this, Lewis told him, “Without
music, the civil rights movement was a bird without wings.”
8. Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: The Semantics of Historical Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). This, perhaps, is the con-
nection of the rule of the people to modernity. If, as Koselleck declared,
modernity is the epoch that opens itself to the new then it is, at least at that
one point, allied to the democratic.
Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
abortion, 20 erosion of right, 47–48

Abu Ghraib, 146–47 right of, 47–50
African Americans Athens
Civil Rights Movement, 147–48 death and, 41
fear and, 18 democracy in, 79–80, 150–52, 153,
poverty and, 97 155, 164
segregation and, 181 law in, 41
Agamben, Giorgio, 215n.4 Auerbach, Adam, 126
Alcibiades, 41 Augustine, 164
Algeria, military rule in, 109–10 Augustus, 192
Altgeld, John Peter, 113–14 authoritarianism
althing, 152, 153 anarchy versus, 6, 7
American Revolution, 100, 133–34, appeal of, 3–4
166, 181 bureaucratic forms of, 5
anarchy criticism of, 5–6
assembly, relation to, 53–54, 173–74 fear and, 6–7, 15–19
authoritarianism versus, 6, 7 private weapons and, 135–36
democracy, relation to, 7–8, 9, 91–92 restraint of, 4
Aquinas, Thomas, 43–44 truth versus, 81
Arendt, Hannah, 6–7, 38, 181,
210n.17, 215n.4 Baldwin, James, 65–66, 67
aristocracy, 187–88 bandits, 9–14
Aristotle, 35, 70, 76, 150, 155, 156–57, beauty, 190–91
186, 208n.14 Beauvoir, Simone de, 159
armed force Beccaria, Cesare, 154–55
civilians and, 131 Berlusconi, Silvio, 124
democracy, as threat to, 130–31 Berry, Wendell, 5, 166
revolution and, 130 Beveridge, Albert, 33–34
arrogance, democracy and, 87–88 Bill of Rights, 29, 107–8
artificial intelligence, 77 Bodin, Jean, 154–55
al-Assad, Hafez, 81 body
assembly democracy and, 181–82
anarchy, relation to, 53–54, 173–74 rights as grounded in, 43–46, 180
courage and, 48 self-rule and, 181–82
democracy, relation to, 53–54, 173–74 Bolivia, coups in, 109–10
218 Index
Borbón, Felipe, 110 rights in, 60

Bourdieu, Pierre, 14 wisdom of, 8–9
Brown, Wendy, 181, 183 conservatives
Bryan, William Jennings, 34–35, 78, conservative nature of democracy,
208n.19 166–68, 169–70
Buck, Carrie, 64 leftists versus, 88
Buck v. Bell (1927), 64–65 poverty, on, 96
bureaucracies, 108 conspiracy theories, 125
Burke, Edmund, 5, 37, 166 Constitution, 29, 33, 130–31, 135, 173
Burns, Robert, 15 constitutionalism, 107–8
Bush, George W., 126–27 corporations, democracy and, 178–81
Butler, Judith, 95, 97 cosmopolitanism
Bryon, George Gordon, 151 democracy, of, 86–88
leftists and, 88
capital punishment, 21 country, democracy and, 175–76
Catalonia, 110–11 courage
“The Cat That Walked by Himself ” assembly and, 48
(Kipling), 39 democracy, requirement for, 19–25
celebration, democracy as time of, 159–61 elections and, 118
Chartism, 113–14 enemies, living with, 22
chauvinism, 89 loss and, 25
Cherokee (Keetowah,Tslagai) 33, 54 “taking things lightly” and, 20–21
child labor, 180 courts, liberal reliance on, 109
Chile, coups in, 109–10 creation, democracy as time of, 163
Christianity crisis, executive energy and, 127–29
Holy Spirit, 191–92 Cromwell, Oliver, 15
outcasts and, 13
Pentecost, 191–92, 193–94 danger, democracy as time of, 162–63
Church of Latter Day Saints, 32 Darrow, Clarence, 78
cities, democracy and, 174–75 Davis, Kathleen, 142, 212n.2
citizens, 35–38 death
civilians, armed force and, 131 democracy and, 23–24, 25, 197
Civil Rights Movement, 147–48 war, in, 32
Civil War, 176 decentralization, 121–25
Cold War, 146–47 community and, 121–22
colonialism ethic, as, 123
equality and, 184 institutions, of, 121
history of, 146–47 media and, 124–25
imperialism and, 32–33 online communities and, 122
“place in the world” and, 55 ordering principle, as, 123
Columbus, Christopher, 24 politics and, 123–24, 125
commons Declaration of Independence
economic commons, 98, 156 conservatism and, 166
friendship and, 186 imperialism versus, 33–34
rights held in common, 59–61 inalienability of rights, 37
community judgment and, 87
decentralization and, 121–22 law and, 61, 69
“place in the world” and, 54–57 rebellion and, 28, 60–61
Index 219
slavery versus, 184 recall of officials, 125–26

Deleuze, Gilles, 211n.7 risk and, 26–27
Demnig, Gunter, 214n.3 sacred time, as, 164
democracy shabbiness of, 14–15
armed force as threat to, 130–31 social realm, inseparability from, 181
assembly, relation to, 173–74 sovereign, citizens as, 35, 36–37
body and, 181–82 struggle, as, 145–48
canon of Western political philosophy subject, citizens as, 35–36
versus, 154–58 superseding law, as, 70–72
celebration, as time of, 159–61 taxation and, 100–4
cities and, 174–75 tolerance of undemocratic, 92–93
conservative nature of, 166–68, 169–70 truth, requirement of, 78–81
corporations and, 178–81 upward movement of, 170–71
cosmopolitanism of, 86–88 voice of God and, 191–95
country and, 175–76 war and, 131–34
courage, requirement of, 19–25 wisdom of free people and, 76–78
creation, as time of, 163 democratic ethics, 20–21
danger, as time of, 162–63 democratic politics, 194–95
diversity of, 82–86 demos, 79–80, 94, 106, 150–51
divinity and, 190–91 Derrida, Jacques, 13–14, 108, 109–10,
downward movement of, 171–72 156–57, 193, 204n.16
elections and, 117–18 Devi, Phoolan, 10
enemies of, living with, 186–89 Dickinson, Emily, 190–91
episodic nature of, 159 dictatorship. See authoritarianism
equality as proper to, 183–84 Diné (Navajo), 183, 210n.4
eternal time of, 164–65 Diogenes, 86–87
excessive nature of, 90–92 diversity of democracy, 82–86
executive energy in, 126–29 divinity
freedom, requirement of, 120–21 beauty and, 190–91
friendship and, 185–86 democracy and, 190–91
fugitive nature of, 149 justice and, 192
genealogies of, 150–54 law and, 192
generative nature of, 90–92 morality and, 192
humanity, requirement of, 93–99 “voice of God” and, 191–95
imperative mandate, 125–26 Donne, John, 182
imperialism versus, 29–35 Dorr Rebellion, 181
inequality as corrupting, 184–85 Douglass, Frederick, 56, 97
institutions, insufficiency of in downward movement of
ensuring, 115–17 democracy, 171–72
justice and 105–7 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 63–64
loss and, 25 du Bois, W.E.B., 97
patriotism and, 88–90 duties
poverty and, 94–99 rights, relation to, 60–61
private institutions and, 176–78 taxation, relation to, 103–4
private weapons in, 134–36
progressive nature of, 168–70 Eakins, Thomas, 190–91
punishment and, 136–37 “earth belongs to the living,” 196–97
radical nature of, 166–70 Eco, Umberto, 114–15
220 Index
Edmund Pettis Bridge, 148 labor law, in, 142–43

Egypt race and, 142–45
coups in, 109–10 sex and, 142–45
Egyptian Revolution, 15–16, 19–20, Finkielkraut, Alain, 115
48–49, 161 Floyd, George, 67
ejido, 152 Floyd, “Pretty Boy,” 10
elections food, right to, 43–44
courage and, 118 fortitude, poverty and, 96
democracy and, 117–18 Foucault, Michel, 121, 211n.7
imperative mandate, 125–26 France
recall of officials, 125–26 canon of Western political philosophy
elites, populism versus, 115 in, 154–55
empire. See imperialism French Revolution, 35, 79, 125–26
enemies of democracy, living Gilets Jaunes, 115
with, 186–89 July Monarchy, 160–61
English Civil War, 63 National Front, 112–13
episodic nature of democracy, 159 National Rally, 112–13
equality freedom
colonialism and, 184 assembly, of (see assembly)
democracy, as proper to, 183–84 competing histories of, 145–48
populism and, 115 democracy, requirement for, 120–21
slavery versus, 184 “left alone,” desire to be, 7–9
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 112–13 movement, of, 44
eternal time of democracy, 164–65 obedience and, 39, 40–42
eugenics, 65, 78 press, of, 51–52
Eveningland fable, 23–25 private weapons and, 134–36
excessive nature of democracy, 90–92 punishment and, 136–37
executive energy, 126–29 slavery and, 148
speech, of (see speech, freedom of)
Facebook, 124 “Freedom’s Plow ” (Hughes), 68
faith, truth versus, 81 free market, 116
Al-Farabi, 76–77, 83–84, 85, 92, 105, free people
208n.14 canon of Western political philosophy
fear as forged against, 154–58
authoritarianism and, 6–7, 15–19 “carrying the democratic,” 176–78
democracy, as threat to, 109–10 executive energy and, 126–29
enemies of democracy and, 186–87 fear of, 108
free people, of, 108 law, right to judge, 67–72, 73
glory, relation to, 30 national greatness as measure of work
imperialism and, 29–30 of, 102–3
liberalism and, 108–9 policing of, 137
nuclear weapons and, 16–17 possibility of misrule by, 106
poor, of, 94–95 private weapons and, 134–36
racial hierarchies and, 18 punishment and, 136–37
terrorism and, 17 rights of, 37
women and, 18 singing and, 195
Federalists, 29–30 steering by, 119–20
feudalism, 141–45 “voice of God” and, 191–95
Index 221
war and, 131–34 Haymarket riot, 113–14, 146–47

wisdom of, 76–78 healthcare, right to, 43–44
Freud, Sigmund, 155, 206n.15 heckling, 52
friendship, democracy and, 185–86 Hegel, G.W.F., 23–25, 154–55
fugitive nature of democracy, 149 Henry, Patrick, 7–8, 29–30, 31, 162–
Fugitive Slave Act, 149 63, 167–68
Hightower, Jim, 211n.10
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hill, Christopher, 8, 158
140, 141 Hinduism, 13
gender, feudalism and, 142–45 Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief
genealogies of democracy, 150–54 Joseph), 31–32
generative nature of democracy, 90–92 Hiroshima bombing, 146–47
Germany Hoar, George, 33–35
canon of Western political philosophy Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 99, 154–56
in, 154–55 Hobsbawm, Eric, 8, 10, 158
Third Reich, 63 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 64
Gilroy, Paul, 8 Holocaust, 167
Ginsberg, Allan, 190–91 Holt, Thomas, 158
glory Holy Spirit, 191–92
enemies of democracy and, 188 homogeneity, democracy and, 85–86
fear, relation to, 30 Houellebecq, Michel, 115
imperialism and, 30–35 Hughes, Langston, 68, 69, 101,
Goyaałé (Geronimo), 31–32 105, 145–46
Graeber, David, 98, 152 humanity as requirement for
granges, 175–76 democracy, 93–99
Greece humility, democracy and, 87–88
austerity in, 153–54 Hurricane Irma, 127–28
Golden Dawn Party, 112–13 Hurricane Katrina, 127–28
independence, struggle for, 151 Hurricane Maria, 127–28
Guantanamo Bay, 67, 146–47
Guattari, Felix, 211n.7 Ibn Khaldun, 95, 96, 97, 98–99
guns ijma, 191–92, 211n.3
authoritarianism and, 135–36 imperative mandate, 125–26
democracy, in, 134–36 imperatives, 199–200
revolution and, 135 imperialism
Guthrie, Woody, 10 colonialism and, 32–33
democracy versus, 29–35
Habermas, Jürgen, 156–57 fear and, 29–30
hadith, 191–92 glory and, 30–35
Hagar, 13 opposition to, 34–35
Hamilton, Alexander, 29–30, 31, 126–27, racism and, 147
204–5n.1 United Kingdom and, 184
Hanchard, Michael, 212n.3 United States and, 31–35
Hartz, Louis, 142 indigenous peoples. See also
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Mohawks, specific people
Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and foreigners and, 150–51
Senecas), 121–22, 152, 164 harms committed against, 71
Hávamál, 185–83 populism and, 114
222 Index
inequality as corrupting divinity and, 192

democracy, 184–85 liberalism as insufficient for, 111–12
ingenuity, poverty and, 97–98 superseding law, as, 70–72
institutions undemocratic governments and, 105–7
decentralization of, 121 Justinian, 192
democracy, insufficiency of in
ensuring, 115–17 Kant, Immanuel, 154
private institutions, democracy Kanunî Sultan Süleyman, 192
and, 176–78 Kim Jong Un, 81
totalitarianism and, 116 King, Martin Luther Jr., 164–65
Ireton, Henry, 95–96, 210n.11 Kipling, Rudyard, 56–57, 206n.15
Iroquois Confederacy. See Korematsu v. United States (1944), 65
Haudenosaunee Koselleck, Reinhardt, 216n.8
Ishmael, 13 Krishna, 13
Islam Kropotkin, Peter, 98, 100
democracy and, 85 Ku Klux Klan, 146–47
hadith, 191–92
ijma, 191–92, 211n.3 labor law, 142–43
outcasts and, 13 Lacan, Jacques, 95
revelation and, 84 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier 133–34
shebab, 14 Lafayette Escadrille, 133–34
umma, 191–92 Lakota, 32
Italy, canon of Western political Landemore, Hélène, 78
philosophy in, 154–55 law
Ivins, Molly, 211n.10 democracy as superseding, 70–72
divinity and, 192
January 6 insurrection, 49–50 free people, right to judge law, 67–
Japanese internment, 65, 146–47 72, 73
Jay, John, 29 justice as superseding, 70–72
Jefferson, Thomas, 7–8, 175 labor law, 142–43
Jim Crow laws, 65–66 liberalism, reliance of on, 109, 139
Judaism rights, relation to, 61–62
exile of Jews, 54 rights as superseding, 57–58, 61–62
outcasts and, 13 rule of law, limitations of, 63–67
judgment ruling law versus being ruled by
democracy, relation to, 72–76 law, 63–70
in everyday life, 73, 74 Lebanese uprising, 161
free people, right to judge law, 67– Lefebvre, Henri, 160
72, 73 leftists, conservatives versus, 88
honing of, 74, 76 Lenape, 183
social change and, 74–75 Leviathan, 156
tolerance and, 73–74 Levinson, Sanford, 134–35
juries Lewis, John, 216n.7
community and, 70 liberalism
jury nullification, 73, 123 courts, reliance on, 109
justice democracy versus, 108
democracy as necessary but not fear and, 108–9
sufficient condition for, 105–7 justice, as insufficient for, 111–12
Index 223
law, reliance on, 109, 139 Meno, 41

liberty and, 112 Merrill, James, 190–91
life and, 112 Mexican War, 32
problem of, 107–12 migration, 44, 46–47, 56, 113, 146–47
property and, 112 military power. See armed force
rights and, 107 Mill, John Stuart, 98, 154
self-rule versus, 111 mir, 121–22, 152, 157–58
liberty Montaigne, Michel de, 154–55
liberalism and, 112 Montesquieu, 154–55
right to, 44, 45, 46–47 Morales, Evo, 114
life morality, divinity and, 192
liberalism and, 112 Mormon Wars, 32
right to, 45, 46 Morrison, Toni, 190–91
Lincoln, Abraham, 4 Morsi, Mohamed, 15–16
Lincoln Brigade, 133–34 movement, freedom of, 44, 54–57
Lincoln Memorial, 167 Muhammad, 13, 105, 141, 191–92
Lindsay, Vachel, 12, 208n.19 Mujica, José, 114
Linebaugh, Peter, 158 Müntzer, Thomas, 177–78, 214–15n.1
Locke, John, 111, 112, 145, 154–56 Murdoch, Rupert, 124
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 32–34 Murphy, Frank, 65
Long, Huey, 112–13 Muscogee, 183
López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 114 Mustafa, Farouk, 103–4
loss My Lai Massacre, 146–47
courage and, 25
democracy and, 25 Napoléon, 35, 192
solidarity through, 95, 97, 98 Native Americans, 31–32, 33
lot, selection of leaders by, 118–19 natural disasters, 26, 27, 127–28
love Negri, Antonio, 95, 148
country, of, 88–90, 102 New Zealand
land, of, 89 indigenous peoples in, 71
lynching, 18 nonhumans, rights of, 44–45
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38–39, 92, 102, 141,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 8, 39, 48, 95, 154, 154, 155, 185
155, 156, 192 Nimiipuu (Nez Percé), 31–32
Madison, James, 29, 204–5n.1 nuclear weapons, 16–17
Maison des Esclaves, 167
Malcolm X (Malik el Shabazz), 47–48 obedience
Maori, 71 freedom and, 39, 40–42
March on Washington, 47–48 punishment and, 136–37
Marcuse, Herbert, 73 Occupy Wall Street, 179
Marx, Karl, 154, 155, 156 O’Keefe, John, 190–91
McCarthyism, 146–47 online communities, 122
media “open hands,” democracy and, 90–93
decentralization and, 124–25 Orban, Viktor, 112–13
freedom of press, 51–52 Orren, Karen, 142–43
Medici family, 155 outcasts, 13
Mehta, Uday, 98 outlaws, 9–14
memorials, 167 Overing, Joanna, 98
224 Index
Oyez.com, 207n.2 press, freedom of, 51–52

pride in democracy, 87, 91
Paine, Thomas, 57, 101, 103, 133–34, privacy, right of, 50–51
166, 187–88 private weapons
Palestinians, 54, 128 authoritarianism and, 135–36
panchayat, 121–22 democracy, in, 134–36
Panthéon, 167 revolution and, 135, 136
Paris Commune, 35, 158, 160 privileges, rights versus, 58
Pateman Carole, 206n.15 progressive nature of democracy, 168–70
patriotism property
chauvinism and, 89 liberalism and, 112
democracy and, 88–90 slavery and, 112
Pentecost, 191–92, 193–94 punishment, 136–37
people. See free people pursuit of happiness, right to, 45, 47
People’s Party, 34–35, 113, 175–76, Putney Debates, 95, 183
211n.10
Perón, Juan, 112–13 QAnon, 50
Philippines, American colonialism in, Quran, 85, 141
32–33, 34–35
Piaroa, 98 race
pirates, 9–14 African Americans (see African
“place in the world,” right to, 54–57 Americans)
Plato, 14, 70, 82, 83–85, 86–87, 95, 96, 98, feudalism and, 142–45
99, 148, 155, 209n.3 segregation and, 181
policing of free people, 137 racism
politics imperialism and, 147
decentralization and, 123–24, 125 populism, misidentification with, 114
democratic politics, 194–95 segregation, 181
rights and, 181 radical nature of democracy, 166–70
populism, 112–15 Rainsborough, Thomas, 46, 47, 95–
elites versus, 115 96, 183–84
equality and, 115 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 138–39,
indigenous peoples and, 114 212n.1, 215n.4
Latin America, in, 114 Rauschenberg, Robert, 190–91
misidentification of, 112–13, 114–15 Rawls, John, 99, 111–12, 156–57
pluralism and, 113–14 rebellion, 28–29
racism, misidentification with, 114 recall of officials, 125–26
poverty Rediker, Marcus, 158
African Americans and, 97 republicanism, 107–8
conservatives on, 96 revelation, 84
democracy and, 94–99 revolution
democratic drive and, 99 armed force and, 130
fear of poor, 94–95 private weapons and, 135, 136
fortitude and, 96 unfinished status of, 141–45
ingenuity and, 97–98 rights
loss, solidarity through, 95, 97, 98 assembly, 47–50
precarity of, 95–96 body, as grounded in, 43–46, 180
self-rule and, 141 citizens, of, 37–38
Index 225
common, held in, 59–61 satyagraha, 140

duties, relation to, 60–61 Schmitt, Carl, 75, 120, 126–27,
food, 43–44 192–93
free people, of, 37 science, 116–17
healthcare, 43–44 Scopes trial, 78
inalienability of, 58–59 Scott, James, 8, 96, 125, 203n.9
law, relation to, 61–62 Second Amendment, 134–35
liberalism and, 107 “security contractors,” 133
liberty, 44, 45, 46–47 segregation, 181
life, 45, 46 self-rule
movement, freedom of, 44, 54–57 body and, 181–82
nonhumans, of, 44–45 discipline, as, 38–42, 139–41
“place in the world,” 54–57 divinity and, 190–91
politics and, 181 lack of true self-rule, 106–7, 138–
press, freedom of, 51–52 39, 145
privacy, 50–51 liberalism versus, 111
privileges versus, 58 poverty and, 141
pursuit of happiness, 45, 47 separation of powers, 123
shelter, 43–44 sex, feudalism and, 142–45
silence, 50–51 sexuality, 186
speech, freedom of, 50–53 shabbiness of democracy, 14–15
subjects, of, 37–38 shebab, 14
superseding law, as, 57–58, 61–62 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 151
risk shelter, right to, 43–44
democracy and, 26–27 Shi-ka-She (Cochise), 31–32
each other, to, 27 silence, right to, 50–51
natural disasters and, 26, 27 singing, 195
war and, 27 slavery
Rivera, Diego, 191 Dred Scott decision, 63–64
Robin Hood, 9–10 equality versus, 184
rogues, 9–14 freedom and, 148
Rohingya, 54 ingenuity and, 97
Roma, 54, 115 prohibition on, 180
Roosevelt, Franklin, 17–18 property and, 112
Roosevelt, Theodore, 32–34 rule of law and, 65–66
Rorty, Richard, 21 Smith, Joseph, 32
rotation, selection of leaders by, 118 social change, judgment and, 74–75
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35, 40, 99, 112, social contract, 206n.15
154–55, 192, 206n.15 social realm, inseparability of democracy
rule of law from, 181
free people, right to judge law, 67– Socrates, 41, 79–80, 82, 84, 99
72, 73 Solon, 192
limitations of, 63–67 Southern Agrarians, 5
Russell, Thaddeus, 11 sovereignty, democracy
versus, 192–94
sacred time, democracy as, 164 Spain
Salgado, Gabriel, 212n.6 Catalonia, 110–11
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 115 Spanish Civil War, 134
226 Index
speech, freedom of, 50–53 democracy, requirement for, 78–81

heckling, 52 faith versus, 81
press, freedom of, 51–52 fragility of, 80
privacy, right of, 50–51 Tulsa Race Massacre, 146–47
silence, right of, 50–51 Turkey, coups in, 109–10
torture and, 53 Turner, Victor, 54
Stamp Act, 100
states’ rights, 147 ubuntu, 153–54
steering, 119–20 umma, 191–92
sterilization, 64–65 unions, 180
Stevenson, Adlai, 14 United Kingdom
stewardship, 45 Blitz and, 128
Stolpersteine, 167, 214n.3 and canon of Western political
struggle, democracy as, 145–48 philosophy, 154–55
Stuart, Charles, 183 feudalism in, 142
subjects, rights of, 37–38 Greek independence and, 151
imperialism and, 184
Taj Mahal, 167 monarchy in, 37–38
“taking things lightly,” 20–21 Prevent program, 17
Taney, Roger, 63–64 uprootedness, 55–56
taxation, democracy and, 100–4 upward movement of democracy, 170–71
Taylor, Breonna, 67
technology, 116–17 Velasquez, Diego, 191
terrorism, 17 Vico, Giambattista, 154–55
Thachil, Tariq, 126 Vikings, democracy and, 152–53, 164
Thatháŋka Íyotake Villa, Pancho, 11
(Sitting Bull), 31–32
theft, 9–10, 43–44, 113 Wagdi, Waseem, 48–49
Third Reich, 63 want. See poverty
Thompson, E.P., 158 war
Thunberg, Greta, 37 bearing costs of, 132, 133
Till, Emmett, 148 democracy and, 131–34
Till-Mobley, Mamie, 19–20 free people and, 131–34
Tilly, Charles, 30 risk and, 27
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6, 36–37, 142, 145, “security contractors” in, 133
160–61, 166, 182, 190, 191, 196 United States and, 31–35
Todorov, Tzvetan, 146–47 unjust wars, 132–33
tolerance Washington, George, 31, 73, 205n.6
judgment and, 73–74 Weber, Max, 5, 108, 145, 154
undemocratic, of, 92–93 Weil, Simone, 55–56, 136–37, 206n.7
Tomba, Massimiliano, 125–26, Wengrow, David, 152
152, 157–58 Western political philosophy
torture, 53, 146–47 democracy versus, 154–58
totalitarianism institutions and, 116 as forged against free people, 154–58
Trump, Donald, 32, 112–13, 176 Westminster Cathedral, 167
trust, democracy and, 85–86 Whiskey Rebellion, 181
truth Whistler, James McNeill, 190–91
authoritarianism versus, 81 Whitman, Walt, 7–8, 41, 89–90, 170, 190–91
Index 227
Wikipedia, 77 Xenophon, 6, 210n.17

Wolin, Sheldon, 6, 16, 117, 149, 204n.21
women, fear and, 18 Zapatistas, 10, 125–26, 152
Works Progress Administration, 158 Zelicoff, Colin, 216n.7
World Trade Center, 127 Zolberg, Aristide, 159, 160
World War I, 133–34 Zuckerberg, Mark, 124

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Wild Democracy

I. Anarchy, courage, democracy  3

19. Rights are held in common.  59

43. People can always recall their representatives,

67. Democracy lives in the city.  174

Appendix of imperatives  199

anarchic, and free, we rule ourselves. People ruling themselves are

1. Anarchy is the shadow and salvation

People defend repression by declaring that to oppose it would lead to

We are still fools enough to tell children stories of good kings.

It falls to the people to restrain those ambitious to be autocrats. They

Authoritarianism is not, however, confined to great men. We have

Radical critics recognize that the drive of governments and govern-

“no government, as among our Indians,” and if he misunderstood the

reject established knowledge and old wisdom. Politics, as much as art

2. For anarchy we need the anarchic.

Many a starvin’ farmer

. . . as through your life you travel,

We slept thro’ wars where Honor could not sleep

Yet this late day we make a song to praise her.

be born, questioning the sins (and perhaps the achievements) of the

was or wished to be a man of the people. For Derrida, democracy was so

3. Democracy is shabby.

What though on hamely fare we dine,

This democratic shabbiness is welcoming and welcome, but the

4. Fear is the enemy of the free.

When Oliver Cromwell called himself the Lord Protector he taught

people with regularity. Secularists discovered, as one told me with sur-

5. If people are to rule themselves, they must have

Courage is necessary for democrats. Revolutions require courage. If we

The opponents of capital punishment seek injunctions, pardons, and

or epiphany, decay or resurrection? Perhaps the European in Hegel

6. Democrats take risks.

7. Rebellion is not only a right: it is a duty.

There is a passage in the American Declaration of Independence

8. Empire is the enemy of the democratic.

When Patrick Henry argued against the ratification of the 1787

economy of fear. Hamilton had argued that the ambitions of European

earth.” The imperialists spoke of themselves as God’s Chosen People.

For these religious democrats, the betrayal of democratic principles

Because our Declaration of Independence was promulgated others

9. The democratic citizen is both sovereign

Rousseau’s famous definition of the citizen as both subject and sover-

10. Free people keep something wild in them.

Nietzsche wrote of himself:

I hate to follow and I hate to lead

Nietzsche is rarely thought to have a disposition toward democracy,

And whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to living in

Free people keep something wild and ungovernable in them. Those

Consider Socrates. Socrates is rarely thought to be a democrat, but

of themselves as individual people, unlike each other and of infinite

The stone that the builder refuse

There is a proud competence in those who walk by their wild

11. Rights are grounded in the body.

have become more indigenous, more Maori, in their understanding of

Whether they are given by nature or by nature’s god, the rights

12. People have the right to life, to liberty, and to the

freedom of conscience. They are commanded not only to honor that in

13. People have the right to assemble.

fluent English. He speaks calmly and analytically to the reporter at

I. Anarchy, courage, democracy 3

19. Rights are held in common. 59

43. People can always recall their representatives,

67. Democracy lives in the city. 174

Appendix of imperatives 199

to preserve the environment, to take in a way that generates common—

Democracy, it is said—most particularly by liberals and philosophers—

Al-Farabi’s emendation of Plato’s account has a different character.

There is no defense for flag-waving, chauvinistic patriotism among

This fear—that is also a hope—is very old. Plato’s writing links

working. There is work to be done and many obstacles to overcome—