Democratic Theory at a Crossroads: Re-Thinking Democracy from Institutionalization to Dissensus and with Foucault and Havel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a concept and ideal, democracy enjoys an unparalleled global popularity and legitimacy. At the same time, the word has never been more substantively hollow. It has come to mean almost anything and everything. A recognition of this crisis in meaning has motivated a diverse group of political theorists and philosophers who have all coalesced to call for a re-thinking of the concept. This paper situates itself within this movement, arguing for a radical re-thinking of democracy that is incompatible with its institutionalization into a political form or system of government. In this sense, I argue for an understanding of democracy as a practice of freedom (Michel Foucault). In support of this re-negotiation I employ a case study concerning Czechoslovakia’s post-communist transition and the establishment of the Civic Forum in Prague. Here we can witness the de-creation of democracy rather than its formation. The democratic moment dissolves with the advent of formal organizations and political routine. Overall, I seek to articulate the beginnings of a theory of democracy that stands in opposition to the state and institutional embodiment. Democracy is not compatible with government (the conduct of conduct). At the very least, such a theory may help us recognize just how undemocratic our democracies really are.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".