The ‘democratic people’ as democracy’s fingerprint?

The construction of a “lexicon of democracy” collecting and classifying the uses of the word ‘democracy’ over time and space, theorized and carried out by Jean-Paul Gagnon, has been able to trigger a number of different debates internal to democratic theory. The exciting new journal he contributed to launch will welcome many such debates, and in this paper I will focus on one of them: How to conceptually distinguish democracy from non-democracy? The question seems essential to the project, for without some criterion, it seems that we will breathe life into an omnivorous lexicon, indiscriminately devouring anything that has ever called itself, or has ever been called, ‘democracy’, and ruling out anything that has not been called such, despite presenting democratic elements. Although some may argue that establishing such criterion theoretically rather than politically is questionable, I will proceed from the assumption that the theoretical way is legitimate, and I will propose one criterion for distinction: the concept of democracy is characterized by an idea of ‘the people’ as simultaneously plural and united, and morally neutral. This characterization of the democratic people builds upon and expands my previous work. It arises from the comparison of democracy with populism that I carried out in the past years. In this paper, I will proceed as follows. In Section 1 I will go back to W. B. Gallie’s idea that "essentially contested concepts" have their source in one and the same "original exemplar", the specification of which is the object of endless and inescapable contestation. In the case of democracy, I shall suggest, the single concept in need of interpretation refers to a plural and united people making collective decisions over its shared existence. In Section 2, I will attempt to show that this concept triggers the primary question guiding democratic theory and practice: what does it mean, how is it possible, and why is it desirable, that a similar popular entity exercises power? In this section, I will reconstruct the specifying operation by which, based on this fundamental question, the concept of democracy is articulated into a conception. This operation, I will argue, is variously performed by anyone who engages in democratic theory. After having discussed the specifying operation and the interconnections among its components, I will move on to Section 3, where I will conclude that this concept of democracy can effectively help divide democracy from non-democracy, and that it offers a fundamental and often tacit criterion by which we measure the democratic import of a conception of democracy: whether we are looking at a political theory or at an actual political order, it is often when it seems impossible to claim that the people as a heterogeneous unity share sovereign power, that democrats of different orientations rise up and exclaim: “that is undemocratic!”