Democracy contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction. This is a conviction that is widespread in the history of political thought, from its origins in ancient Greece to contemporary political science. True, there are numerous historical examples of the downfall of democracies, and many of the highly varied attempts at conceptualising the reasons for such occurrences contain fruitful insights. However, is it really appropriate to identify the causes for the cancellation of democracy in its ‘self’, its nature? This chapter will argue that it is more useful to underline the possible persistence of a democratic spirit, or culture, even in the face of a cancellation of the institutional underpinnings of democracy. To see democracy as a tragic regime means to recognise the ever-present risk of its cancellation, but it also means to emphasise the anti-democratic nature of such cancellation, thus its incompatibility with democracy.

The following reflections can be read in two different ways, one conceptual and the other historical, and maybe best as a combination of these two. On the one hand, conceptually, this chapter will provide a counterpart to the notion of the democratic paradox, widely evoked recently in politico-philosophical debates about the conceptual origins of liberal democracies. In one version, the notion of paradox refers to two distinct and not consistently connected political traditions at the core of our political self-understandings, namely liberalism and democracy. To use Chantal Mouffe's words:

More generally, the paradox refers to the question of the origins of liberal democracy: democracy is the self-government by the people. However, the people as a political collectivity does not exist before its self-government.