Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

Three Islamist parties (AKP, Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda) won elections and came to power in three predominantly Muslim countries – Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia – in recent decades. After coming to power, these parties followed different trajectories. Ennahda in Tunisia adhered to democratic principles, while the AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood did not. Why? Is Islamism (and Islam) at odds with democracy as skeptics claim? This chapter introduces the central questions of the book and three parties that comprise its subject. It shows that Islamist parties are not monoliths and are comprised of groups with different understandings of democracy. The chapter argues that Islamists often agree on the centrality of elections for ideological and strategic reasons, although they disagree on the norms underpinning electoral politics and what democracy means. It then identifies two main wings within mainstream Islamist parties: electoral Islamists, who carry majoritarian and exclusionary tendencies, and liberal Islamists, who commit to pluralist and inclusionary politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion on data and methods used in the study.

Several concerns stand to lead policing away from its mandate to protect the full range of citizens in a pluralist democracy. Among them are special interests, coarse majoritarian rule, and populism. Given that policing involves the discretionary allocation of power and resources in a strategic sense, and that the enforcement of a wide range of laws is subject to police discretion in individual encounters, each of these concerns can turn policing toward illiberal ends when they exert undue influence. In this sense, the discretionary nature of police power is most typically turned toward injustice in the pursuit of sectarian or populist goals that may have a veneer of democratic process, but are insufficient to justify the ensuing disparities of privilege, protection, or access to public space. The duty of the police to resist this impulse and only act upon reasons that treat citizens as substantive equals (i.e., by employing Rawlsian public reason) is a critical way to mitigate this hazard. The chapter closes by recounting the failed but valiant struggle of police to prevent populist rioters from seizing the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as an example of the duty of the police to safeguard democracy from virulent populist interests.

This chapter recasts the police power to pursue order maintenance as the brokerage and enforcement of the fair terms of social cooperation in a community’s public spaces. The nature of dense, urban living, and various conceptions of the good in a pluralist state unavoidably come together to make legitimate, competing uses of public space incompatible, and in some cases facially uncooperative. The state’s duty to promote fair use in ways that protect and facilitate pluralist interests is accorded to the police, who should privilege brokerage over enforcement whenever possible. Nongovernmental (e.g., informal) adjudication of competing uses carries the risk of illiberal outcomes driven by populism, majoritarian preference, or the occupation and use of space by force, intimidation, or other arbitrary means. That said, the formal policing of social cooperation is also subject to these risks, so while laws that are either underdetermined or inherently designed to promote cooperation through discretionary enforcement underwrite the second power of the police (e.g., disorderly conduct, or quality of life statutes), as a matter of justice the decisions police make based on them will require reasons and justifications that honor democratic pluralism.

This chapter aims to recover a specific intellectual tradition, a tradition that I describe as ‘democratic republicanism’.I do so by focusing on four different early modern thinkers: Johan and Pieter de la Court, Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I show that they were all part of the broader republican tradition unearthed by Quentin Skinner. But, as this chapter shows as well, the De la Courts, Spinoza, and Rousseau differed from English republicans such as Harrington and Sidney in that they were more democratic (which is, of course, why I call them ‘democratic’ republicans). They were more democratic, first and foremost, in a very straightforward way: they were in favour of a relatively inclusive political regime that they themselves described as ‘democracy’. But I will also show that they were more democratic in a second and perhaps less obvious sense of the word, in that they were committed to majoritarianism, to the idea that freedom could only be preserved if the people – which meant, in the absence of unanimity, the majority of the people – was allowed to rule without restraint.

Chapter 5 describes the law regarding speech aimed at religion and morality. Against a backdrop of oppressive prosecutions and antiabolitionist violence, Massachusetts saw denials of the constitutionality of libel law and a rising insistence on individual rights to freedom of conscience and expression. Both the pornographic classic Fanny Hill and the first birth control texts became cheaply available in Massachusetts, and lawyers adapted the law to prosecute obscenity. Nova Scotia likely had fewer such texts, and outside Halifax legal actors also had fewer texts to refer to in drafting indictments. On the religious front, Nova Scotia’s basically voluntaristic environment made religion political, with the Anglican elite on the defensive, but disputes over belief reached neither the legislature nor courts. Massachusetts, however, gradually eliminated establishment, leaving winners and losers. Free Thinkers evoked concern, especially the Englishwoman Frances Wright, whose lectures challenged Christianity, capitalism, slavery and patriarchy. Many understood republican ideals as justifying majoritarian violence, a logic that did not resonate in Nova Scotia, where disputes centered instead on configurations of institutional power.

The process values of majoritarianism, pluralism, and collective rationality are described.The social choice understanding that it is impossible to respect all three of these values with a single collective decision mechanism is considered, as are epistemic and deliberative theories of democracy.

Illiberal democracy is a special constitutional arrangement: it is a plebiscitarian democracy unfolding the totalitarian potential within a democratic system. As a centralized power, it intends to perpetuate the rulers’ monopoly over the state, relying on the falsification of classical (liberal) constitutionalism. These features offer sufficient family resemblance to treat them together for the purposes of constitutional theory. Illiberal democracy takes an instrumental attitude to constitutional institutions. Amendments to the constitution take place according to the momentary interests of the political power, like in any democracy without extremely cumbersome amendment rules. The ultimate attachment to the spirit of the constitution, the idea of respecting an unamendable core, is missing. There is no commitment to underlying principles; appearances matter, not authenticity. Hence the inevitable duplicity and deceit in the constitutional and legal system of illiberal democracy. The constitution is not an entrenched, higher order law but a practical tool to solve emerging conflicts in an illiberal and nondemocratic way (imposing arbitrary will as supreme command).

This chapter describes and explains the fitful emergence of majoritarian political tactics in late 1641 and 1642 and the crucial turn toward consistently majoritarian decision-making between December 1642 and April 1643. It demonstrates how the House of Commons was unable to maintain its consensual decision-making practices once its members found themselves struggling over how to approach the early stages of the Civil War and their first peace negotiations with Charles I. Under these conditions of structural dislocation, members’ use of majoritarian tactics proliferated. Members who employed these tactics at the time clearly considered them to be emergency measures that enabled them to engage in effective status interaction under extremely trying circumstances. Neither these tactics nor majoritarian decision-making itself had yet become institutionalized. The 1641 controversy over protestations to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance vividly exposed the strains under which the Commons was struggling to continue to function. But the winter of 1642–3 was the clear turning point: consensual decision-making suddenly collapsed amid the emergence of war and peace groupings in Parliament and an array of other remarkable developments in English political culture between 1641 and 1643.

This chapter describes and explains the early weakening of consensual decision-making in the Commons between the opening of the Short Parliament and December 1642. The political conflicts of these years were not able, in themselves, to topple the consensual tradition prevailing in Parliament, but some of them further revealed the conditions under which consensual decisions become increasingly infeasible. Divisions that did occur often involved ideological conflict, but ideological conflict was insufficient for causing majoritarian decisions. Instead, divisions in the House were overwhelmingly related to perceived threats to the honor, privilege, existence, or authority of the House of Commons, the Parliament as whole, or its members in particular. Conflicts over what course of action best conduced to maintaining the status of the House were what consistently led to divisions.

This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment religious liberty cases to show how the judiciary has come to terms with the disputes that arise over religious liberty. The religion clauses are often seen as upholding the concept of individual rights and defending religious liberty against religious majoritarianism. However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the religion clauses often belies this perception. This chapter demonstrates that the religion clauses largely epitomize majoritarianism. That is, rather than protecting religious minorities, the scope and protection of the religion clauses reflect both the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s broader constitutional rights jurisprudence, as well as the wider political landscape, both as it relates to judicial politics as well as contemporary social discourse.

“Globalization has transformed the inner workings of societies, and produced a new emerging cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians, affecting the working of our party system and democracy as a whole. The chapter summarizes the most crucial empirical findings of the book, moving from descriptive to more normative issues and asks: What does the struggle over borders mean for the quality of democracy? What understandings of democracy do the cosmopolitan and communitarian positions draw on? What are their flaws and virtues from a democratic point of view? Our core answer is the following: Both normative positions have become politically more prominent during the last decades of globalization, but both provide answers that exhibit considerable weaknesses when measured against the criteria of democratic quality. Nevertheless, both concepts have more room to forge compromises than the cosmopolitan and communitarian theoreticians themselves often assume. Cosmopolitan communitarianism or communitarian cosmopolitanism appear to represent the most promising compromises to overcome the democratic shortcomings of both pure narratives.”

“Globalization has transformed the inner workings of societies, and produced a new emerging cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians, affecting the working of our party system and democracy as a whole. The chapter summarizes the most crucial empirical findings of the book, moving from descriptive to more normative issues and asks: What does the struggle over borders mean for the quality of democracy? What understandings of democracy do the cosmopolitan and communitarian positions draw on? What are their flaws and virtues from a democratic point of view? Our core answer is the following: Both normative positions have become politically more prominent during the last decades of globalization, but both provide answers that exhibit considerable weaknesses when measured against the criteria of democratic quality. Nevertheless, both concepts have more room to forge compromises than the cosmopolitan and communitarian theoreticians themselves often assume. Cosmopolitan communitarianism or communitarian cosmopolitanism appear to represent the most promising compromises to overcome the democratic shortcomings of both pure narratives.”