The authoritarian German jurist Carl Schmitt once pointed out that “a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything.” In seeking to further specify the purported “emerging international right to democratic governance,” the authors of “Intolerant democracies,” Gregory H. Fox and Georg Nolte, have grasped the fundamental significance of the exception: the real meaning of a democratic norm cannot be understood without examining precisely those cases in which democratic values argue for a suspension of democratic processes. The question is whether the assertion of a meaningful international consensus on the “democratic entitlement” can withstand such an examination.

Once a pejorative term in the writings of the most esteemed political philosophers, “democracy” has in recent parlance been transmogrified into a repository of political virtues: rule ratified by a manifestation of majority will (popular sovereignty); orderly mediation of political conflict through participatory mechanisms (polyarchic constitutionalism); individual freedom under the rule of law (liberalism); broad popular empowerment to affect the decisions that condition social life (democracy, properly so called); et cetera. No term can mean so many things and continue to mean anything, for political virtues do not come in neat packages. No set of formal procedures can stand above the clash of competing priorities, nor can a cogent theory of democratic “primary goods” – things everyone wants, regardless of what else anyone wants – be crafted to avoid controversial choices that arise in the moments of crisis to which Schmitt referred.