We are concerned with the prospects for democracy under the conditions of modernity: two words that need not so much definition as exploration.

When in 1950 Hannah Arendt visited Martin Heidegger for the first time after the Second World War, they went for long walks and she sought to engage him in conversation as to how one was to think of the events that had transpired since their last encounter in 1934. Her early book The Origins of Totalitarianism and the later The Human Condition were her most extended attempts to come to grips with this new world (although one should mention Eichmann in Jerusalem here as well).

This is our problem also – at least one of our problems – if democracy is the activity of a people coming together to deal with what they have in common; that is my first attempt at an exploration. I take it that any theory of democracy must determine an appropriate democratic response to the particular set of problems that confront a given people (or peoples) at a particular time. These problems vary importantly, and what one thinks are the predominant problems of the time may be different from what they in fact are. Identification of the nature of particular problems is thus the first and most important step. As an example: if one understands the problem connected to the practice of segregation in the USA in the first two-thirds of the past century as a problem of civil rights, one will tend to think the appropriate response to be the achievement of voting rights. Such, I might note, was the conclusion of Robert Dahl in his 1956 A Preface to Democratic Theory. If one understands segregation as a problem of ressentiment, the achievement of one's identity by the negation of another's, a democratic response requires something additional.

I cannot here given more than an indication of what I think the most important problems that shape this world are. Partly out of lack of adequate knowledge of some of the parts of the world that are of concern to this volume, but more significantly out of the conviction that different peoples have different problems, I am going to restrict myself to the Anglo-American-European West in the twentieth century.

Arendt draws here upon the concept of “reflective judgment” in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. “Reflective judgment” is precisely not my taking someone else's point of view, but thinking as myself (“thinking in my own identity”) that which others think. Such judgment thus re-presents the judgments of all those others to whom I make myself present. I will not necessarily agree with them, but I will have had them present while reflecting. In doing so, Arendt observes, I do not take into account “only my own interests.”

Yet, if Arendt is right, it would seem that there is no room for such a politics in Rousseau: notoriously, he seems opposed to representation as such.

There are two commonly accepted, seldom scrutinized, claims about Rousseau. The first is that he opposed representation in politics and was an advocate of direct democracy,- the second is that he was opposed to the theater on the grounds that is distanced citizens from moral understanding.

I want to write here about the political uses made of Nietzsche, about what Nietzsche says about politics (broadly understood), and about the politics of reading and writing about Nietzsche. Twenty-five years ago few people would have cared. Nietzsche was a minor figure, stimulating to adolescents, without rigor, a bit silly. Now he is a minor industry in the intellectual professions. Everyone is writing about Nietzsche, some their third or fourth book. Articles appear everywhere: The bastions and inner walls of the most analytic redoubts have fallen,- journals of literature both learned and popular vie for text. Nietzsche seems inexhaustible - he is available, it seems, to everyone. Everything in Nietzsche seems living. Yet if everything is living, everything about Nietzsche also seems fragile.

I want also to say something here about the various claims that have been made on Nietzsche. I do not want so much to argue that Nietzsche is or is not the ally of a particular political persuasion as much as to investigate why he lends himself to such a wide range of positions, and what it means about a writer that he can be subject to so many varying claims of political allegiance. Most importantly, I wish to raise the question of what it means for a writer, such as Nietzsche, to resist the currently available political identities.

If in what follows we appear critical, it is not because we are unappreciative of the real achievement of the work of Jürgen Habermas. The theory of communicative action makes the case that rationality is a relevant moral social concept. That humans speak with and to each other places them, he shows, in a moral relationship, simply by the actuality of the fact of that speech. Habermas develops this position into a critical defense of modernity around a vision of the “formation of autonomous public spheres, which . . . enter into communication with one another as soon as the potential for selforganization and the self-organized employment of communication media is made use of.” This is a democratic picture based upon the potential egalitarianism of uncoerced participation in discourse.