Abstract

There is a very fine line separating democracy from terror. Through analysis of the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, I hope to show that there is an uncanny proximity between terror and democracy. In Lefort’s view, political power rests on the contingency and groundlessness that politics has experienced since the French Revolution. Since that time, political power has been separated from the divine and has become a human affair. For Lefort, totalitarianism can come only after the democratic turn because democracy and totalitarianism have the same political foundation in the French Revolution. The openness of democracy is what allows for a totalitarian regime to take power and to terrorize people. But democracy is also able to combat terrorism because, by giving more voice to the excluded and the oppressed, democracy may be able to assimilate them; for if the claim of such people is a lack of autonomy, democracy is the system that should be able to allow them to exercise power. A true war on terror, therefore, would empower people through democracy and not disenfranchise them further