Abstract

The concept of radical democracy is a concept that is often used in an ambiguous way. There are a lot of theorists that are theorizing radical democracy, either outspokenly or labeled radical democrats by their peers. Regardless, there doesn’t seem to any consensus on what the concept of radical democracy entails and how it differs from any other conception of democracy. This lack of conceptional clarity leads to a situation where the radical in democracy is used only to add rhetorical strength to the concept as a whole. In this paper I will first present a couple of already existing different conceptions of radical democracy, they are not seen as definitions but are descriptive of similarities in the usage of the concept within different contextual frameworks. After this I will present what I find the most plausible usage of the concept which is radical democracy as difference. In this view radical democracy is viewed as a concept where difference is seen as the main constitutive feature of democracy, a view that ties this question to the agonism/deliberative democracy debate.