Democracy Disfigured:
Opinion, Truth, and the People
by Nadia Urbinati (Author)
In Democracy Disfigured,
Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of
hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the
messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy.
Urbinati identifies three
types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the
plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning
democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from
the governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical
democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist
democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And
plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of
opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible
the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of
action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize
decisions.
Urbinati focuses less on
the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends:
technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the
people," and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn
governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.
