At the core of Nancy Luxon’s book is an important thesis about the nature of democratic authority, and a set of thoughtful considerations about the Nacherziehung, the “second” or “after education,” that adult citizens might undergo in order to generate “new grounds” for the “seemingly bankrupt concepts of political authority, trust and truth telling” (p. 2). In a context of pervasive mistrust in public officials and public institutions, and where the external markers of authority are in crisis, this book forcefully reasserts the distinction between legitimate authority and mere power and self-interest (Chapter 1). Luxon does not appeal to the proceduralism that typifies much contemporary democratic theory; instead, she provides an original model of authority that is derived from a “risky exchange … between educator and student” (p. 2). More innovative still, she looks to psychoanalysis and to Michel Foucault’s late work on parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” for two complementary accounts of the kind of ethical work on the self that equips adult citizens to become coauthors in “composing the event” of democratic authority. Working carefully around Foucault’s critique of Freud, Luxon provides a cogent account of the proximity between the kinds of relationships that emerge in psychoanalytic practice and in the pedagogic training associated with parrhesia that Foucault reworked from various sources in late antiquity.

Crisis of Authority is not without limitations. Yet the book is built around a powerful set of core propositions, namely, that we must challenge the “presumption that the popular experience of authority can never be more than obedience” (p. 19); that it is possible to generate “asymmetries [that are] something other than subordination” (p. 25); and that we should think of “liberty and authority as entangled in paradox,” one that needs to be continuously renegotiated (p. 19). Overall, I found Luxon’s articulation of these claims, and her account of the implications of these insights for democratic politics, to be compelling and persuasive.

Chapters 2 and 3 detail the contribution that psychoanalysis makes to this more general schema. In a far-reaching exegesis, Luxon focuses squarely on the dynamics of the analytic encounter, as specified in Freud’s clinical writings and case histories. By drawing attention to the relational qualities of clinical practice (pp. 60–61), and to the processes of resistance and transference associated with the “messy middles” of analysis (p. 42), she presents the analytic encounter as a “combative collaboration” (p. 48) that does not stabilize conclusively the viewpoint of either analyst or patient. Although the author acknowledges the “analyst’s [vital] role in recasting the effects of other authorities” (p. 14), her aim is to accentuate the therapeutic task of fostering the patient’s capacity for authorship and self-governance. The purpose of the analysis is not to underwrite dominant cultural norms (as Foucault would have it), but rather to provide a setting where the patient can critically revise and restructure past relationships to authority, in an effort to “dismantle their failed constructions” (p. 15), and to counter the injurious legacies of these former associations on the present.

Luxon deliberately plays down the function of the drives, in order to deemphasize the “reproductive grip” of neurosis (p. 93). However, she also distances herself from those who associate psychoanalysis with liberation. Rather than offering an entirely new beginning “without parents,” psychoanalysis aims instead to “cultivate practices of liberty” (p. 62), by strengthening the patient’s capacity to “assess the [diverse] claims of authoritative others” (p. 11). In particular, the goal is to enhance the patient’s “metaphoric competences,” that is, his/her capacity to make new associations, which is centrally important in a world characterized by contingency and a surfeit of meaning.

The dynamics of the parrhesiastic relationship are set out in Chapters 4 and 5. The focus is on a particular mode of pedagogy that Foucault retrieved from Greek and Roman antiquity and which he elaborated towards the end of his life, in a series of public lectures delivered at Berkeley and at the Collège de France. Luxon shows how the parrhesiastic instruction focused on the “dispositional qualities of the truth teller” (p. 156). Through a series of techniques—where the audience was not passive, but would instead “press the speaker to justify the reasons behind his speech” (p. 157), and where the speaker and audience would frequently swap places—adult citizens learned how to speak with sincerity in the public sphere, and acquired a capacity to identify instances of frank speech in others (p. 133).

Foucault turned to these ancient practices in search of techniques that might enable contemporary subjects to counter modern disciplinary mechanisms, and similarly, Luxon sees in these ideas resources to regenerate trust in political life, in a context where the “public has come to distrust all information regardless of source or accuracy” (p. 289). These techniques are particularly suited to a democratic model of authority, because unlike the modern expert, the parrhesiastes “lacks the insulation and support of surrounding political and professional institutions” (p. 153). Instead, the truth of parrhesia only ever emerges provisionally, and from an uncertain educative encounter, where both speaker and audience “make themselves vulnerable to frank speech” (p. 201). The element of risk guarantees the sincerity of the educators, while testing and reinforcing the student’s independence. In other words, just like in psychoanalytic practice, the purpose of the parrhesiastic relationship is to “cultivate the capabilities necessary for authorship” (p. 42).

Luxon also claims that this emphasis on self-governance can “move persons outward into politics” and need not, contra Hannah Arendt, result in an “apolitical inward flight” (pp. 9, 48), and in Chapters 6 and 7 the author provides a fuller account of how these pedagogic techniques might contribute to the wider goals of democratizing collective practices of political judgment. These chapters are noticeably thin on concrete examples drawn from contemporary politics. They nonetheless develop an interesting set of theoretical reflections on the circumstances of collective authorship and authority.

These reflections include a consideration of the uncertainties that appear in psychoanalysis as Freud attempts to write up the case histories from a stable “third person perspective” (p. 210), and what this tells us about the generative tension that emerges in the concrete relationships among interlocutors as they seek to orient themselves to wider frameworks of meaning. Luxon also offers some thoughts on the role and limits of formal education in facilitating the necessary training to participate in audience reception, in a context where “teaching is not limited to nor determined by institutional context” (p. 200), and where democratic publics are now typically defined by “overlapping, multiple, and non-geographic audiences” (p. 292). These chapters also include a discussion of the idea of “frame breaking,” derived from literary theory, and how this can help us understand the capacity of “counter publics” to challenge “the material and rhetorical power of elites” (p. 257), in order to “work past the insula individualism” of contemporary liberalism (p. 292), while at the same time remaining mindful of the need to balance these “world-making projects” with the ongoing tension between liberty and authority (p. 263).

On balance, I think Luxon overstates the capacity of adult citizens to dispose of themselves and to engage in the kind of world-expanding modes of self-governance that she rightly associates with democratic authority. Although the pedagogic techniques she identifies are surely very important, Luxon perhaps underestimates the forces that counter the individual’s ability to acquire a capacity for self-governance. For example, in Chapters 2 and 3, she brackets the role and function of the drives too effectively, as well as the psychoanalytic account of trauma and taboo. She does not sidestep these elements altogether, but her description of the significance of the “second education” would be further nuanced by a more rigorous account of the ways in which these psychodynamic forces work to interrupt the goal of therapy, and to reaffirm the damaging repetition of past attachments as well as the dominant social norms. In addition, the book would have been further strengthened by additional references to concrete examples drawn from contemporary politics, as well as perhaps from a stronger depiction of the new top-down modes of sovereignty, rule, and command that Luxon’s model of democratic authority seeks to challenge.

In the end, however, these are minor detractions from what is undoubtedly an important book. If anything, Luxon understates the significance of her central claim, namely, that we should not envisage democratic politics in terms of a strict egalitarianism, but model democracy instead on relationships that are simultaneously asymmetrical and reciprocal, or that take the form of “asymmetries without harm.” This is a bold and important statement, and perhaps especially so in a context where many activists and social theorists alike associate the democratic ideal with egalitarianism and horizontalism. The combination of these important insights with the close reading of Freud and Foucault makes the Crisis of Authority a critical intervention, and one that will be the focus of much further interest and debate.