Distancing herself from the conventional approaches of the human, social, and policy sciences, which tend to view foreigners either as a threat to the cultural and linguistic unity of the nation-state or as a much-needed fount of worldliness and diversity, Honig asks not how to address the problem or the promise of the foreigner but, rather, “What problems does foreignness solve for us? Why do nations and democracies rely on the agency of foreignness at their vulnerable moments of (re)founding, at what cost, and for what purpose?” (p. 4). The imposition of the law by one who is neither product nor member of a given political society serves a critical symbolic function within political life, Honig suggests, marking the law itself as alien to those who are subject to it and, in the case of democratic foundings, who become the (alienated) subjects of it.

For Honig, democratic foundings are always (re)foundings; they gain their foundational status only post hoc, as a people claim the law as their own. The device of the foreigner offers democratic citizens a convenient, and perhaps necessary, political fiction, enabling them to externalize the source of the violence that often attends the imposition of the law, and thus distance themselves from their own implication in it. “Democracy,” Honig writes, “is always about living with strangers under a law that is therefore alien (because it is the mongrel product of political action—often gone awry—taken with and among strangers)” (p. 39). In this respect, foreignness constitutes a critical site at which both the aspirations and the anxieties that attend democratic self-rule are managed.

That said, “the supplement of foreignness” is not simply therapeutic; it “both shores up (Rousseau) and unsettles (Freud) the people or the law being founded” (p. 32). Honig's democratic (re)founders transgress as much as they transform, taking liberties rather than waiting for them to be granted. This is not a simple endorsement of self-complacent cosmopolitanism. Democratic self-governance, Honig argues, requires a more robust form of cosmopolitanism “in which cosmopolitans risk their cosmopolitan (and nationalist) principles by engaging others in their particularities, while at the same time defending, (re)discovering and (re)articulating located universalisms such as human rights and the equal dignity of persons” (p. 67). Democratic peoples, then, must confront the inescapable political fact that democracy entails trespass as well as cooperation, and that political belonging evokes terror and betrayal as much as hope and pleasure.

Beyond Honig's incisive readings, another important contribution of this work is an interpretive style that dramatizes rather than simply advocates its radical, democratic intellectual temperament. While the progression of the chapters examines a range of ways in which foreignness figures in democratic thought, each of these chapters also pursues alternative interpretive modes and directions, setting out widely varied and frequently conflicting readings as critical political-interpretive possibilities. This pluralization of perspective is itself the sustaining force that helps to hold together, without assimilating or fragmenting, the positions that Honig lays out. Political interpretation itself, she seems to suggest, is a democratic project, with the critic occupying a political position analogous to the foreign founder: simultaneously giving to, taking from, and refiguring the political landscape.

If there is a chapter in which Honig's democratic-interpretive temper falters somewhat, it is the final, concluding chapter, in which she considers the question of genre. While the interpretations developed here are very much in keeping with the rest of the work, the mode of argumentation somewhat uncharacteristically positions one set of generic conventions, modern gothic, as clearly superior to its competitors, romance, comedy, and tragedy. This may simply be a function of developing a hitherto unmade argument for reading democracy as gothic: Perhaps a certain amount of interpretive violence attends original interpretations, just as it does political foundings. Nonetheless, one leaves the work with a sense of Honig's having made a case about genre and interpretation that is, by comparison with the rest of her argument, only thinly developed. How might the interpretive task of the theorist be enlivened not (simply) by rereading the democratic tradition through the insights made available by modern gothic, but (also) by developing the gothic reading against and alongside competing readings generated by the techniques of other genres? Is it possible that the reductiveness that haunts modern democracy and political theory alike might be countered by employing multiple interpretive frames that challenge, enliven, and exhilarate? That these are the kinds of questions posed by Honig herself in the bulk of the book, however, far outweighs her inability to fully sustain this at the end.

Democracy and the Foreigner is timely in ways that neither its author nor anyone else could have foreseen. Given the explosion of xenophobia that has accompanied the events of September 11, Honig's book prompts readers to distance themselves from the immediacies with which questions about immigrants are so often freighted, and to think more complexly and productively about the political and conceptual work accomplished by the figure of the foreigner. More important perhaps, Democracy and the Foreigner is also a profoundly untimely book. It gently but uncompromisingly interrogates the way we read and think about democracy, about nationalism, and about cosmopolitanism. It is relentlessly thoughtful, and not simply nonreductive but antireductive. It lays out a variety of often contentious political and interpretive possibilities, and by remaining productively agnostic toward any final resolution of their internal conflicts, it dramatizes to us the value, the richness, the complexity, and the intellectual challenges posed by the foreigner within us.