If democracy is rule by the people, then who are the people? Who is included and who excluded from the people, and by what authority do they rule? These questions ignite what Alan Keenan calls Rousseau's paradox: “the freedom and openness of the people's foundation, which means that ‘they’ must call themselves into being before they exist and thus from a point that is not yet ‘the people’ themselves, rule out the possibility of there being any politically neutral source of generality, or definition of who the people are. One must act in the name of the people before receiving the people's own sanction” (p. 53). Although it shares a dilemma with liberal social contract theory, Rousseau's paradox is unique to democracy because the problem is to found the sovereignty of the people to define themselves. The liberal contract tradition solves Rousseau's paradox by defining the people in advance as rational or self-interested in a state of nature or behind a veil of ignorance. Democracy has no recourse to imagined foundations of any sort because the fundamental task of democracy is for the people to define and to rule themselves. Keenan brilliantly examines how Rousseau, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Michael Sandel, among others, resolve Rousseau's paradox in ways that threaten and violate democratic principles, and yet their efforts exemplify and illuminate the constitutive dilemmas of democracy.

As paradoxical as “the people” prove to be, an even more confounding dilemma for democracy is that if it remains truly open, then the answers to these questions must be continuously deferred. No collective identity of the people can ever be both open to contestation and inclusive at the same time that it works to identify and unite that “people.” And yet, inevitably, the people do and must take on some substantive or normative shape in order to engage in ruling themselves, and so democracy must violate its own principle of plurality. To be and to remain democratic, any particular demos must first found itself as a people and so risk violating the democratic principle of openness by closing itself off. Clearly, openness in Keenan's sense was not a principle of ancient Greek democracy and is not a principle of democracy per se. Democracy in Question focuses on the constitutive paradoxes of radical democracy wherein the authority of the people to govern must come from the people themselves and not from any external closure based in tradition or nature. If the people are free and autonomous enough to constitute themselves, however, then the closure that sets them off as a people will necessarily impinge upon their autonomy, for they are then no longer free to autonomously define themselves either collectively or individually.

In the face of three tensions—between equality and liberty, plurality and commonality, openness and closure—and the resulting constitutive dilemmas of democracy, Keenan persuades the reader to stay attuned to democracy even after we learn to see it as essentially unstable and never capable of realizing its own principles. These dilemmas are constitutive of democracy, he argues, and are not capable of resolution by the adoption of new democratic principles or a new theory of democracy. The reader is further persuaded that to seek resolution of these dilemmas at all is to expose oneself to deepening their power to undo democracy. “We, the people” can no more reconcile ourselves, on the one hand, to a permanent state of becoming than we can, on the other hand, settle for what we are now or who we may finally become. Both of these strategies entail risks that are fatal to any people. The first strategy, exemplified by Arendt, Laclau, and Mouffe, affirms the contingency, plurality, and conflict of democracy. Keenan points out first that the affirmation of those democratic principles is important, but they must remain open to contestation and so do not, in themselves, ground democracy. Moreover, affirmations of democracy do not supply the practical reasons we have to stick with democracy and the techniques we might need for dealing with conflict, plurality, and contingency. For example, why is more contestation better than less? How can we learn to live with contingency if what we really want is a stable job and some respect?

The second strategy is exemplified in Keenan's reading of Sandel and Benhabib. Neoconservatives, theorists of deliberative democracy, and (some) communitarians are attempting to restore our citizens' virtue by force and by closure. Rather than moralize in a radical democratic voice against those closures, Keenan proposes a method for establishing a nonmoral common ground with them based on our common disenchantment with liberal government, on disinvestments in public education and public space, and on our frustration with the cynicism and polarization that characterize our media and electoral politics.

Rather than being resolved, the constitutive dilemmas of democracy must be answered provisionally and contingently within democratic politics. Keenan is not arguing for the priority of democratic practice over theory. Rather, he is deconstructing the foundations and principles of democracy in a voice that will establish common ground with post-structuralists and neoconservatives, and communitarians alike. Keenan's interpretations and criticisms of the authors listed above exemplify his proposal for a democratic practice that seeks to find nonmoral common ground with our antagonists and interlocutors before we attempt to define who we are or take positions and persuade others. He proposes a democratic practice that does not presuppose commonality, closure, or liberty (that is, fixed opinions, stable identities or rules of the game, and autonomous selves). His proposal is for a kind of nonpartisanship that “speaks to others as sites of possibility,” even when those sites are the texts of democratic theory (p. 186). And to radical democratic theory in particular, Keenan's work offers a dynamic word of caution on how to avoid the cynicism and shame that our calls for more political participation often meet. Keenan lays out a practical method for establishing common ground even as he teaches us how thoroughly our political practices are constituted and limited by the irresolvable dilemmas of democracy.