The animating conundrum of Adrian Little's intelligent and thought-provoking book is how to make sense of the disjuncture between the manifold failures of democracy to live up to its ideals (in the West, as well as its attempted global export) and the almost universal adulation it evokes. More specifically, Little is interested in piercing the “piety” of democracy's more zealous advocates who see democracy as the harbinger of a peaceful world order and who are also willing to justify a variety of nondemocratic practices, even outright violence, to enact and preserve it. In this criticism, the author aims at something more than exposing democracy as ideological mystification or merely pointing to the rhetorical hypocrisy of democracy's missionaries. Rather, he wants democratic theory to confront the fact of its political failures, and thus he explores how democracy as both a normative theory and a practical model might be radically revised in light of this recognition.

The failures to which Little is especially attuned are those that point to a deep imbrication of democracy and violence, instances where democracy seems to engender violent conflict and where violence is justified in the name of protecting or advancing democracy. The most persuasive discussions of democracy's relationship to violence refer to the project of imposed democratization in Iraq and the relationship between democracy and political conflict in Northern Ireland. Theoretically, Little turns to complexity theory, poststructural political philosophy, and theories of radical democracy to reconceptualize and defend models of democracy that fully acknowledge, and therefore better manage, democracy's “constitutive failures.”

This is an enormously suggestive and original line of criticism. Little's work follows up on recent books by Michael Mann (The Dark Side of Democracy, 2004) and John Dunn (Democracy: A History, 2006) that raise a variety of doubts about the uncritical bent of contemporary commitments to democracy. Although Little does not explore in depth how and why the end of the Cold War and the loss of recognizable political challengers enabled the “hegemonic articulation of democracy as a generic good” (p. 5), he effectively and sharply poses the question of what effect this hegemonic articulation has on how we theorize democracy. He notes how the very vagueness of the term democracy allows for greater varieties of ideological mobilization. The sheer fact that democracy has come to be associated with an expanding and often contradictory list of principles, values, and virtues—from a form of government with a specific configuration of institutions (from elections) and a principle of legitimacy (popular rule or the “rule of law”) to a way of life to a set of values—allows it to be employed in irreconcilable contexts and projects.

The author further notes the irony that alongside this ever-growing appreciation of democracy's benefits is the persistent complaint that democracy never seems to reach any of its professed ideals. In the West, this complaint revolves around a worry about a range of democratic deficits, from low rates of participation to electoral arrangements that produce minority governments. He wants us to take seriously the paradoxical simultaneity of both general enthusiasm for the ideal of democracy and nagging disappointment in terms of its realization. He suggests that this paradox is not just a contingent disjuncture between theory and practice but ought to be taken as a sign of a fundamental conceptual error in the normative theory of democracy.

This criticism is made most acutely in the case of democracy's export, and it is here that Little's analysis is particularly illuminating. As he indicates, despite the persistent anxieties about the contemporary practice of democracy in the West, it is uncritically championed “as the panacea for contemporary political conflicts and the failings that supposedly characterize non-Western societies” (p. 2). And yet in the context of actual experiments in exporting democracy, the same champions seem to dread democratic outcomes and search for various mechanisms to limit and control the process of democratization. For example, in the anxious reaction to Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and in the debate around the proper structure and timing of parliamentary elections in postinvasion Iraq, the promotion of democracy was coincident with a deep suspicion about the ability of popular elections to produce results consistent with so-called “democratic” values. Thus, in practice, democratization is more often characterized by various elite-driven, top-down attempts to engineer specific political outcomes, such as the promotion of moderate elites and the securing of a stable ethnic balance—attempts that are hard to characterize as democratic themselves. Moreover, the recourse to various nondemocratic means to ensure democracy are often justified or explained away as due to infelicitous local factors and contexts, from deep sociocultural impediments to more strategic questions of timing and application. Little importantly alerts us to how this way of characterizing failures of democratization as problems of application both allows democratic theory to retain its utopian veneer and protects it from confronting in theoretical terms the fact of its repeated practical failures. The price of this kind of theoretical purity, however, is that democratic theory functions more and more like ideological justification for realist politics.

The main drawback of Democratic Piety, and it a serious one, is that the alternative theoretical model of democracy the author proposes seems only to acknowledge constitutive failure in an abstract sense, rather than offer specific tools for understanding theory in its practical contexts. Of the two kinds of enabling theory—complexity theory and poststructural philosophy—that Little mobilizes as alternatives, the turn to complexity theory seems the more promising. In viewing societies as dissipative structures, complexity theory emphasizes problems of path dependency, unintended consequences, and interactive, nonlinear effects that suggest serious limits on the capacity of political actors to understand and intervene effectively in the political world. However, the author stops short of elaborating this thread into a new model of democracy and, instead, ties it too neatly to poststructuralist insights about the centrality of contingency, conflict/violence, and nonclosure to democratic politics. And although he justly criticizes radical democratic theory for also producing its own idealized forms of agonistic democracy, he tends to rehearse its basic objections to rationalist and consensus-driven models of liberal democracy.

My objection here is not the reliance on poststructuarlism or radical democratic theory, but that Little does not develop them further into the directions opened by either his suggestive turn to complexity theory or his persuasive and original critique of the piety of contemporary democratic theory. Thus, the second half of the book does little to extend and specify the argument and, at times, even seems to undo the insights of the first. This is especially the case when he turns to Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt to establish the constitutive connection between violence and democratic politics. Ontologizing the connection between violence and democracy in this manner, however, runs counter to the claims of complexity theory and Little's own critical exhortation to detail that connection in terms of its dynamic, contextual, and consequential mechanisms. Surely, attending to the theoretical implications of failure and violence in democratic politics cannot end with an abstract, ontological redefinition of democracy in which violence and failure are now acknowledged as constitutive.