“Deliberative democracy” is an ideal formulated largely by college professors over the last 20 years or so, and its provenance is obvious. It posits a polity in which public policy is the product of the force of the better argument. It is redolent with the atmosphere of the seminar room.

This is not to say that deliberative democracy is not an attractive ideal, even for those without a Ph.D. As Marc Stears nicely sums it up, the theory holds that “[f]irst, citizens can only legitimately be required to obey a law if it can be justified to them in terms that they could reasonably be expected to accept. And, second, the only way of testing whether they could, in fact, be able to do so is for the law to emerge from a deliberative setting where every citizen aims reasonably to persuade others of the necessity or desirability of their preferred political outcomes” (p. 7).

This happy ideal, however, has drawn the “if-pigs-could-fly” scorn of those Stears terms “democratic realists,” critics such as William Connolly, Raymond Geuss, and Michael Walzer who regard it as “an empty pipe dream” (p. 7). While it might describe a well-oiled seminar, it does not even approximate the dynamics of most department meetings, let alone the politics of the world outside the university. It underplays the deep differences that divide citizens, and neglects the stubborn effects of self-interest and the inequities of power that render politics necessarily coercive.

Deliberative democrats such as Archon Fung, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson have responded to this criticism vigorously, pointing out that theirs is an effort in normative theory—“their task has been to describe democratic life as it ought to be rather than as is currently conducted” (p. 9). They are positing a regulative ideal that can and should serve to guide reform. Without such an ideal, little will change. Realists are unduly pessimistic about the possibilities of political transformation, too ready to concede to the status quo.

Stears is sympathetic to this response, but rightly argues that if deliberative democrats are going to convince anyone that theirs is what John Rawls termed a “realistic utopia,” then they are going to have to devote a good deal more effort than they have to offering “some account of how the transition from the non-ideal to the ideal might occur” (p. 9). Above all, he says, they need to consider the likelihood that the egalitarian, “deliberative settings” that they aim to create for democratic politics will not be the product of deliberation but of far less genteel means. Stears aims to foster this sort of thinking by drawing the attention of political theorists to the resources for it that are available in the work of radical democrats who preceded them in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

As Stears sees it, these radical democrats—Progressive intellectuals such as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl; CIO organizers such as John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther in the late 1930s; Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the activists in the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s—cultivated the virtues and avoided the vices of both contemporary deliberative democrats and realists. “Like the latter-day realists,” Stears writes, “they recognized that the inadequacies of American democracy ensured that political change could not be forged through a politics of reason, consensus, and inclusion alone, but would also require ‘buoyant, crusading, and militant’ [Dewey's terms] forms of political action, including forms that might be rightfully described as adversarial, manipulative, and even coercive. Like the deliberative democrats, however, they also looked forward to a time when democratic politics would become more open, less exclusive, more egalitarian, and perhaps even more deliberative than the politics that had existed since the founding” (p. 12). For these democrats, “it was necessary to craft a politics that would enable a better regime to be created but it was also vital not to act as if such a future had already come” (p. 13).

In sum, these were radical democrats who wrestled strenuously with questions of ends and means. Generally, they believed that democratic ends required democratic means because the use of undemocratic means, violent coercion above all, might well be counterproductive. Yet deliberation was not the only, or often not the most effective, democratic means, and they were ready and willing to use nondeliberative political action in the service of a more deliberatively democratic future.

The bulk of Demanding Democracy is an interpretation of 60 years of American radical democratic thought and activism through the lens of these concerns. And it proves a most fruitful way of thinking about this history, particularly because Stears is acutely alert to the “fiendishly difficult” (p. 39) task that his subjects set themselves. On the one hand, “the worst characteristics of the citizen body would have to be enlisted in the task of their own abolition” (p. 39). And, at the same time, doing so might well serve to make things worse rather than opening the door to a more democratic polity. Stears does not claim that the “campaigners” of this radical democratic tradition succeeded in conquering their fiendish difficulties in any thoroughgoing fashion. His aim is less to celebrate the achievements of these democrats (though they were not without achievements) than to highlight the manner in which they found their way to the heart of the dilemmas confronting anyone who would reconstruct American democracy out of less-than-ideal constituencies in less-than-ideal circumstances.

Much of this history is convincing, though not all. Stears strains to establish the radical democratic credentials of the likes of Cold War liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in order to establish a continuous tradition from Dewey to King. And, in his effort to give a hard-boiled edge to the Civil Rights movement, he reads its campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience not as efforts at moral suasion but as a project to “intimidate” southern racists. There is little to no evidence that this was the intention of the movement's leaders or the consequence of their actions. The movement's strategy did have coercive intentions and effects, but its targets were not the sheriffs who were locking up demonstrators or Klansmen who were burying bodies outside of town, but the northern liberal politicians and moderate southern segregationists whose political and economic self-interest enlisted them (often grudgingly) on the side of greater racial equality.

Although I share Stears's convictions and hasten to adopt the interpretive framework he has supplied for understanding an important chunk of American history, I wonder why he ends his story in 1970 without explanation. Have there been no successors in the last 40 years to his radical democrats? Has the “tradition” expired? If so, why (and should this not worry him)? If not, who has kept it alive and what might they add to his argument? For example, have not “populist” sectors of the American Right found much of late to admire and emulate in the tradition? Might one not say that in the last generation, the nonideal character of American democracy has mutated in some significant ways, presenting fresh fiendish difficulties that Croly, Dewey, and King could not imagine.