The Annual Review for the Sciences of the Democracies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2025

Jean-Paul Gagnon’s project of a “lexicon of democracy” has been able to trigger a number of different debates internal to democratic theory. This article will focus on one of them, which is: How does one conceptually distinguish democracy from non-democracy? The question seems essential to the lexicon of democracy project. The article combines four elements: (a) an acknowledgement of the need for a concept-based approach to the problem of the lexicon; (b) a defense of the methodological claim that a cogently formulated concept of democracy should be able to account for the unity of the operation through which democracy is specified, that is, for the idea that the set of interpretive questions with which theorists grapple stems from roughly the same overarching idea in need of interpretation; (c) a particular formulation of that overarching idea—i.e., of the concept of democracy—informed by a certain view of “the people” as a morally empty union of individuals; (d) an explanation of how the operation of specifying democracy from concept to conception proceeds through a set of essential questions which flow from the concept of democracy proposed.