Democratic Vision Research Articles

Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy and the Inevitability of Conflict

Overdoing Democracy is an important contribution to the literature on (deliberative) democracy, as it offers a sobering diagnosis of the risks and pitfalls of (overdoing) democracy in the form of internal critique. But the book does not go far enough in its diagnosis because it is not sufficiently critical towards some of the basic assumptions of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In particular, Talisse does not sufficiently attend to the inevitable power struggles in a society, where different groups and individuals must protect their own (often conflicting) interests instead of working towards a ‘common good.’ In this essay, I contrast two different visions of democracy and politics, one based on ideals of consensus and cooperation, and another on the inevitability of perennial conflict. I then briefly present an alternative to deliberative conceptions of democracy that has gained traction in recent decades, known as agonism. Next, I offer a short reconstruction of Talisse’s proposal, and finally I sketch a critical assessment of some of his main claims and assumptions from an agonistic perspective.

Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination

Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination

Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels

Reviewed by: Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Edited by Shirley Samuels. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xii, 224. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-7311-5.) Visual culture, and vision itself, have long been central to the development of modern racial formations. From exotic illustrations of Indigenous peoples framing early modern maps to the famed casta paintings depicting a taxonomy of new American race mixtures, visuals of so-called corporeal and moral difference and inferiority traversed the Atlantic, presenting discernible evidence used to rationalize colonization and enslavement. As early modern definitions of race collided with the liberalism and humanism of the post-Revolutionary United States, visual culture became increasingly important in resolving philosophical hypocrisies and codifying the color line. The grotesquery of minstrel makeup and costuming and the anthropological realism of Louis Agassiz’s photography capturing nude enslaved people are great examples. Across the nineteenth century, these objects and performances, through the techniques unique to the visual (for example, composition, light, color, scale, and so on), dictated how physical human difference was perceived and what philosophical, political, and cultural meanings were attached to those differences. In recent years, scholars have offered important monographs and essay collections addressing the intersection of race and a single visual medium in the nineteenth century, such as photography, painting, or sculpture; however, there has been an infrequency of work simultaneously addressing the particular modalities of multiple media. Through astute editorship (or dare I say curation), Shirley Samuels has assembled an excellent collection, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which offers far-reaching case studies of myriad forms, such as land surveying, theatrical staging, sheet music, stereography, and literature, attending to the distinct properties of each. Samuels is a professor of English and American studies at Cornell University, where she also chaired the History of Art Department from 2006 to 2012. She is a prolific scholar of gender, race, and literary and visual cultures of the nineteenth century, having previously published several volumes on the subject, including Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (New York, 2004). The individual contributors are experts and practitioners in photography, art history, literary criticism, folklore studies, and architecture. Thanks to this interdisciplinarity, the collection produces a wide-ranging, albeit episodic, [End Page 137] cultural and intellectual history of how people living in nineteenth-century United States came to see race and difference. The collection is composed of twelve essays; taken together, the essays contend that technological innovations in science, engineering, and aesthetics that emerged throughout the nineteenth century radically influenced and reoriented the perception of who were and could be U.S. citizens. These technologies changed how humans saw and what they expected to see—that is to say, vision. Throughout the book’s introduction, Samuels deploys vision and visualizing as central analytical concepts and objects of study, which encapsulate all sorts of visual sensations from physical ocular function of the human eye to the figurative language of literature and other media. In this way, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is much less about visual culture as a discrete product; rather, it foregrounds the ways those visibly rendered products are tethered to and constituted by the processes, instruments, and conditions—social and otherwise—by which we see. Further, the essays collectively assert that the intersection of vision and technology informed racial formations “in alternately democratic and anti-democratic” ways (p. 1). The essays are arranged into two discrete yet interrelated thematic sections—“Articulate Spaces” and “Democratic Visions.” The first section undertakes the entanglements of race, vision, and spatiality or the social construction of space and its organization by way of human interactions and behavior. For example, Irene Cheng, in the opening chapter, demonstrates how Thomas Jefferson’s strategies for both territorial and architectural design consummated “his ideal of a liberal, agrarian republic” in particularly exclusionary and oppressive ways (p. 17). Jefferson’s rational, grid-like geographical patterns validated the land tenure system and the subsequent displacement of Native Americans, while his similarly rational octagonal house plan enabled the...

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s by Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell

Reviewed by: The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s by Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell Rosemarie Zagarri (bio) Keywords U.S. Constitution, Political parties, Democracy, Politics The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s. By Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 254. Paper, $28.99.) One of the most enduring paradoxes of early American politics is how the framers of the U.S. Constitution not only failed to anticipate the development of a two-party political system but actually believed that the country could be governed without political parties. More than a half century ago, in The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1785–1840, Richard Hofstadter laid out the basic intellectual framework that explains how Americans moved from the anti-partyism of the founding era to a widespread acceptance of political parties. By the time of Martin Van Buren in the 1830s, Hoftadter argued, a permanent, two-party political system had come to be seen as an essential feature of American political life, connecting ordinary voters in their local communities with national politics and providing a check on those in office. Instead of being considered seditious and illegitimate, parties came to be seen as the vehicle of the loyal opposition. Leonard and Cornell’s excellent book builds on Hofstadter’s argument and updates it in light of recent decades of scholarship on women, enslaved people, and Native Americans, not to mention the popular political culture in the early republic. In contrast to Hofstadter’s traditional [End Page 494] top-down approach, they acknowledge the importance of popular opinion and bottom-up political mobilization in shaping the emergence of the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican parties. At the same time, their key intervention is to place the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court at the center of their discussion, exploring the relationship between judicial interpretation, popular constitutionalism, and party politics. The authors structure their argument around a somewhat artificial, but nonetheless useful, distinction between a “republican” as opposed to a “democratic” vision of the Constitution. As the framers imagined it, elite white men would continue to inhabit the most important positions of power and authority in the new government. With the rapid rise of popular political parties in the 1790s, however, this vision of governance quickly came to be challenged. Even as Federalists continued to embrace the framers’ republican model, Jeffersonian Republicans pursued a more democratic vision, pressing states to expand voting rights and broaden officeholding to larger proportions of the population. Yet as Cornell and Leonard acknowledge, the Jeffersonians’ support for universal rights was more constricted than it might at first appear. Although striving to make all men equal before the law, Republicans did not include women and Black people (especially slaves) within the compass of their egalitarian vision. Democracy, on these terms, extended only as far as the adult white males whose support could get Republican politicians elected. Republicans also had a particular vision of the role of the courts. According to Cornell and Leonard, Republicans increasingly demanded that “the people”—either through their state legislatures or through their political parties—be allowed to determine the constitutionality of federal laws and policies, through a process that the authors call “popular constitutionalism” (60). Although Republicans achieved greater and greater success at the polls during the first decades of the nineteenth century, they also met fierce resistance—not only from the opposing political party but also from the Supreme Court. Despite the decline of Federalist political influence at the national level, the federal court system was brimming with Federalist judges whose “legalist” (5) judicial philosophy reinforced support for key Federalist positions. In a series of important decisions from 1800 to 1832, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, repeatedly ruled in favor of strengthening national power at the expense of the states, embracing common-law principles concerning contracts and property rights, and most especially, promoting the notion of judicial supremacy. Although [End Page 495] the Supreme Court’s position tended to disadvantage the dispossessed, there was one set of issues in which Marshall...

Rural Revolt: Power Line Protests and the Alternative Technology Movement in the United States, 1970s.

In the 1970s, powerline protests erupted across rural communities in the United States. Just as a global movement of environmentalists, farmers, and activists fought expansive energy infrastructures, many rural Americans living in the transportation corridors of the electric-grid system directly confronted the political, social, and environmental costs of cheap electricity. This article revisits three well-known powerline protests in the United States-in western Minnesota, Appalachian Ohio, and upstate New York. It argues that rural protestors, by resisting capital-intensive technological growth in the countryside, proved highly receptive to the era's alternative technology movement. The protests show how the alternative technology movement and its democratic vision spread and transmuted within mainstream American culture. Rural communities, leery of large-scale corporate and government control, helped advance renewable energy politics and challenged the "utility consensus" of the American electric power industry. Grassroots revolts blended populist politics with global critiques to make environmental ethics agreeable to rural constituencies.

"Eros the Great Leveller": Edward Carpenter, Sexual Cosmotopianism and the Northern Working Man

"Eros the Great Leveller":Edward Carpenter, Sexual Cosmotopianism and the Northern Working Man Alison Twells This article focuses on the domestic and transnational dimensions of Edward Carpenter's writings on the naturalness and cultural significance of same-sex love. I explore the relationship between Carpenter's representations of "comradely love" between men in Ancient Greece, in Hindu mythology and culture, and in industrial communities in northern England, to contribute to recent scholarship on friendship and anti-imperial politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article draws on the concept of "aspirational cosmotopianism", defined by Clare Midgley as "a transnational and transcultural utopian space of interaction", which, in Carpenter's case, involved a homo-erotic imagining of a universal humanity and valorisation of cross-class same-sex desire.2 I argue that bringing Carpenter's interest in transnational and cross-class desire into the same frame enables exploration of his "cosmotopian" aspirations and his ultimate inability to escape the structures of late nineteenth/early twentieth century imperial Britain. The article brings together the transnational dimensions of Carpenter's "comradely-love" with his writing about northern working-class men, amongst whom he lived following his move to Sheffield in 1877. As Sheila Rowbotham has noted, historians have long tended to "do" Edward Carpenter "in bits," emphasising his socialism or his interest in the East or advocacy of sex reform.3 More recent scholarship focusing on the transnational dimensions of his writing on same-sex love similarly separates into distinct strands of scholarship, examining the influences of Ancient Greece and Walt Whitman on his concept of "comrade-love,"4 and the "erotic and philosophical culture of the East" as a source of inspiration throughout his work.5 A related strand of scholarship considers issues of "sexual colonialism" and "homosexual orientalism" in Carpenter's accounts of his travels in India and Ceylon in 1890-91 as part of a problematic search for, and identification of, same-sex sexual practices among colonised and "primitive" peoples.6 Most recently, Leela Gandhi has inverted the relationship to explore Carpenter as representative of a small group of Britons who were enabled by their own marginalised social status—in his case, as a gay man—to pursue cross-cultural friendships and so create spaces for anti-imperial politics.7 By bringing together Carpenter's writings on class and sexuality within a transnational and transcultural frame, I reveal and explore the co-existence of anti-imperial qualities in Carpenter's thought alongside hegemonic class and orientalist features of his writings that suggest limits to his aspirational cosmotopianism. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Carpenter's representation of northern working-class men derived not just from his personal encounters with men in South Yorkshire's industrial communities but was crucially shaped by his cosmopolitan and transnational friendships and interests. Most important here was Walt Whitman, with whose work Carpenter was deeply engaged, and who he twice visited in the United States. Building on William Pannapacker's insightful exploration of the hopes and limitations of Carpenter's democratic vision of "comrade-love," I argue that Carpenter's tendency to impose his own emergent sexological understandings of same-sex desire onto the lives of his working-class lovers and interlocutors potentially obscured their own worldviews and reinforced both his own position as an educated outsider with power to interpret and create meaning and hegemonic representations of northerness and northern working men. It was also a forerunner to Carpenter's writing about "primitive" peoples across the globe. The second part of the article places Carpenter's cross-class theorisation alongside his anthropological interests in Vedantic mysticism, male friendship in India and Ceylon and the homosocial culture of Ancient Greece. Spurred on by the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, with its prohibition as "gross indecency" of intimacy between men, and working alongside John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis and other sexologists, Carpenter sought evidence of cultures in which same-sex desire was accorded social value. His aim was to develop a more high-minded, pure-hearted, possibly heroic and certainly comradely and democratic articulation of sexual desire and same-sex relationships. His writings on...

Gianni Vattimo e Jean-Luc Nancy: o fundamentalismo democrático

Este artigo tem como tema a democracia enquanto fundamentalismo, ou o fundamentalismo democrático. Seu objetivo principal é o reconhecimento de que o pensamento sobre a democracia pode ser, ele mesmo, fundamentalista, de modo que não só os fundamentalismos religiosos são uma ameaça à democracia contemporânea. Trata-se de uma interpretação de textos de dois filósofos contemporâneos que não costumam dialogar entre si, o italiano Gianni Vattimo e o francês Jean-Luc Nancy. A tese do ensaio é a afirmação do pensamento democrático enquanto uma forma de fundamentalismo, na medida em que ele cumpre certas condições estabelecidas pelos dois pensadores analisados. Estas condições são, na linguagem dos filósofos citados, o enquadramento da democracia sob o pensamento forte, ou a sua subsunção a um modo metafísico de pensar, de modo que se torna incapaz de autocrítica e de sua necessária reinvenção. Assim, espera-se contribuir para a construção de uma visão autocrítica da democracia mediante o diálogo com aspectos do pensamento pouco conhecidos de importantes filósofos da atualidade e também mediante o diálogo entre filosofia e teologia enquanto modos emancipatórios de saber.

Deconstruyendo el yo disciplinar

Este artículo reflexiona sobre el vínculo entre ciencia política y teoría política en América Latina. Por un lado, argumentamos que, en el modo en que trata a ‘la teoría’, la ciencia política dominante revela algunos de sus ‘rasgos de personalidad’ más problemáticos. Por otro lado, proponemos que la teoría política —siempre y cuando se le permita— puede contribuir a custodiar y cultivar el pluralismo de la disciplina y, por ende, a potenciar su imaginación democrática. En otras palabras, hay mucho en juego en el vínculo en cuestión. El texto se nutre de nuestras agendas de investigación en teoría crítica y sobre la relación entre poder y conocimiento en la ciencia política. Pero el trabajo tiene asimismo una dimensión experiencial y subjetiva que no solo no pretendemos disimular, sino que queremos subrayar. Nuestro objetivo es incitar al debate y contribuir a generar las condiciones para que la teoría política latinoamericana sea escuchada sin que tenga que alzar la voz.

Re-imagining accountability: storytelling workshops for evaluation in and beyond youth work

ABSTRACT In recent years, investment in youth services has been contingent on the measurement of predefined outcomes as ‘proof’ of effectiveness. However, this approach to impact measurement has been criticised for distorting practice and reinforcing inequalities. As youth work emerges from a decade of spending cuts, there is an urgent need for new approaches to evaluation. This article argues that such alternatives must be rooted in a participatory and democratic vision of accountability. It grounds this argument in critical reflection on one alternative approach: storytelling workshops, as developed by the activist practitioner group ‘In Defence of Youth Work’. It discusses their potential as an inclusive, dialogical method of evaluation that contributes to practice development and moves away from top-down managerial logic. The article concludes by arguing for the re-imagining of accountability in education more broadly, through the use of alternatives such as storytelling alongside a wider democratisation of policy and practice.

Interest Groups, NGOs or Civil Society Organisations? The Framing of Non-State Actors in the EU

Scholars have used varying terminology for describing non-state entities seeking to influence public policy or work with the EU’s institutions. This paper argues that the use of this terminology is not and should not be random, as different ‘frames’ come with different normative visions about the role(s) of these entities in EU democracy. A novel bibliometric analysis of 780 academic publications between 1992 and 2020 reveals that three frames stand out: The interest group frame, the NGO frame, as well as the civil society organisation frame; a number of publications also use multiple frames. This article reveals the specific democratic visions contained in these frames, including a pluralist view for interest groups; a governance view for NGOs as ‘third sector’ organisations, and participatory and deliberative democracy contributions for civil society organisations. The use of these frames has dynamically changed over time, with ‘interest groups’ on the rise. The results demonstrate the shifting focus of studies on non-state actors in the EU and consolidation within the sub-field; the original visions of European policy-makers emerging from the 2001 White Paper on governance may only partially come true.

Patient-public engagement interventions for health system improvement in Sub-Saharan Africa: A systematic scoping review protocol.

Research has found health system improvement cannot be achieved without continuously engaging patients, their families and all stakeholders in the design, management and delivery of health care services. Following the Alma Ata declaration on Primary Health Care in 1978, the focus of health system improvement has tended to shift from physician or hospital-centric approaches to a more democratic vision of engaging the public and/or patients in the commissioning, planning, organisation, operation and control of the health care system. Thus, patient-public engagement (PPE) has become an important tool in health system improvement particularly for countries with poor health outcomes including countries in sub-Saharan Africa which carries an estimated 24% of the global burden of diseases in both human and financial costs. The aim of this scoping review is to describe and systematically map PPE research in sub-Saharan Africa, and then to synthesise this research in relation to key theories of PPE, identify the key drivers and barriers of PPE and to identify the knowledge gaps that may usefully be addressed by future research. This scoping review will follow Arksey and O'Malley's best guidelines for conducting scoping reviews and also follow the standard guidelines for reporting using the Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for scoping reviews checklist. A systematic search of peer-reviewed English language literature published between January 1999 and December 2019 will be conducted on four databases: Scopus, CINAHL, Medline (Ovid) and Embase. The initial screening of titles and abstracts will be undertaken independently by two reviewers, followed by full text screening involving three independent reviewers. A thematic framework synthesis will be employed in the analysis of data to identify the various PPE interventions, and outcomes mapped to a framework of engagement continuum to understand its overall effect on health system improvement in sub-Saharan Africa. To our knowledge, this scoping review will be the first to systematically investigate PPE interventions implemented across sub-Saharan Africa, map the outcomes of identified interventions to a framework of engagement continuum and to understand its overall effect on health system improvement. Findings of this review will be published in an open-access peer review journal and disseminated at scientific conferences.

The Revolution, Languages of Performance: Emancipation and Democratic Imagination

The Revolution, Languages of Performance: Emancipation and Democratic Imagination

The real body of therapeutic communities in society of lockdown

Purpose It is argued that COVID-19 epidemic has critically affected, from many points of view, the hyper-modern economic system, dominant in the globalized capitalist societies. This paper aims to describe the point of view of therapeutic communities, basing my reflections on the Italian experience. Design/methodology/approach The author would like to share a critical thought on three issues that this pandemic crisis has made manifest in Italian society: the return of the removed bodies, the feeling of excess represented by therapeutic communities and the emergence of the need for a common thought. Findings Body become again an object of studies and with it also the group, as grouping of the bodies. Also the community become a now old-object of studies, as grouping of bodies and groups in a human environment. The objectives of this study are presented as the substance of the democratic vision of society, which therapeutic communities have a responsibility to promote scientifically and ethically. Originality/value Therapeutic community is presented as transformative and evolutionary for individuals and groups that compose it, as equally conflictual and destructive, both internally and externally. The author thinks this is the substance of the democratic vision of society, which therapeutic communities have a responsibility to promote scientifically and ethically.

Time may Change Us: The Strange Temporalities, Novel Paradoxes, and Democratic Imaginaries of a Pandemic.

Time may Change Us: The Strange Temporalities, Novel Paradoxes, and Democratic Imaginaries of a Pandemic.

History Politics and (Re)forming the Future: Visions of Democracy and the Category of the Utopian

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged throughout Europe. Not only did the war affect the great powers; smaller nations that were not directly involved also experienced a resurgence of constitutional disputes. While these controversies have been analyzed as conceptual struggles, this article – inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of historical times – suggests that they can also be understood as ideological struggles over temporalities. The article examines the Swedish parliamentary debates on further democratization after the introduction of universal suffrage. In this context, there were ideological struggles over how the historical development should be interpreted and differing visions of how the future should be shaped, resulting in varying understandings of what was required of the present. In the conclusion, the article addresses the Koselleckian categorization of temporal experience and argues that there is a need for another category, one that lies beyond calculable prognoses and predictions: the category of the utopian.

The organic crisis of Internationalism and the challenge of remembering alternative futures: Woman suffrage, parliamentarism, and anti-colonial critique in the Communist International

ABSTRACT The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations.

“The State was Patiently Waiting for Me to Die”: Life without the Possibility of Parole as Punishment

Despite its growing use over past decades, there has been relatively little public or scholarly discussion of life sentences that deny the possibility of parole. This essay outlines the labyrinthine legal and political developments that have rendered life imprisonment difficult to address—including the intertwined histories of the death penalty and civil death—and draws upon the life writing of those serving life to theorize a more distinct understanding of this punishment. Witnesses reveal how the possibility of life despite the impossibility of parole punishes by subverting the goals of human growth and development. The potentiality of what can be done in the present grinds up against the futility of what could have been done and what could be done were release an option. Considered alongside the laws and court opinions and claims that characterize its convoluted development, these testimonies reveal this punishment’s role in the American imagination. Life without the possibility of parole reinforces and relies upon a vision that not simply some people are unable to change, but that anyone in a democracy—no matter their position—is some steps away from irretrievable exclusion. Permanent confinement denies a restorative vision of democracy: any effort to abolish or amend it must include the voices of those imprisoned.

Benedicto Kiwanuka and Catholic Democracy in Uganda

In this article, I introduce Benedicto Kiwanuka (1922–72), Uganda’s first prime minister and most prominent modern Catholic politician, and explore how his religious and political sensibilities — especially his vision of democracy — intersected with Catholic thought and historical experience in Buganda and Uganda. Far from turning him into a “Catholic tribalist” looking to empower Catholics vis à vis other religious groups, Kiwanuka’s Catholic identity was a core component of his political commitment to non‐sectarian democracy, the common good, and pan‐ethnic nation‐building. He saw in Catholicism the possibility of envisioning political solidarity during a moment of social rupture, and he and his Democratic Party used Catholic and biblical discourse and theology to help undergird a broader political commitment to liberal democratic nationalism during Uganda’s transition to independence (1958–62). At the same time, Kiwanuka’s prophetic commitment to principle — an uncompromising dogmatism often expressed in religious and theological language — also helped cost him the opportunity to lead Uganda into and beyond independence.

The People versus Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT In this paper, I outline two concerns regarding Avner de Shalit’s proposal for a public reflective equilibrium. Firstly, de Shalit's work suggests a division between the philosopher and the people. We, therefore, need to clarify what the relation between the philosopher and the public is. Secondly, who is the ‘public’ that de Shalit is discussing? By bringing de Shalit's work into contact with the work of Jacques Rancière, this paper will deepen the question who the ‘people’ or ‘public’ in de Shalit's work are, and how would a public reflective equilibrium allow for the implicit democratic vision that de Shalit believes it has.

Authoritarian Populism and the Republic of Heaven in Philip Pullman’s

The chief antagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is the Magisterium, a powerful multinational religious organization reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church. In the first two novels of the new Book of Dust trilogy, Pullman expands upon the original series and further explores the authoritarian populist tactics utilized by the various branches of the Magisterium to assert its authority and to exert a commanding influence over state politics. Set in opposition to the Magisterium is the republic of heaven, which invokes the underlying principles of Milton’s republicanism and seeks to establish a democratic and egalitarian society. This paper examines Pullman’s representation of authoritarian populism in the agencies of the Magisterium, and contrasts this with the democratic vision of the republic of heaven. It argues that in drawing on Milton’s republicanism, Pullman is less concerned with a specific mode of government than with the underlying principles of republicanism that seek to enable the shared participation of the members of a society in its governance and which serve as a means to circumvent the potential for tyranny that accompanies the concentration of power. In invoking Milton, Pullman, however, fails to account for the tension in Milton’s politics between his support for a free and equal polity and his elitist stance towards governance founded upon a belief in humanity’s inherent fallibility. Unlike Milton, whose view of democracy is informed by a belief in Biblical ‘truth,’ Pullman conceives of democracy as a system that underpins pluralism and which facilitates the dynamic exchange of a socio-political collective. His representation of the Magisterium and the republic of heaven are shown to be directly concerned with the dangers posed by hegemonic ideology, as well as the oppressive forms that it can take.