As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Wes Tirey looks at Norberto Bobbio’s ” Democracy and Invisible Government,” from Telos 52 (Summer 1982).
“Democracy,” writes Jacques Rancière in Hatred of Democracy, “first of all means this: ‘anarchic government,’ one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.” He adds: “Democracy is . . . the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.” While Rancière’s suggestion that democracy is ‘anarchic government’ indeed seems paradoxical, and by all means requires careful unpacking, one thing that can be taken from it is that democracy is to be seen. That is to say, a political regime that requires active citizen-participation in which the body politic is self-governing requires political activity to therefore be made public.
Will Europe be able to master its debt crisis and prevent the spread of economic instability throughout the eurozone? Will the political leadership in the United States be able to manage the challenge of the debt limit and, more broadly, the ongoing problems with the federal budget? As this issue of Telos goes to press, each of these dramas is still playing out, and the conclusion to neither is predictable. Will the euro crumble, will Washington grind to a halt? Probably not. Yet if Europe’s contagion is ultimately contained, and if the United States dodges the bullet and avoids default, it will only have been in the nick of time. Perhaps some tired observers will heave a sigh of relief and reassure themselves that the system has worked. Of course, escaping catastrophe is better than the alternative, and no one should be wishing for the worst. But this is not a matter of wishful thinking at all. Magic will not save us. On the contrary, this is about contemporary politics and the apparent inability of existing political institutions to address vital matters in an effective manner. 
This article begins by showing how the desire for justice in the modern democratic tradition is a manifestation of a deeper drive toward unity between nature and reason, as well as self and community. The bulk of the article explores Rousseau’s works as a demonstration that this drive towards unity is tragic in nature—it cannot be fully realized, and at the same time cannot be given up. Furthermore, Rousseau’s inability to accept this desire as tragic, his insistent attempts at creating a total unity between nature and reason, and self and community, leads to its own secondary set of tragedies in his works and his life. The tragic nature of the modern democratic orientation must be recognized and integrated, in order to avoid these secondary tragedies. 
There is much to be admired in Paye’s path-breaking reflection on the nature of a new normative order that comes to life after the implementation of a permanent state of exception. And he must be congratulated for taking seriously what so many others have only announced, imagined, or theorized, and for performing the painstaking “archeological” work of uncovering the basic rules of formation of the new political regime that hides behind legal exceptionality. Still, towards the end of Global War on Liberty, Paye’s inability to provide a more innovative and thought-provoking critical conclusion is disappointing. Instead, Paye needlessly insists on retrieving the ideas of dictatorship and totalitarianism, as if those concepts could provide a grand conceptual finale to his study. Closing with these obsolete political concepts and labels does not do justice to the originality of Paye’s contribution and potentially diminishes its value. But there are two other errors that become obvious at the end of Global War on Liberty, and they are hard to reconcile with the rest of Paye’s analysis.
