processes that will be entirely democratic. We conclude that normative grounds other
than democracy are ultimately essential for a complete theory of, and successful practice
of, democracy. Democracy, as both a process and an ideal, cannot be an end in itself (an
“ultimate good” or “metanorm”); it can only be a means to other ends (an “instrumental
good”).
What ultimate good democracy should serve is a question beyond the scope of this
paper. But we cannot discern any explicit metanorm in contemporary democratic theory.
Cohen claims, for example, that “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if
they could be the object of free and reasoned agreement among equals.”
reflect the view that freedom and consensus among equals, not democracy as such, may
be the ultimate norm. Rawls prudently avoids detailed discussion of political mechanisms
and defers instead to other routes for “public reason.” It may be that Rawls’s concepts of
equality or public reason are the ultimate norms to which contemporary democratic
theory implicitly appeals, rather than democracy as such. We can’t tell; our reading of the
literature has revealed nothing precise or explicit. Without an explicit discussion of what
the ultimate grounds of democratic legitimacy are, we cannot find justification for
democratic theory’s multitude of prescriptions for democratic processes.
Our status as outsiders to the contemporary discussion of democratic theory puts us in
a position to offer something unique to the insiders – we can tell those theorists who
specialize in democratic theory how their theories sound to those who are not themselves
specialists in democratic theory. We have been unable to find any democratic theorists
who address this problem with anything like the urgency that (it seems to us) the problem
demands. Because we are outsiders, we readily admit that our whole critique may be a
big misunderstanding – but even if this is the case, the existence of the misunderstanding
3
Convention