The nation, so long a victim of monarchical selfishness, thought to deliver itself for ever by declaring that it alone was sovereign. In chapter 1 of What is Property he wrote: Proudhon clearly viewed democracy in these terms. Democracy meant representative government, as opposed to monarchy or oligarchy. A survey of the writings of the prominent anarchist activists and theorists of the 19th and early 20th century reveals that, on the rare occasions on which they even employed the term, it was used in its conventional, statist sense to refer to actually-existing democratic institutions and entitlements within the bourgeois state.
Historically, democracy was not a word that anarchists tended to use in reference to their own visions or practices. The second is that the invocation is problematic, because its rhetorical structure and audience targeting almost inevitably end up appealing to patriotic sentiments and national origin myths. The first is that anarchist invocations of democracy are a relatively new and distinctly American phenomenon. Is it worthwhile for anarchists to de-contest “democracy” in ways that point towards statelessness and non-domination? Two arguments follow. I would therefore like to suspend the discussion of the appropriate conceptual understanding of democracy, and instead ask about the strategic choice to employ the term. On such a reading, there is no way objectively to determine the meaning of such concepts-all that exists are distinct usages, each of them regularly grouped with other concepts in one or another ideological formation. The term “equality,” for example, can mean equal access to advantage (liberalism), equal responsibility to the national community (fascism), or equal power in a classless society (anarchism). What political ideologies do, as mass patterns of political expression, is to “de-contest” or fix the meaning of such concepts and place them in particular relationships.
Like most political words, democracy is an “essentially contested” concept-its meaning is itself a political battleground.
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