Response to Critics

We are deeply gratified by the constructive and generous engagement with our book.We are especially moved to be in dialogue and company with this group of scholars, whose work has helped us develop and push our own thinking.In our response, we want to address some of the questions and provocations offered in the individual essays.To begin, our goal was to write a romance.By this, we mean that we chose the genre of romance to carry our argument for democracy in a moment of seemingly incessant crises and doubts in and about the forms of democracy that are prevalent today.Although we do not explicitly identify this genre in the book, it informs our somewhat playful, suggestive, and purposefully unconventional approach to writing about democracy.Hence, our emphasis on myth, rituals, the collective unconscious, morphic fields, and-ultimately-our methodological choice of practicing what we refer to as visionary political theory.One of our key goals was to expand the archive beyond the one that democratic theorists typically invoke, by enlarging our imagination of democratic practices beyond the "West" and the modern timeline that sees Philadelphia and Paris as steps along the inevitable march to democracy's state today.Every approach has its limits, so we are grateful to our reviewers for pointing some of these out.First, William Connolly illuminates a limitation of romancing democracy in his emphasis on bumpy temporalities and turbulence in political imaginaries.These forms of disorder challenge the assumption of smooth, progressive, or linear developments that might be implied by terms like the collective unconscious, species resonance, and, as we argue following Sheldon Wolin, the "recurrent aspiration" for democratic power in the life of the human species.We believe that the myth of Earthborn Democracy (EBD) can include less pacific stories and archetypes, like the Windigo story.As retold by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her Braiding Sweetgrass, the Windigo represents the ever-present possibility of greed and hunger coming to corrupt and overtake patterns of mutuality and cooperation in a political community.Such examples in the long archive of democratic practice are legion and resonant very powerfully today.And yet (and too often in our estimation), the emphasis on the frailties of democratic forms of life crowds out the abundance of strategies, possibilities, and stories of democratic survival and thriving.In the book, we seek to provide a structure of