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The American democratic socialist tradition began with radical democrats of the early American Republic, acquired movement infrastructure with the founding of the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Party, and established a socialist flank in the American Federation of Labor. Scholarship on American socialism has been overdetermined by two contrasting ways of looking down on it represented by Ira Kipnis and Daniel Bell, and has persistently underestimated the importance of religious socialism, through which most of the early movement’s female and African American socialists came into the movement.

Starting from a short story by Borges, this chapter discusses the role that representation may play in a project of radical democracy, defined as a ‘collective will’ aiming at expanding the democratic horizon of freedom, equality and solidarity, as established in the democratic revolution. It is radical not in the sense of referring, with these terms, to a particular ground or foundation of democracy, but to the ultimate absence of such ground. This implies that we have to see radical democracy as an emancipatory project of expanding the democratic idea of representation – as a relation of mediacy and self-alienation – to more and more social fields. The chapter takes its lead from Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau and Frank Ankersmit, to claim that representation should be understood as, precisely, a relation of non-identity between represented and representative, as only then it attests to the ultimately ungroundable nature of the democratic regime. These points are exemplified by analyses of the case of Bosnia, where the democratic, non-identitarian form of representation was replaced by an identitarian one, and that of the anti-representational ideology of the assembly movement of 2011, which fell into the self-delusionary trap of a fantasy of presence and immediacy.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, the fourth chapter proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Emancipation here means a perpetual contestation of the alienating effects of capitalism and its contemporary expression as neoliberalism. The chapter establishes a framework for understanding democracy in nonviolent and anarchist terms by arguing for radical democracy through agonistic public places. Public places are of primary importance because democracy is meant to be inclusive to all. They are places where the politics of hierarchy, technocracy, international patrons, government appropriation, and co-optation by the modern aristocracy can be dismantled by a continuous dialogue of reformation.

The last chapter of the book synthesises the discussions of the relation between constituent power, freedom, and institutional politics throughout the book. The chapter argues that it is one thing to counter the perceived groundlessness and formlessness of constituent power with the formalism of political institutions, but that it is a more ambitious task altogether to re-conceptualise the constituent power as encompassing the dual ambition of both constituting new political regime forms and a care for the stability and durability of those institutions. The council tradition, the chapter argues, provides an excellent vantage point for such re-conceptualisation of the constituent power. Moreover, the chapter argues that democracy have always been criticised for being anarchic, formless, and volatile – starting with Plato and Aristotle and reiterated by numerous political thinkers throughout history. The ambition of institutionalising the constituent power without exhausting it, which is the object of this chapter, is thus also an attempt to defend democracy against this critique, but without relinquishing its relation to radical transformation. Council democracy, in this interpretation, becomes a way of controlling the constituent power without completely exhausting it, thereby giving the citizenry continual access to the powers of self-transformation, co-creation and constituent freedom.

In the concluding chapter, the authors return to the question of democracy. Yet in the on-going fallout from the global financial crisis, even the least radical of democrats would struggle to disagree with Alain Badiou’s assertion that democracy now means ‘nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of the banks’ or his claim that what passes for democracy would be more accurately named ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’. In this context, the chapter argues that any commitment to democracy that precludes the urgent transformation of the capitalist mode of production can only be regarded as part of the problem. It is from this perspective that the idea of communism is discussed, an idea that may galvanize a new emancipatory imaginary.

Examines the radical politics of contemporary “assembly movements” as radical democratic movements against the presumed collusion between institutionalized democracy and capitalism. Shows how the invention of new forms of political life that understand themselves to rest on no foundation is the contemporary indication of the secular imagination, even if conducted in societies presumed to be religious (as in Egypt or Tunisia).

The final chapter concludes by suggesting ways to think and relate to loneliness beyond individualising accounts and in ways that account for social conditions. The chapter returns to the youth co-researchers agenda for youth loneliness and considers the research findings in relation to the themes of experiencing difference, re-imagining connection, and recognising the productivity of youth work practices and moving methods in researching youth loneliness. The findings are used to re-engage with the youth loneliness agenda in ways that push beyond the constraints of the neoliberalising commonsense. Instead, the case is made that responding to the challenge of youth loneliness requires enabling young people to encounter forms of radical democracy and once again re-imagining the potentials of friendship, mutuality, association and co-operation for young people today. Finally, the chapter concludes with a series of recommendations for things we can all do or not do to help young people navigate unwanted experiences of loneliness.

The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism and poststructuralism. This paper seeks to expose the deeper history of the symbolic in the legacy of Romanticism. It argues that crucial to the concept of the symbolic is a polyvalence that was first theorized in German Romanticism. The linguistic turn that so marked the twentieth century tended to suppress this polyvalence, but it has returned as a crucial dimension of contemporary radical political theory and practice. At stake is more than a recovery of historical depth. Through a constructed dialogue between Romanticism and the thought of both Žižek and Laclau, the paper seeks to provide a sharper appreciation of the resources of the concept of the symbolic.