23

The author revisits the « death certificate » of European democracy, which some saw in the removal from the draft European constitution of the citation from Thucydides defining democracy as the rule of the majority. From this starting point, he considers the limits of contemporary political theory to show that democracy as an object is « dynamited » by observers as varied as the theoriests of elites or those of deliberative or procedural democracy. Democratic citizenship, he notes, is also being reconsidered, creating a challenge from the bottom. He attributes the weakening of the perceived quality of democracy to the action of certain political professionals. What is needed, he concludes, is a reinvention of the values of liberal democracy.