And my question is simply this, when I say to you, democratic politics, this democratic politics, that do you think? Do you think of what most people call democracy, which is the kind of politics we have in a country like the UK? Or do you instinctively feel that democracy needs to mean something else?

Yeah, I think maybe that's a good way of getting the disagreement out right away and then we can kind of go around it. I think COVID has an ideal. And so to the extent that I think of it as an ideal of how you think about politics and how you relate to politics, it's not really something that democratic states are so-called democratic states really have. It's something that they try to pursue and it's more like a horizon and something that shapes our actions, both as citizens, but also as politicians, as members of different states. But I don't really think that anyone in the world has got to the ideal. And it's actually very, very demanding ideal because it's about how you relate to political authority and what political authority needs to do to be justified to you. So maybe that's where our disagreement is because I suspect I have a much more demanding view of what makes politics acceptable and what makes authority acceptable to all of us. And maybe for you, it's more a story of as long as it guarantees our survival or something like that. That's enough for it to be good. And I think of it as a particular way of relating to authority. So there is different and that's maybe also how it goes back to the history of political thought and to different discussions around what democracy is, how it compares to other regime types. And it's a particular way of thinking about politics and about political institutions. And I think it's that particular way of thinking about politics is actually extremely demanding. And so that's why I think it's an ideal.

So maybe that one of the things we're going to differ about is the usefulness of really, really demanding ideals of politics. And I think we should come on to that. I'm not sure I have as minimal a view of what democracy is for. There are people, certainly, who do think of it in very, very negative terms, the cliche, which is it's the worst system of government, apart from all the others. And there's a view that it's a very, the justification of it can be pretty basically procedural. It is a minimal way of keeping the peace. Most forms of politics break down into a kind of civil war, civil disorder and successful democracies manage somehow to negotiate between rivals for power in a way that they accept the legitimacy of each other ruling. So that is pretty minimal. And I think it's too minimal for me. I think it has to be something more than that. But in a way, what I'm interested in, and what you say is that for you, the core of it is it has to be a justification for power on the part of the people who have power that can be accepted by the people over whom that power is exercised. Yeah. That is demanding because it requires finding a language or a means of talking about politics, which makes sense both to people with power and people over whom that power is exercised. But it also raises the question in democratic politics. I think for some people, the ideal is that that gap shouldn't exist, right? In a way, the way to close that gap is that the exercise of power and being on the receiving end of power should belong to the same people, the people. So I may have misunderstood you, but I understand you as accepting that in any politics, including democratic politics, there is going to be that gap. So it can't be that maybe hyper idealized version of democracy where the people rule themselves. But the demanding bit is that gap has to be closed in such a way that the exercise of that power, which is real nonetheless, has to be completely acceptable to the people over whom it's exercised. Yeah.

And in the demanding version of that idea, which I endorse, the argument says that they will only accept it if they are the source of that authority. And so in fact, the gap that you are pointing at between the people who rule and the people who are being ruled, the only way of actually making that gap acceptable is if it's so minimal that eventually disappears. And that's why it's an ideal, because it's an ideal that shapes a process through which we increasingly take control of our political lives in such a way that we are at the end, the authors of all the laws that we're subjected to. And that's the sort of the sort of the radical democratic element that I subscribed to, which I think is a very distinctive way of thinking about politics, about political institutions, about the relationship between power and freedom, all these things. And I think if you care about freedom, at any level, you have to care about political institutions that track freedom in this way. And that's why I think what makes democratic politics attractive. It's exactly that. It promises a particular connection between individual and collective freedom. One where exactly this gap is progressively minimized to the point of eventual disappearing.

So I was going to say to you that it sounds like Rousseau what you were saying in the sense that Rousseau has a strong realist streak in his writing. He's not so pie in the sky idealist. In some ways, he's a pretty hard-nosed political thinker. And he accepts that there will always be this thing called government. The people can't do government. Government is something that is going to be done either in a specialist way or in some respects by some kind of elite. It won't be in the Rousseau version or a wealthy elite, but it will be an elite that have particular qualifications to exercise that role. But that isn't what politics should be identified with. If you identify politics with government, you're already in trouble because you've sort of justified the power too early in the game. What you actually need is a form of politics where the power that government has is itself rooted in something where that gap is closed. And that, as you say, is the popular mandate, the popular legitimation of government. Now if you relate it to contemporary democracy, the thing that most people call democracy, the primary mechanism for legitimating government is elections. But that doesn't really cut it on this account. And then the technical day-to-day mechanism that we use is political representation, the sense that the gap is closed by the thought that these people are taking decisions on our behalf. They're not us and they're not our decisions, but somehow they stand in for our decisions. And again, the Rousseau version doesn't think that that cuts either. So Rousseau doesn't believe representation, the idea that people can stand in for other people will do it. And he doesn't think that what we would call elections would do it. So it is very demanding in a contemporary setting because it doesn't sound like what most people call democracy. Yeah, although I wouldn't be as critical as Rousseau is of that part of the argument. So to

me, representative institutions are a good approximation to what I call democracy. So I'm not against, I'm not that set against representation because it actually, for me, all comes down to how you are represented, whether you are represented, whether there really is this capacity to say to someone, okay, I trust you with tracking my interests or my principles or however you want to cash it out into politics. And that's okay, that gives me some representation, it gives me some freedom. So there is a principle and an agent and that relationship is, I think, a better approximation and certainly, yeah, closer to democracy than any other mechanism whereby you have a king or a ruler or an absolute monarch or whatever. So different ways of thinking about this politically. For me, the problem is that in contemporary so-called democracies, even that representative relation is broken. And it hasn't always been broken. I think it's a history and because democracy is a process, there are moments in the process where the gap is closer and there are moments where it's completely false apart somehow. And I think right now, we are at a moment in our politics where this representative relation is completely broken at all levels because of the way in which the party system, which is what we have come up with historically, is broken, which has traditionally been one mechanism of tracking people's will because of the relationship between political power and economic power and the fact that some people's interests and voice and will are much more reflected in political decisions than other people. And I think also something that actually democracies traditionally also been better, to me, real democracy requires global institutions that are representative. This is a particularly weak chain because we are at a point where we have all kinds of global processes of interaction and trade and exchange and conflicts, concerns that are common in environmental crises or AI data, whatever. So all our challenges are shared. The kinds of institutions that we have are not at all responsive to democratic decision-making at that global level. So it's kind of broken nationally. It's broken regionally and I think it's also broken internationally. So right now, I think we're even. So it's just broken. Yeah, but it's not broken at all times and all places in the same way. It's broken in different places for different reasons. And again, that's why I say to me, it's a process and there is a history that matters there because there are moments in that process where you're clearly closer to the ideal and moments where you're very far from it. And I think right now we're at a point where all of us are actually quite far, but not all equally far.

So what's the moment when we were closer to it? And I honestly don't know what you're going to say here. I'm really curious to know what you think.

Well, it depends. I mean, different countries are different. You know, I don't think you can generalize for the world, right? So different moments, I'd say maybe post-war Britain was in, would take the example of the United Kingdom. Maybe that was a moment where there was some kind of collective reckoning and an idea that democracy is very demanding and requires certain political processes and certain economic processes in place for it to represent. And maybe, you know, the party system was a little bit more clear cut. For me, insofar as we link it also to the development of party democracy, there was a moment where at least in Western Europe, very different from Eastern Europe. So again, you can't really generalize for the world because these different places have different trajectories. But if we just stick to Western Europe, there was a moment where we're going to be at a moment in Western Europe where party democracy was really, to some extent, tracking the principles and commitments of different groups. And it was much more widespread than now. So I think for me, that was the moment where the mass party was acting as the institution that was able to help people find representation in political institutions to the extent that has in the second half of the 20th century progressively that link's broken, which was I think there in Western Europe right after the end of the Second World War, that

contributed to the loss of representation. So the example of post-World Britain makes me think of two things. So one is that this is very historically contingent and the kind of politics that you describe where there seems to be a more direct tracking of popular preferences in representative politics. Here comes at a time where probably there is more consensus generated by a shared historical experience. So this often is a post-war phenomenon. And that is a real challenge for the idea that as we are progressing towards some ideal because the further you get away from that collective experience, actually the harder it is to hold on to that set of conditions, circumstances. And you can't really contrive them. I think it's really hard to contrive post-war unity in the absence of a war. The second thing is that what really strikes me about the experience of post-war democracy in the UK is that it didn't go along with institutional reform. In a sense, this was achieved by people who thought they shouldn't tinker with the institutions or tinkering with the institutions would be a distraction from the primary purpose, which is to respond to, so if you take post-1945, a clear majoritarian preference, something very close to a genuine majoritarian preference for something like a social democratic settlement. And so the job is to achieve that through the existing institutions, either because you will take your eye off the ball if you do institutional reform, if you do process when you should be focused on content, but also I think because it's thought to be a bit dangerous maybe to do that. But actually if you don't do that, if you just always try and achieve it through the existing, broadly the existing institutions, it becomes harder and harder to hold on to it. And I think this may be something we don't agree on, I'm not sure, but I think one of the problems with contemporary democratic politics is that there isn't enough focus on changing the how rather than the what, how we do it rather than what it is we're trying to achieve. If you think about the prospect of an incoming Labour government in this country, whatever you think of their programme, which hasn't been specified yet and certainly doesn't sound like a post 1945 transformation, but given how broken our politics is, there's also not much in it about changing the very way we do it, changing the way we try and track people's preferences, changing the fundamental mechanism of politics. It still seems to be whatever it is we want to do, we're going to squeeze it through the existing system, we're going to take all of our ideas and ideals and we're going to squeeze them through this increasingly narrow funnel and it is really narrow and then it will come out okay the other side. And I think the evidence of the last few decades is that it just doesn't come out at all. And so actually to get democracy back to something closer to the ideal, there needs

to be much more of a focus on process. Yes, but I would start by maybe saying something about what you started with, which is a shared experience of the war and of crisis and how it's easier to come to a consensus after those moments. And to me, that's a kind of rafication of a moment in history and of people's preferences in that moment. And it's not that at some point there is a consensus in society. It's that consensus is itself forged by political actors and by political agents. And one of the things that social democratic parties did in their infancy was because they were the hair of a tradition that wasn't institutional to begin with, was a process of fighting and protests and mobilizing consent in all the ways that didn't actually have to do with institutions because people didn't have access to institutions. At that point, it was much more about ideas and ideology to some extent. And parties were very active in creating interpretations of reality in a way. They knew that this was a two-way process. It wasn't just that you go out there and have to campaign to win the votes. And so what you need to know is, you know, what do the polls say or what do people's preferences, where do they stand and so on? Because they didn't have these constraints when they started these social democratic parties. They were in many ways much more free and much more creative and much more imaginative in how they enabled their members or their sympathizers to actually articulate preferences, just didn't just find them. And I think one of the problems is that in some ways, parties right now are actually hostage of this institutional political process whereby they think of themselves just as election winning machines. And all they need to do is go out there, convince people that they should vote for me rather than other party. And that will be enough for them to be represented. And that's exactly the problem in a way, because if you don't have a process that goes both ways. So parties help people understand what their conflicts are, where they're coming from, what their grievances might be about power, about how they relate to power. And then people themselves relate and participate. This is also, even in the making, I think the democracy is a much more demanding idea than what we think it is, because it's not just about you go out there and you convince people to vote for you. And that's enough for those people to be represented. You have to find ways of representing and help people understand on the basis of what principles they ought to feel represented. So yeah, I think it's much more demanding. And that's also why I think talking about just changing institutions, that's in some ways not enough, because then we're just talking about changing the laws and how do we get to change the laws? We get to change the laws in some ways by starting to where the laws are, where we are not right now. And this is a slightly more outside perspective, I guess, what I'm trying to articulate.

I still suspect there's quite a lot of historical contingency in that. I don't know if I'm ratifying it or not. I'm not completely certain I know what that means. But when I think about the history of early social democracy, I completely agree with you, what gives it a lot of its drive is the sense that people were making it up as they went along. And that was certainly true of movements that came out of labor movements and early trade unionism and so on. This was a fight, it was a struggle for recognition. So if you're by definition, if you're struggling for recognition, you're not being recognized. So the institutions aren't working. You don't have that institutional voice, you have to fight for it. But I think it was also true, if you go back to the first half of the 20th century, that these institutions, that is the institutions of democratic politics, as we understand them, were relatively unformed. What we call democracy is a phenomenon of the last hundred years, this particular version with elections and political parties and various forms of mass communication and so on. That comes with the technology of the 20th century. It comes with 20th century ways of doing politics, including the mass franchise, all of that. At the start of that story, it was more open ended. Now a lot of that is, I don't know if it's rafied, but to me, just a lot of that is stuck, right? The ways we do it are really predictably, inflexibly the same as they were 50 years ago. Whereas 100 years ago, these ways of doing politics were being invented by the people who were doing it. So my fear would be, if I'm thinking about this in terms of the possibility of different political outcomes, that the parties that try to reimagine what politics is in a way that, as you describe, gets people to see their preferences differently and so on and tries to do that sort of communication with voters, electorate, citizens. They get squeezed out by this narrow funnel and the institutions which are pretty rigid now actually surprisingly rigid, I think, pollements, electoral systems, which just never change, the institutions themselves. They make it harder and harder every year that goes by where they don't shift. So I don't think institutional change is sufficient, but I really think it's necessary.

Yeah, but I think there is an argument that would say that the problem, yes, of course, it's necessary, but it depends on what the site of institutional change is. And it sounds to me like you were thinking about the state. And I think part of the problem is that we have actually collapsed democracy into the state and we think of democracy only as democracy that is realized through state institutions. And one of the things that I think made these social democratic movements at the beginning of the origins distinctive was that they were thinking of the state as an instrument for the realization of certain democratic goals, but they didn't think that they thought the state was necessary, but they didn't think it was sufficient to realizing democracy. And they had a story about what you needed to do that went beyond the state that had to do with internationalism and with how states ought to cooperate with each other, with how states related in the northern side of the world. And with imperialism, all these different, there was a diagnosis of why we didn't have global democracy that I think was much more rich and more nuanced. And to some extent, because these social democratic parties weren't so wedded to the idea of the nation state as the P.O. and all of democracy, that's why they had more margins for maneuver. They had more freedom in a way. And I think the problem right now is that they think of the project of advancing democracy and the project of advancing the nation state that have become for all parties completely identical. And so now it's really hard to think of what else can you do apart from trying to win elections, which is ultimately trying to have access to parliament, which is ultimately trying to change the laws. Even though we know that at a global level, you are powerless if you don't have mechanisms of representation that go beyond the state. And if you don't have institutions that are able to coordinate and articulate these principles beyond this nation state. But the parties of the left have just abandoned that project. And as I say, that's because they had this illusion that by having access to the state and because they were doing so well and they were winning elections and so on. At one point, the project of developing the state and the project of developing democracy became one and the same. And I think right now that is actually what's holding back democracy, that we are not able to see the state in a much more instrumental perspective. And do you think one of the reasons that the left abandoned

that? And more broadly, I think people don't think of democracy as something that just continues to scale up. And as it were, the bigger it gets, the greater its potential is to realize some of its ideals is because most people assume there is a problem of scale here. I mean, it's the familiar argument against international, let alone global politics. But also, I think there's always a background assumption with democracy that the best site for experimentation is the local. And this is probably true in a lot of contemporary political science and academic writing about politics. When people are frustrated with politics at the national level, they hold up examples of really dynamic cities or regions or localities. And often it's very small scale. You can do these amazing things if you're only 10,000 people, which is a lesson as old as democracy itself because more dynamic potentially forms a democracy in the ancient world. Anyone who studies it quickly comes to appreciate are on a very small scale by our standards. And then it's assumed that you scale up to the nation state and you can have relatively dynamic forms of representation, but you're getting quite close to the edge of what's possible. And when you go beyond the nation state, what happens is not what you describe as what you would like to happen, which is you get more dynamic forms of representation, but actually it gets more and more attenuated and the vices of contemporary state based politics become more and more exaggerated, remote elites and the near impossibility of creating majoritarian consensus. So you just have endless coalition building, which is one of the things our democracies have become, right? They're not Rousseau and in the sense that they are very, very, very rarely majoritarian about anything except occasionally in a referendum and then people get completely freaked out by what the majority wants and they abandon it again. And so at the international level, that would become harder and harder. So why, I'd love to be persuaded of this. Why should we believe that as you scale it up rather than becoming more remote from your ideal, it gets closer to your ideal?

Well, because I don't think it's a process of just scaling it up. It's a process of dispersing from within and scaling it up as well. So it's a process of internal differentiation by creating mechanisms of political participation that actually give you genuine political participation, genuine popular control, just to give you one example. There could be ways in which our elected representatives are much more held into account through systems of something close to imperative mandate or recalling representatives. There's all this history of these democratic innovations and democratic suggestions that movements have made over the years and usually the elites run away because they don't want popular control. They don't actually want to have this. And this is all about internal differentiation of democracies. So there are ways in which you can really, you can try to have to hold representatives to account much more. But that's not how where liberal political institutions go and wants to go because they actually want something else. They want stability. They don't necessarily want popular control. They want small elites that are able to control what's going on. And they're usually, and this is another standard objection to democracy is that it gives too much power to people and that you don't know because they're, the rebel is concerning. And this is a trope there of a kind of anti-democratic trope that if you care about democracy, then you really have to have an argument against. But to go back to your point, it's not just about scaling up. It's also about, as I say, internally differentiating and creating mechanisms of accountability that might require you to disperse power within the nation state. And about size and scaling up, I mean, I'm not convinced by that argument because it seems to me we have lots of really big states that we don't say, oh, the US is, when people think that the US is the best democracy in the world, nobody says, oh, but it's too big to be democratic. I mean, you know, wouldn't you just let that concern the state? They started saying that, but yeah. But it's not because of the size, right? There's something else going on there. And I think, so this is why, to me, just setting the limit at the scale of the states seems to be arbitrary. And it's just, again, the failure of imagination that you can't see this world operates with these units that are very, very different. So, yeah. They do say

the United States is very big, but it has certain necessary features of any viable democratic unit. It has a shared language. It has, you're not going to agree with this. And I don't think I even agree with this. It has a shared history. It has a single currency. That is actually one of the features of most democratic units. And so people look at the EU. I mean, I don't want to get into an argument here about the EU and its democratic deficit or anything like that. People look at the EU and they often hold that up as an example of the challenge of scale for something to be democratic. And then it seems to me that there probably are 101 ways in which European politics, regional, national and European-wide, could be more responsive in the ways that you describe. More responsive to citizen preferences and to shift since citizen preferences. But it's really hard for me anyway to see where the spaces to wedge that in now. I mean, it feels more like a revolutionary idea. So, as you're speaking, to go back to this geopolitical thought, two people come to mind to me. One is Bentham. So, sort of the Benthamite, not Bentham, the utilitarian, but Bentham, the radical Democrat. He said in the 1810s, 1820, is democracy needs three things. It needs a secret ballot. We got that. It needs as open a franchise as possible. He hadn't quite imagined how open it could be because it didn't for him include women, but we got that. And then it needs annual elections. Like, if you wait more than a year before getting the chance to recall these bastards, they will set up little secret clubs and groups and cabals and elites and you'll lose control of the process. And we don't have that. We don't even come close to having that. It doesn't really happen anywhere. And that was the radicalism of it. So I'd sort of hear that. You need much more direct recall and control and mandate. And then I hear Marx in what you're saying that actually this is a revolutionary ideal. The closing of that gap requires something much more than just, I guess what I'm talking about, which is finding the chink of light in the institution through which you might begin to drive some of this stuff. It actually requires a re-imagining of this way of doing politics because it is now captured in ways that probably aren't amenable to this

kind of bent my opening up. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think to some extent Marx's argument is about the relationship between economic and political power, the fact that you have these global processes of economic expansion and capital accumulation and so on. And they are sustained by a certain kind of political institution like the state and like a particular kind of state that is not really usually the democratic state. And to the extent that historically it becomes a democratic state is more a concession of the elites to these moments of popular uprising and trying to take control from the rich. And we also see historically that it closes very quickly as soon as the elites are more secure in their capacity to actually control the state. So they open up. So those moments where we were talking earlier about when was social democracy successful, when did it work? It worked when economic elites were willing to make the kinds of concessions on the access to the state, to other political groups, other social classes. And it closes when those social democratic parties collude with capital and collude with the economic elites and just are able to continue. And I find that diagnosis and that analysis is also very plausible because it seems to me to bear out with kinds of realities that we observe. And it also makes sense of this idea that democracy is both an ideal and a process. It's an ideal in that we're not there really ever. And it's a process in that you're sometimes closest and sometimes further away from it depending on political conflict, depending on history, depending on geopolitics, depending on the development of economic relations or how things go for capital when it goes well. When it's in moment of growth and willing to share more, when it's in moment of contraction they're not willing to share and then democratic spaces will become more reduced. And that's also a story about ultimately how the real power is economic power. That's I think compatible with what Marx was saying and was diagnosing. But I don't think changing the economy is all there is to having a democratic society. You need to change the economy and you need to change the system of production. But I think you also need to care about the kinds of things that you were saying earlier. Bentham and other people, other Democrats cared about which is how relationship between the people and the elites, how much can you scrutinize them, how much can you actually have control over them and when those power degenerate and deteriorate. I mean, these are all themes in the history of political fault which aren't strictly related to the organization of the economy, even though I think right now the organization of the economy is actually one of the fundamental questions also because I think it also explains why when these democratic social democratic parties were successful in the West, it usually also coincides with the moment where there's huge injustices in other places outside the kind of core liberal Western countries, but nobody really cares about what's going on there. And sometimes they are enabled by processes of exploitation in other parts of the world. Things go well for capital in one side of the world because they go badly for workers in another side of the world. And I think that's also why it's really important to think of it as a global process rather than just something that is fixated on the nation state.