The lack of an ideal type of democracy does not preclude Touraine from postulating the historical existence of three distinct types of democracy, each putting the emphasis on a different element from the above mentioned triad of democratic ideals: (1) the liberal type, characteristic of the UK, emphasizing the protection of basic rights against the powers of the state, (2) the constitutional type, characteristic of the US, emphasizing the notions of citizenship and civic duty, and (3) the conflictual type, characteristic of twentieth-century France, emphasizing the struggle for representation of the interests of the majority against oligarchic interests.

Touraine contends that at the end of twentieth century, democracy must be defined anew within the framework of a struggle to assert the autonomy of the human subject against two dangers: (1) the omnipotence of the market and (2) the intolerance of introverted communities.

Following Hannah Arendt, Touraine argues that the real enemy of liberty is political totalitarianism, especially the kind stemming from the rationalistic, universalistic, utopian, and revolutionary politics which dominated this century, rather than the market forces of capitalism.

Given the twentieth century’s absolutist legacy of mobilizing states, vanguard groups, and revolutionary parties, Touraine welcomes the reassertion of the liberal cry for negative liberty in the form of a limitation on political power. Nevertheless, he worries that this liberal reaffirmation has simply meant the dissolution of the nation-state into the market and the reduction of the political system to a political supermarket where citizens act as mere consumers of technocratic socio-political management plans.

Notwithstanding, Touraine also notices an absolutist backlash in many countries and regions. The social marginality and economic inequality generated by the unqualified instantiation of global economic liberalism, coupled with the erosion of political structures to manage these forces, has fueled the spread of a dangerously militant, intolerant, and identitarian nationalism that results in the scandal of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and the threat of international war.

Touraine’s book attempts to give “an answer to the question that arises when we reject both the excessively arrogant mobilizing state [characteristic of this century] and the highly dangerous confrontation between markets and tribes [which we begin to experience now]” (2).

Like Jürgen Habermas, Touraine thinks that ours is a fragmented world with instrumentality reigning in the objective world of technology and the market, and closed cultural identities dominating the world of subjectivity. The world, he maintains, must be recomposed and that recomposition must take place at the level of the social actor: “only at this level can we reconcile the instrumental reason that is indispensable in a world of technology and trade with the memory and creative imagination without which there can be no actors producing history but merely agents reproducing a self-contained order” (ibid.).

The locus of democratic action, he explains, is the subject (individual and collective) who tries to integrate rational thought, personal liberty, and cultural identity with the help of a political system tempered by the demands of negative liberty yet able to create the conditions for the subject’s exercise of positive liberty. A kind of negative democracy protects the population from the ravages of arbitrary power and a positive democracy allows for the greatest number to take control over their own existence (32).

The subject is an ontological amalgam of freedom and tradition who struggles, on the one hand, with modernization and rationalization and, on the other hand, with community, to creatively exist in the context of a multiplicity of social relations. This creative and self-affirming activity of the subject defines democratic action.

Just as we have different types of democracy, democratic action also operates differently depending on the state of development of a society. In modernized societies, democratic action combats the threat of the state to private interests by limiting state power. In dependent societies, democratic action combats the threat of cultural homogeneity caused by an exogenous modernization process with the defensive assertion of a community.

Touraine contends that democracy is not defined by a separation of powers, but by the nature of the links between civil society, political society, and the state. A top-down influence from state to civil society does not lead to a democracy, but when social actors control their political representatives, who in turn control the state, the outcome is democratic (32).

Contemporary society, he claims, suffers from a crisis of representativity, lacking clear social categories around which to organize political conflict. The old categories based on class conflict are not useful anymore and new and effective social categories have not yet been devised. New social movements need to emerge autonomously at the level of social life with their corresponding political parties. However, he believes that this development will take time.

New social actors must emerge that can connect the particularity of their interests with the universality of basic rights, simultaneously pursuing the common good and the defense of particular interests. These new subjects will aspire to become both as universal and as particular as possible, rising above identity and integrating personal liberty and personal creativity with basic human rights. Only this, he thinks, will ensure a truly democratic politics.

Touraine observes that our present political system is concerned with law and order more than with justice, with adaptation more than with equality. Hence, those within the system claim that peace reigns, while in reality it is only that internal demands have subsided into external threats. Democratic action must help reduce injustice and violence by bringing these externalized conflicts back to the center of the political system.

For its part, the political system must reconcile its dual role as antechamber to the state and as expression of popular demands and feelings (109). Touraine acknowledges that this reconciliation is difficult given that the State’s function is to unify society while popular demands are diverse.

Ultimately, Touraine concludes that democracy is that institutional space which allows subjects to be autonomous subjects in the context of a unifying state, a rationalizing and modernizing market economy, and traditional communities.

A culture of democracy can be fostered with the help of an education that leads to the acquisition of knowledge, the development of rational thought, and the recognition of others as subjects. However, there can be no democracy unless the greatest number wish to exercise power, to make their voices heard, and to be involved in decisions that affect their lives. Hence, democratic culture cannot be divorced from political consciousness. A democratic political consciousness requires the practical acknowledgment that political institutions are the primary locus of the recognition of the other as a subject.

Touraine is keenly interested in the prospects for democracy in the developing world. Democracy and development are closely related, he argues, with democracy simultaneously moderating the negative effects of exogenous development while promoting endogenous development. Development, according to him, involves the political management of tensions between the economic and social spheres, while democracy involves the social representation of the subjects’ interests. Hence, within his framework, democracy ends up being a precondition for development. Legitimate management of the tensions between economic and social interests will only be possible when the social representation of the political actors is ensured. This notwithstanding, Touraine maintains that a modernizing voluntaristic state can be a vehicle of development whenever it conceives of itself as merely a temporary agent in the formation of economic, social, and administrative actors, who can then play an active role in the generation of endogenous development and in the construction of civil society.

Touraine’s nonessentialism and antiutopianism regarding democracy is clever and commendable. His detailed explanation of why democracy cannot be reduced to a single principle or ideal is enlightening and convincing. Touraine convinces us that no ultimate theoretical resolution to the inherent tension between the conflicting ideals of democracy is possible. He compels us to accept his conclusion that the resolution must happen in practice, at the level of the subject, not in theory.

Despite the apparent truth of Touraine’s judgment, however, his own explanation of how the subject can achieve this practical harmony between the competing demands of basic rights, citizenship, and representation is too sketchy and represents the weakest point of his whole account. Perhaps it is true that subjects must integrate rational thought, personal liberty, and cultural identity, but without some robust, mid-level theoretical explanation of how this is done in practice – the kind of explanation one expects from good social theory – or without a clear and rigorous analytical exploration of the dynamic tensions between the three conflicting democratic ideals – the kind of analysis one expects from good philosophy – Touraine’s account seems wanting and opaque.

Touraine is very successful in defining the agenda for future, democratically-inspired social theorizing, but not in meeting the sociological and philosophical explanatory challenges it presents. We should take on these challenges and elaborate clear, detailed, convincing, and pragmatically efficacious answers to the broad but fundamental question of how to harmonize universality and particularity, self-creation and justice, the market and social needs, rationalization and community, freedom and tradition. By doing this, we extend the definitive task of critical theory into the twenty-first century.