PositiveFull StopTaylor does a commendable job of compiling data from diverse fields to corroborate her central thesis that democracy is the sum of its abiding paradoxes ... The author navigates these different orders of discourse with perspicuity, making the book at once casually readable and intellectually engaging. For readers already familiar with its companion film, the book will seem repetitive in parts, as Taylor does not mind repackaging her best cinematic material as prose. That said, the book is not simply a prose redux of the film. On a general theoretical level, it adds texture to the concept of the democratic paradox, while its individual chapters reflect upon numerous democratic experiments, such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of North America, that are not covered in the film ... Although I appreciate Taylor’s caution about falling into neoliberalism’s ideological finger-traps, I find her more coherent when she stresses the conceptual link between democracy and popular economic struggle ... The book’s most valuable contribution to contemporary democratic theory may be its dialectical push beyond Plato’s paradox.
