The project of collecting democracy’s words has a quietist undertone. Petr Špecián argues that it provides a desirable counterweight to the activist urge to rethink and redesign the political order. Especially so in today’s challenging times
Jean-Paul Gagnon’s project involves the collection, labelling, and organisation of published words on democracy. He intends it to help democratic scientists to counter authoritarianism. But, argues Marta Wojciechowska, the project’s method may overlook issues of power involved in creating and publishing meanings of democracy
Andreas Avgousti asserts that collecting democracy’s words gives us a window into the democratic imagination. He reads Jean-Paul Gagnon’s expanding database as an illustration of democratic virtues
Jean-Paul Gagnon’s ambitious project expands our democratic imaginaries. While inspiring, Antonin Lacelle-Webster argues that making sense of democracy requires more than a lexicon. Resisting the prevailing sense of disrepair in today’s democratic politics asks us to pay more attention to democracy's appropriation, design, and normative value
Leonardo Fiorespino finds Jean-Paul Gagnon’s proposed lexicon of democracy wanting in its base assumptions around knowledge and arbitrariness. Moreover, he wonders, can we really trust 'democracy's words'?
Today, democratic imaginaries are diluted while parochial understandings of democracy are presented as universal. Such a state of affairs, argues Pablo Ouziel, calls for a deeply diverse speaking-with multilogue amongst democratic traditions
Viktor Valgarðsson argues that words are not enough to understand the concept of democracy. 'Democracy' denotes an important ideal that we must not sacrifice on a mountain of words.
Jean-Paul Gagnon’s endeavour has great potential for bringing unknown or ignored definitions to the fore. However, Friedel Marquardt argues, we hinder understanding and cut its empowering potential short if the communities these definitions are about do not get a chance to speak about their democracies
Jean-Paul Gagnon's data mountain for rescuing the abandoned Science of Democracy is a worthy challenge. Nevertheless, Mauricio Mandujano Manriquez advocates for giving precedence to the epistemic commitments of the scientific enterprise and their implications
According to Rafael Khachaturian, Jean-Paul Gagnon’s 'lexical approach' misses the interpretive dimension of democracy. Instead, we need a self-reflexive theory of concept creation that treats democracy as an unfulfilled political project
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