Contemporary democratic theory increasingly poses a choice between democracy as the power of the people resisting all institutionalized rule or democracy as rule by the people through carefully specified procedures and institutions. On one side is a diverse group of theorists often referred to as agonal democrats. From various perspectives, these theorists insist that contestation, struggle, and resistance lie at the heart of politics in general and democratic politics in particular. Agonal democrats thus reject the drive for consensus that they find in theories of those on the other side, liberal democrats and deliberative democrats. Consensus, according to the agonal view, amounts to the end of contestation and the squelching of resistance to dominant ways of thinking and acting. But liberal and deliberative democrats insist—again in various ways—that democracy properly understood involves the ordered, reasonable, and responsible exercise of the power of the people, which can only occur when contestation and resistance are tempered by consensus-producing practices of public reason, deliberative procedures, and institutional safeguards.

At its most basic, this book draws on Aristophanes to help move beyond any either-or choice between democracy as contestation and rebellion and democracy as ordered and responsible collective action. Instead, I take rebellion and collective action as rival impulses within democracy. On my reading, Aristophanic comedy shows ordinary people at once pulled toward resistance to all attempts to impose order or rule on democratic politics and, at the same time, pulled toward contributing to the collective action of the demos.