CFP: Call for Chapter Proposals - Democracy as a Way of Life: Rethinking Democratic Theory and Practice

Call for Chapters - Democracy as a Way of Life: Rethinking Democratic Theory and Practice

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2025

Editor: Albano Pina/ University of Beira Interior

Publisher: Routledge (planned)

Contact email: [email protected]

Democracy is not just a political system, but a mode of living together. Long before universal suffrage or representative institutions became widespread, the term “democracy” had already begun to denote a specific form of society. A powerful early expression of this view can be found in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, where democracy is described as a shared ethos marked by public engagement, mutual respect, and civic virtue.

In the early 19th century, early French liberal thinkers also sought to articulate an extra-institutional account of democratic life. Tocqueville, perhaps more than anyone, gave this insight its enduring philosophical depth. In Democracy in America, he famously defined democracy as an “état social” — a social condition structured by equality. While he initially distinguished this from the political principle of popular sovereignty, he also acknowledged their profound interdependence. Democracy, for Tocqueville, was both a way of organizing society and a dynamic pressure reshaping institutions, mores, and beliefs — a force that could not be easily circumscribed within legal or constitutional frameworks.

This conception resonates through a rich tradition of political thought which portrays democracy not simply in institutional or procedural terms, but as a lived experience and a continuous social experiment. As Claude Lefort famously argued, democracy designates the type of society that emerged from the collapse of ancien régimes: a society of equals, founded not on fixed hierarchies or inherited roles, but on the indeterminacy of power and the legitimacy of conflict. In this context, democracy is a total social fact (Mauss) — a principle that permeates all domains of life. According to this perspective, aristocracy, democracy, and totalitarianism are not simply three forms of government, as is commonly understood in Western political thought. Rather, they represent three rival and incompatible principles of social organization, each giving rise to fundamentally different types of society. 

This conception is echoed in John Dewey’s idea of democracy as a way of life, where democratic habits, communicative practices, and plural forms of cooperation serve as the groundwork for political and ethical life. For Dewey, democracy is inseparable from the epistemic conditions of modernity. After the scientific revolution, knowledge underwent a secularizing transformation, becoming unstable, fallible, and shaped through collective processes distributed across the entire social body. In this sense, the democratic ethos mirrors the very structure of modern knowledge, demanding a society where inquiry, dissent, and cooperation are not only permitted but cultivated as vital civic virtues.

Over recent decades, thinkers influenced by Wittgensteinian philosophy and ordinary language theory — particularly Stanley Cavell and political theorists in the critical tradition — have further expanded this view. They interpret democracy as a Lebensform, a form of life grounded in shared vulnerabilities, mutual recognition, and a caring orientation toward others and the world. As such, democracy implicates not only institutions, but affects, perceptions, attitudes, and embodied ways of inhabiting the world.

This broader conceptualization requires rethinking the boundaries between the political, the social and the intimate. It rejects the idea that democracy can be confined to formal political institutions, affirming instead that democratic life must be cultivated across all spheres. As Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi suggest, democracy as a form of life provides the normative resources needed to critically evaluate social practices and institutions from within, according to their own immanent standards.

This volume invites contributions that explore democracy as a way of life — a perspective that pushes beyond the confines of institutional arrangements and embraces democracy as a pervasive social ethos, a network of everyday practices, and a normative horizon for collective existence.

We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines (political theory, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, etc.) that address, among others, the following themes:

• The theoretical lineage of democracy as a form of life or society: from Tocqueville to Dewey and Lefort
• Democracy, habit, and the formation of a democratic ethos
• Democracy and the fragility of forms of life: caring, recognition, and vulnerability
• Democracy and epistemology: uncertainty, fallibilism, and collective inquiry
• The role of education in cultivating democratic dispositions
• Practices of democratic innovation
• Aesthetic and narrative expressions of democratic life
• The limits of procedural or deliberative models of democracy
• Normativity and immanence in the critique of forms of life

Contributors are encouraged to reflect on democracy not only as a normative ideal but also as a historical formation and an experiential condition. The goal of this volume is to map the conceptual, practical, and affective textures of democratic life in the broadest sense, offering a multidimensional account of what it means to inhabit democracy today.

Submission Guidelines and Timeline

To submit your proposal, prepare:

·       A Word file or PDF with your 500-750-word proposal for a maximum 9,000-word chapter (please include your last name in your file name).

Estimated Timeline

·       September 30, 2025: Deadline for proposal submissions

·       October 30, 2025: Decisions and feedback from editor

·       January 15, 2026: Chapters due to editor

·       February 25, 2026: Peer reviews due

·       March 20, 2026: Peer reviews to authors

·       May 15, 2026: Final revised chapters submitted

·       June 30, 2026: Final manuscript deliver to Publisher

Please direct proposals and inquiries to: [email protected]