While Keenan does an excellent job of pointing out the paradoxes at the heart of democratic thought, his tone and overall pessimism distract from his otherwise insightful commentary. Keenan's analysis of the paradoxes in the work of Arendt, Benhabib, Castoriadis, Laclau and Mouffe, Rousseau and Sandel is complex and well-argued, but he can be a harsh critic, and this can lead, at times, to the sense that his critique is driven by the search for weaknesses and paradoxes in a particular theorist's work, rather than by a desire to illuminate these paradoxes and offer alternatives. Part of this has to do with the overall layout of the work, which is divided somewhat arbitrarily by theorist. While I understand the necessity of dividing the book in this way, it has a tendency to make Keenan's argument seem unnecessarily formulaic and repetitive in the sense that almost all the theorists concerned fall prey to the "paradoxes of collective autonomy" (9). While illuminating the "difficult space of democratic politics" provides a welcome antidote to what Keenan refers to as the "too simple and optimistic pictures of democratic openness" offered by Arendt and Laclau and Mouffe (16), he at times overemphasizes this difficulty and slides into the "cynical resignation" that he decries in the introduction (3). As a result, the response to this "more complex and chastened vision of radical democracy" can only be framed in terms of "compassion and generosity [which] arise from the recognition of the shared suffering we all experience as fluid, open, internally complex beings inevitably trapped....in more or less fixed identity 'scripts' or self-images" (188). Furthermore, because he leaves so little room for his own "strategies" for dealing with the dangers of democratic openness, the nature of this "compassion and generosity" is left frustratingly vague, leaving unremarked the potential risks of this proposal. ( )