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Violent conjunctures in democratic India, by Amitra Basu, New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 357 pp., $35.99 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-1107461321

and norms of democracy become impediments to the populist’s hold on power, he will subvert them. For populists, opposition is always illegitimate and, any means are justified to achieve “the people’s” ends. In fact, the intimate relationship between democracy and populism is at the heart of this book. Müllersays, “Populism is something like a permanent shadow of modern representative democracy, and a constant peril” (p.11). He cautions that we should not think that populism is a means to restoring the strength of democracy but rather that we see it as a threat to democracy, an always present possibility of disease and decay. He argues that democracy and populism are linked because democracies justify governance in the name of the people but cannot satisfactorily resolve the question of who the people are. In democracies, the answer is evolving and open, while for populists there is a clear and exclusionary answer to this question of who constitutes the people. Muller believes there is no escaping this boundary problem, rather democracy requires a constant engagement with it. But, one could easily argue that this boundary problem is not a problem for democracy, but rather for nation-states. After all, nation-states govern in the name of an imagined people that must be a community that is finite. Democracy could be imagined in other, more creative, ways. Ian Shapiro has suggested that democratic decision-making be organized based on affected interests. This need not be limited to affected interests within a nation-state. The membership problem of nation-states is a real one. They must have borders, but who is to decide who can belong and who cannot? Thus, while this argument about democracy always carrying within itself the possibility of populism is tempting, it turns out to be not fully defensible. Untangling the legacy of nationalism and democracy is a complicated project. Perhaps a future book in which Müller can step back and consider populism from a less immediate perspective could offer a platform for such thinking. Written in the shadow of events in Turkey, Austria, Hungary, the United States, the United Kingdom this book offers a powerful corrective to liberal democrats who are tempted to simply dismiss populism and its supporters as deplorable dupes. It asks us to make a public defense of pluralism as a value that must be defended if democracy is to survive. This short and powerful book can be useful to all of us as we rethink our political strategies.