Unsettling Democracy

Unsettling Democracy: Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People Lisa Slater (bio) Adam Dahl. Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2018. 272 pp. $24.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780700626076. At the close of Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People, he calls for unsettling democracy. To do so, he turns to Indigenous political thought, in particular decolonial theories of democracy. It is here that he finds the conceptual tools that he argues are vital to reimagining the democratic tradition. Invoking and extending the work of Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred, he appeals for political theorists to draw upon Indigenous conceptions of nonsovereign democracy, to rethink power: not based upon mastery and control, but rather in terms of relationality and interdependence. Power is ecological, each part dependent on the other. Justice is an ongoing process of harmonizing of collective life; however, equilibrium is dependent upon genuine respect for the power and dignity of each part. Second, decolonial theories of democracy reject the idea that Western democracy was an insulated tradition, originating in Europe and spreading to the colonies through imperialism. Instead, modern democratic theory is the product of transcultural cross-pollination. Dahl wants to emphasize not only the productive influence of Indigenous and non-Western thought, but the destruction that settler colonialism wrought upon democracy. As he writes, a “[d]eep engagement with the history of settler colonialism necessitates revising the ethical and political basis of modern democracy” (184). I start at the end to highlight that Dahl’s motivation is to decolonize democracy. To reverse the legacies of colonial domination and to realize native self-determination, he argues, requires exposing and accounting for how American democracy is rooted in colonial injustice, and concurrently refounding it upon nonsovereign and transmodern concepts of democracy. He is a political scientist rigorously and thoroughly re-examining the foundations of American democracy through the theoretical lens of settler colonialism. More so, for this reader, the force of this book is its contribution to a counter-narrative, a re-orientation of democratic theory towards decolonization. Dahl’s project contributes to the emerging scholarship of imperial and colonial histories of democracy. His central argument is that the role of empire in American thought is under-examined, and he demonstrates how dominant interpretative and historical currents of modern democratic theory have neglected the constitutive role of colonial dispossession in shaping democratic values and ideals. To do so, he places American democratic thought in the context of settler colonialism; a distinct form of colonialism aimed at the expropriation of native land rather than the exploitation of native labor. He writes “American democracy owes its origins to the colonial settlement of North America by European colonists” (1). His aim is to reveal how colonial dispossession is fundamental to the construction of democratic thought and culture. At the heart of the book is an investigation of the disavowal of colonial dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and polities. As [End Page 493] Dahl notes the “the paradox of sovereignty” is a significant concern to contemporary democratic political theory: “constitutional order rests on forms of exclusion that are beyond the realm of legal legitimacy” (157). Law and sovereignty are dependent upon violence and exclusion. He proposes that scholars have failed to locate the “the paradox of sovereignty” within the context of the relationship between European settlers and Indigenous peoples: one of the most enduring problems of democratic modernity. Although the conquest of Indigenous peoples is often taken as an archetypal case of founding violence, he contends that it has remained unexplored in detail. He apportions assigns neglect to the failure of political theorists to take Native American political thought seriously. Arguably, this neglect reflects how the colonial settler imaginary resolved the “paradox of sovereignty.” After all, as Dahl demonstrates, the processes of settler expansion created democratic citizens and publics. Empire traces the conceptual and theoretical lineage of this disavowal throughout the course of American democratic thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a material sense, he writes, colonial dispossession involves the construction of a new society on top of expropriated land. Conceptually, it entails the construction of a spatial

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