On the Fringe of the French Political System

It will be useful,'' Robert Dahl writes, consider two extreme possibilities. At one extreme, a government might respond to the political preferences only one person ... a system this kind might be called a pure hegemony. At the other extreme, the political preferences everyone might be weighted equally... a system this kind might be called a pure egalitarian democracy.1 Dahl recognizes, course, that there is no pure democracy in the real world but instead imperfect democracies which he labels polyarchies. Polyarchies may be thought as relatively (but incompletely) democratized regimes or... regimes that have been substantially popularized and liberalized, that is highly inclusive and extensively open to public contestation. 2 Imperfect hegemony is merely defined in a negative way: lies at the opposite corner; it is what polyarchy is not; it is polyarchy by default. In thus structuring the political space on the basis a binary opposition between polyarchy and hegemony, Dahl is following a method which is rarely questioned by social scientists, long accustomed to think in terms binary oppositions such as nature/culture, subject/object, cause/effect, conscious/ unconscious, etc. The method is based on a logic either/or, characterized by the mutually exclusive nature the two opposing poles.3 This does not mean that a given phenomenon must be either at one extreme or the other, and indeed Dahl readily admits that few political regimes are either fully polyarchical or fully hegemonic. Most existing regimes fall into a mid-area: they are either near-polyarchies or near-hegemonies. Or to put it another way,4 'there are shifts within, into or out of this important, yet undefined mid-area-a mid-area which Dahl characterizes by its absence names.4 What is significant here is the presupposition that even those regimes which

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• The Legitimacy of Opposition Parties in Democratic Political Systems

  Open Access•Raphael Zariski•The Western Political Quarterly•1986

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