Today, the word ‘democracy is the principal organiser of consensus. It is a word that supposedly unites the collapse of the socialist States, the putative well-being enjoyed in our countries and the humanitarian crusades of the West.
In fact, the word ‘democracy’ concerns what I shall call authoritarian opinion. It is forbidden, as it were, not to be a democrat. More precisely, it stands to reason that humanity aspires to democracy, and any subjectivity suspected of not being democratic is regarded as pathological. At best it refers to a patient re-education, at worst to the right of military intervention by democratic paratroopers.
Thus democracy necessarily elicits the philosopher’s critical suspicion precisely insofar as it falls within the realm of public opinion and consensus. Since Plato, philosophy has stood for a rupture with opinion, and is meant to examine everything that is spontaneously considered as normal.
— Alain Badiou, Metapolitics. trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2006), 78.
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