In this volume Rancière insists that the West’s continual defense of democracy, rooted almost exclusively in a comparison between the virtues of democracy and the evils of totalitarianism, is inadequate to the task of defending democratic virtues against the tyrannical use of force and torture by superpowers such as the US. He suggests that the ruling elites have developed a ‘hatred’ of democracy precisely because the democratic ideal has revolutionary power, and argues for a reinvigoration of this potential.