NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE, 2016 VOL. 38, NO. 3, 411–427 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2016.1189032 The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy David W. McIvor Political Science Department, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO USA ABSTRACT Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter- power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has signifcant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices. Introduction There has been a dramatic shift over the past decade in the dominant questions and motifs of political theory. 1 In the John Rawls- and post-Rawls era, much of political theory seemed motivated largely by questions of how to iron out unjust wrinkles within established and legitimate democratic systems. From the redoubt of ideal theory, questions such as just allocations of basic goods within constitutional democracies or procedures for democratic legitimation dominated the conversation. Yet, over the past several years, the legitimacy and durability of democracy itself has come into question, and, as a result, theorizing about ideal liberal democratic confgurations has ceded to work focused on non-ideal social real- ities. Instead of focusing on how the democratic state can respond to persistent material 1 Marc Stears, “Review: The Democratic Moment in American Political Thought,” Public Policy Research 19:3 (2012), pp. 208–211. © 2016 Caucus for a New Political Science CONTACT David W. McIvor david.mcivor@colostate.edu