In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he expounded the originality of his approach, which is to consider the history of democracy as the exploration of a problematic experience. Democracy, he posited, establishes politics as a field that constitutively resists closure by virtue of the tensions and uncertainties that underpin it. "As it forms the basis for an experience of freedom, the history of democracy, he noted, is therefore not simply a history of frustrations or betrayed utopias: it has become a deeply intertwined history of disenchantment and indeterminacy." This...