Short politics: Why democracy cannot only be defended deliberatively

Democracy without Shortcuts is written in the shadow of Habermas' long-stand-ing idea that democracy should be reconstructed with the help of an ideal dis-course. Not to accept (sic)shortcuts < just means that democrats' central normative claim, expressing and defending one's opinion on public matters against co -citi-zen as a form of (sic)autonomy < should be realized extensively within the institution-al structure of the political society. The book struggles to shed the constraints of this idealistic approach towards democracy by involving it with (sic)minipublics < and the constitutional law. Nevertheless, if democratic societies are seen a bit more realistically, even an ideal theory (as the one by Lafont and Habermas) is in need of a richer basic vocabulary. The article tries to make these alternatives visible, by help of pointing to the conceptual simplifications in Lafont's scenario.