As the ideals of democracy appear increasingly beleaguered, Jacques Rancière presents an argument of pressing importance. The task confronting us, he argues, is to undermine the crude realism that has governed politics and theory since the declaration of an 'end of history' in the 1990s. Since Plato and Aristotle, politics has always constructed itself as the art of ending politics, a purported realism that is itself utopian. What has succeeded the polemical paradigm of class struggle is not the wisdom of a new millennium but the return of old fears of criminality and chaos. Rancière's aim is the restoration of philosophy to its proper place in order to return politics to its original and necessary importance: the organization of dissent. Book jacket.