There’s a powerful moment in season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale. While doing their daily food shopping the Handmaids begin telling each other their real names, an act forbidden under the rules of Gilead. Their ‘official’ names, beginning with the prefix ‘of’ followed the name of the Handmaids’ commanders are a powerful reminder that the Handmaids are the property of someone else.

Another powerful moment is when Offred is out walking and meets Ofwarren. Offred greets Ofwarren with the familiar Gilead greeting “blessed day,” Ofwarren breaks with protocol and responds with “may the force be with you.” Both instances are simple, yet extremely radical acts of protest. They stand in a long tradition of protest — rather than assuming that any act of resistance must operate within the rule of law they call into question the very legitimacy of the rule of law. 

The difference is important. The former assumes that state sovereignty — rooted historically in a religious ontological primacy of the king as the unmoved mover appointed by a higher divine being — is a given way of being in the world. The latter — like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back exposing the wizard as an ordinary man operating a machine — calls into question the way things (supposedly) are.

The acts of the Handmaids are a kind of anarchism that subtly undermine the authority of the dictatorship under which they live exposing the sovereignty of Gilead as open to contestation. This is relevant to us today when we consider what it means to live in a so-called liberal democracy under the power of national sovereignty. 

The word ‘democracy’ is made up of the ancient Greek words demos and kratia. For Plato and Aristotle demos meant the workers too busy to help maintain the polis. In contrast,  following Hobbes we now understand demos to mean everyone — all of society. Kratia carries the meaning of having power over someone or something (like aristocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy, etc.)

Alternatively, Mark Purcell shows, following Spinoza and Nietzsche kratia or Kratos could carry the meaning of “the power that humans have to act in the world” and “to make a tanigible impact on our surroundings” (Purcell, 2016: 392). So, we might conceive of democracy as, all people exercising their right to act in the world. 

However, “What the State does—and it is designed expressly for this purpose—is to alienate people from their power and vest it in an entity outside themselves” (Purcell, 2016: 387). The basis for this is the Hobbesian idea that without the state, society would be a bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of each person against every other person. Society without the state is a “nasty, brutish and short” war machine. A Hobbesian conception of the state, forms the theoretical underpinning for western liberal democracy.

On the one hand we have democracy as an act which should be performed by all people and on the other we have a delegation of power to the state for the benefit of the society as a whole. Purcell puts this succinctly when he writes that,

“the modern State … works actively and intentionally to prevent democracy. It is designed to separate demos and kratos, to make democracy impossible. The key to rediscovering democracy today is to unequivocally refuse this separation of demos and kratos. In democracy, kratos is not surrendered to the State; it remains immanent to people themselves. And so we must declare the social contract null and void, affirm that it does not bind us, that we do not agree to surrender our power to the State, that it is no longer sovereign over us.”

Purcell (2013: 392)