The tradition of radical democracy includes, in different ways, figures such as Jefferson and Emerson, Marx and Gramsci, John Stuart Mill and Dewey. What unites these otherwise diverse thinkers - what makes them “radical” democrats - is the view that democratic participation is an important means of self-development and self-realization. They also hold that more participation will produce individuals with more democratic dispositions - individuals who are more tolerant of difference, more sensitive to reciprocity, better able to engage in moral discourse and judgment, and more prone to examine their own preferences - all qualities conducive to the success of democracy as a way of making decisions. For the radical democrat, democracy is always more than a means of checking power and distributing values, as it is for most liberal democrats. Radical democrats hold, in the well-known reversal of Lord Acton's phrase, that powerlessness corrupts, and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Democracy is a way of life, a mode of decision making that generates its own ethics and values - expectations I have referred to elsewhere as the self-transformation thesis in democratic theory.