The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power -- the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present -- has revealed itself as yet another technology of foreclosure. Two apparently opposed approaches to power in political philosophy -- political theology and biopower -- are the contemporary heirs to this critical tradition. Each can be described loosely as a post-Marxist discourse on power advancing something like a theory of radical democracy on its normative edge. Despite the shortcomings I set forth throughout my discussion, and those I omit, these remain the farthest reaching, the most provocative and the most sophisticated theories of power and democracy in circulation today. Together, however, they compose an antinomy. Its resolution would carry us swiftly out of democratic theory and, therefore, beyond the principle of modern power. Adapted from the source document.