Its purported universalism has been criticized for how its elite has been unable to recognize the particular experiences of groups such as the working class, the colonized, women and children.

[1] Pierre Muller argued that the book lacks the necessary keys to understand the relationship between the subject-individual and the collective actor, which is crucial for the proposed new forms of mediation, as well as for any issues concerning exclusion and citizenship.

Still, Muller found the book "extremely stimulating" for its "original contribution to the current debate on the crisis of political mediation and, more generally, on the place of the individual in sociological analysis", although it "opens more doors than it offers answers".

[2] Barry Cooper wrote that Touraine was a "master of the genre" of deconstruction, but that "those who are puzzled by opacity of argumentation and bored by repetitive, allusive language bursting with metaphors may wish not to devote their time to his text".

[3] Peter Beilharz described the book as "a kind of summary of a life's work" and "arguably longer than it needs to be", and wrote that What Is Democracy?