In modern democracy, opposition and dissent are not only tolerated, but they are recognized as necessary aspects of the system. The task of the opposition in a democratic system is to express distrust. This chapter discusses several classical theories of democracy and argues that they do not conceptualize the role of institutionalized distrust in a satisfactory way. Hegel’s theory of recognition, as formulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit, provides some conceptual tools for the conceptualization of the role of opposition as the institutionalized form of distrust.