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This article argues that Schmitt's concept of sovereignty and Gramsci's notion of hegemony represent two distinct variations on a single theme, namely the idea of the political as the original instituting moment of society. Both Schmitt and Gramsci focused on the sources, conditions, content, and scope of the originating power of a collective will. While the former located it in the constituent power of the sovereign people, the latter placed it in the popular-national will of the modern hegemon. Both thinkers explored the complex and perplexing relationship between radical founding acts and modern democratic politics in a secular age, that is of democratic legitimacy, where with the entrance of the masses into the political sphere, the references to ultimate foundation s of authority and to an extra-social source of political power had begun to appear more dubious than ever. The last section of the article develops a notion of hegemonic sovereignty defined as an expansive and positing democratic constituent prince, aiming, through founding, total decisions, at the overall, radical, explicit, and lucid institution of society. The article briefly shows how the concept of hegemonic sovereignty can solve some problems pertaining to Schmitt's notion of sovereignty and to Gramsci's theory of hegemony. In so doing, the article seeks to establish the mutually reinforcing qualities of the two concepts. ; Este artículo argumenta que el concepto schmittiano de soberanía y la noción gramsciana de hegemonía, representan dos variantes de un mismo tema, a saber, la idea de lo político como el momento instituyente original de la sociedad. Ambos, Schmitt y Gramsci, se concentraban en las fuentes, condiciones, contenido y alcance del poder que origina a una voluntad colectiva. Mientras el primero lo situaba en el poder constituyente del pueblo soberano, el último lo hacía en la voluntad nacional-popular del poder hegemónico moderno. Ambos pensadores exploraron la compleja y desconcertante relación entre los actos fundantes radicales y la política democrática moderna en una era secular, es decir, de hegemonía democrática, donde con la entrada de las masas a la esfera política, las referencias a fundamentos últimos de la autoridad y a una fuente extrasocial del poder político, comenzaron a aparecer más dudosas que nunca. La última sección del artículo desarrolla una noción de soberanía hegemónica definida como un príncipe constituyente democrático amplio y propositivo, que busca, a través de la fundación, decisiones totales, en el conjunto, la institución, radical, explícita y lúcida de la sociedad. El artículo muestra brevemente cómo el concepto de soberanía hegemónica puede resolver algunos problemas propios de la noción schmittiana de soberanía y de la teoría gramsciana de la hegemonía. Al hacerlo, el artículo busca establecer las cualidades que se refuerzan mutuamente entre ambos conceptos.

Introduction : Carl Schmitt's prison writings / Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein -- Conversation with Eduard Spranger (summer 1945) -- Remarks in response to a radio speech by Karl Mannheim (winter 1945/46) -- Historiographia in nuce : Alexis de Tocqueville (August 1946) -- Two graves (summer 1946) -- Ex captivitate salus (summer 1946) -- Wisdom of the cell (April 1947) -- Song of the sixty-year-old -- Appendix: Foreword to the Spanish Edition

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction: Re-Interpreting Democracy for Our Time -- 2 Autonomy in and between Polities: Democracy and the Need for Collective Political Selves -- 3 Rethinking 'Modern' Democracy: Political Modernity and Constituent Power -- 4 Democratic Surplus and Democracy-in- Failing: On Ancient and Modern Self- Cancellation of Democracy -- 5 Setbacks of Women's Emancipation (Condition, Consequence, Measure and Ruse) -- 6 Political Modernity, Democracy and State-Society Relations in Latin America: A New Socio-Historical Problématique? -- 7 Communitarian Cosmopolitanism: Argentina's Recuperated Factories, Neoliberal Globalisation and Democratic Citizenship. An Arendtian Perspective -- 8 Middle-Classing in Roodepoort: Unexpected Sites of Post-Apartheid 'Community' -- 9 Democracy and Capitalism in Europe, Brazil and South Africa -- 10 From Realism to Activism: A Critique of Resignation in Political Theory -- 11 The World as We Find It: A Suggestion for a Democratic Theory for Our Times -- 12 Epilogue: Democracy as Capacity for Self-Transformation -- Index

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both everyday and academic—and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format "What is X?" and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now.The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage, intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly, attempts to re-open the question "What is political thinking?" Each is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the political as such may be understood as a property, a field of interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to the question "What is the political?" by submitting the question to a field of plural contention.The concepts collected in Political Concepts are "Arche" (Stathis Gourgouris), "Blood" (Gil Anidjar), "Colony" (Ann Laura Stoler), "Concept" (Adi Ophir), "Constituent Power" (Andreas Kalyvas), "Development" (Gayatri Spivak), "Exploitation" (Étienne Balibar), "Federation" (Jean Cohen), "Identity" (Akeel Bilgrami), "Rule of Law" (J. M. Bernstein), "Sexual Difference" (Joan Copjec), and "Translation" (Jacques Lezra)

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction -- Part I Reconstructing the History of Atlantic Modernity -- 1 The American Divergence, the Modern Western World and the Paradigmatisation of History -- 2 The Limits of Recognition: History, Otherness and Autonomy -- 3 On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities -- 4 The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator:1 Republicanism and the Return of Dictatorship in Political Modernity -- 5 The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution -- Part II Comparing Trajectories of Modernity in the South -- 6 Inconsistencies between Social-democratic Discourses and Neo-liberal Institutional Development in Chile and South Africa: a Comparative Analysis of the Post-authoritarian Periods1 -- 7 HIV/AIDS Policies and Modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a Comparative Critical Analysis -- 8 Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective: Analysing the Evidence of Right to Land for Black Rural Communities in Brazil and South Africa -- Part III Claims for Justice in the History of Modernity and in its Present -- 9 An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource -- 10 Injustice at Both Ends: Pre- and Post-apartheid Literary Approaches to Injustice, Sentiment and Humanism in the Work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the Film Invictus -- 11 The Student Movement in Chile 2011-12: Rearming the Critique of Capitalism -- 12 Indignation and Claims for Economic Sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: Renewing the Project of Control over Production -- Notes on the Contributors -- Index