Suchergebnisse

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular founding has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. This study shows why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of democracy's beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders

The article examines the inaugural encounter of the Greek theory of tyranny and the Roman institution of dictatorship. Although the twentieth century is credited for fusing the tyrant and the dictator into one figure/concept, I trace the origins of this conceptual synthesis in a much earlier historical period, that of the later Roman Republic and the early Principate, and in the writings of two Greek historians of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Appian of Alexandria. In their histories, the traditional interest in the relationship between the king and the tyrant is displaced by a new curiosity about the tyrant and the dictator. The two historians placed the two figures alongside one another and found them to be almost identical, blurring any previous empirical, analytical, or normative distinctions. In their Greco-Roman synthesis dictatorship is re-described as `temporary tyranny by consent' and the tyrant as a `permanent dictator.' Dictatorship, a venerated republican magistracy, the ultimate guardian of the Roman constitution, is for the first time radically reinterpreted and explicitly questioned. It meets its first critics.

A discussion of sovereignty calls attention to the negative impact of globalization on notions of state sovereignty as well as tension between popular sovereign power & universal human rights. It is argued that an alternative conceptualization of the sovereign as constituent power is more relevant in today's world. The notion of the constituent sovereign avoids failings of the more hegemonic version of sovereignty; is more in sync with the emancipatory guarantees of popular sovereignty; & avoids the contradictions associated with a sovereign commander. The implications for constitutional & political theory are explored, along with reasons offered by Hannah Arendt & Jacques Derrida for the absence of recognition of the constituent sovereign in both contemporary constitutional jurisprudence & political discourse. The relationship between constituent power & democracy is explored to argue that constituent power fulfills the need for democratic legitimacy & promotes reconsideration of the "problem of the legitimation deficit that unavoidably plagues the normal politic of all modern constitutional, representative democracies.". J. Lindroth