America's Constitutional Narrative

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence H. Tribe
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
We The People

America has always been a wonderfully diverse place, a country where billions of stories spanning centuries and continents converge under the rubric of a Constitution that unites them in an ongoing narrative of national self-creation. Rather than rehearse familiar debates over what our Constitution means, this essay explores what the Constitution does. It treats the Constitution as a verb – a creative and contested practice that yields a trans-generational conversation about the meaning of our past, the imperatives of our present, and the values and aspirations that should point us toward our future. And it meditates on how this practice, drawing deeply on the capacious wellsprings of text and history, simultaneously reinforces the political order and provides a language for challenging its legitimacy, thereby constituting us as “We, the People,” joined in a single project framed centuries ago that nevertheless remains inevitably our own.

Regional-Cosmopolitan Constituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
Member State ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The People ◽  
We The People ◽  
The Eu

This chapter deals with the question of whether the public narrative of ‘We, the people of Europe’, which claims constituent power for a cross-border demos composed of EU citizens, can be justified in terms of a systematic model. To that end, it draws on the political theory of regional cosmopolitanism, which holds that even though the EU is not a state, it has its own political community. The literature on regional cosmopolitanism offers two possible strategies of defending the idea of an EU-wide constituent power: a first-principles approach and a reconstructive approach. The chapter argues that only the latter proves viable, and then goes on to examine the merits of the model that it gives rise to. While regional-cosmopolitan constituent power plausibly responds to the fact that the EU has created a new group of addressees and authors of the law, it neglects the continuing importance of the member state peoples and fails to explain how an EU-wide constituent power could be reconciled with the compound and dependent nature of the EU polity.

What’s in a Name? Questions for a New Monument

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margrethe Troensegaard
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Sculpture ◽  
The Social ◽  
We The People

What is the contemporary condition of the monument? In relation to the current issue’s discussion of immersive and discursive exhibition practices, this essay places itself at a slight remove; rather than to analyse and evaluate specific curatorial strategies it seeks to raise questions of relevance to such practices and begins by moving the discourse out of the museum and into the public space. The point of interrogation here is the monument, a form with a particular capacity to tease and expose the triad we find at the core of any curatorial discourse: the relation between institution, artwork and audience. Following an introductory reflection on how to describe and define a ‘monument’, a term so broadly used it all but loses its value, the text proceeds to examine three cases, Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar (2010), Danh Vo’s WE THE PEOPLE (DETAIL), various locations (2010-13), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, New York (2013). The sequencing of these geographically and culturally diverse works makes way for an interrogatory piece of writing that addresses the question of permanence versus temporariness of the artwork as exhibition (and the exhibition as artwork), and that of the political agency of the artistic form. Probing the social agency of the monument, the text draws lines between the symbolising capacity once held by modern sculpture and the oscillation between immersion and discursiveness as two complimentary modes of communication. The discursive content or function of the monument (i.e. what it commemorates) is activated through the viewer’s personal, immersive encounter with its form, a form that potentially places its viewer as a participant to the construction of its message rather than as a mere receiver.

A New Government – A New Democracy? The Red–Green Coalition in Germany

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Max Kaase
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
The People ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The One ◽  
New Democracy

With the 1989 eclipse of communist ideology and power in Central and Eastern Europe, the political order of democracy has, on the one hand, proved to be the superior way of organizing a society where in politics the pluralist interests of the people can be articulated and represented freely without fear of repression through competitive elections and otherwise, and where particularly through the operation of market mechanisms citizens are furnished with reasonably satisfactory economic circumstances to conduct their everyday lives. On the other hand, quite different from what many contemporary observers had anticipated, liberal democracy has been subjected to closer and closer critical internal scrutiny, and with this also alternate conceptions of how to organize a democratic polity are now more than before a matter of debate and controversy.

The Utopian Imagination

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-238
Author(s):  
Sudhir Hazareesingh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Will ◽  
Social Oppression ◽  
The People ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
Radical Republicanism

This chapter examines the French tradition of radical republicanism, from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century. Radical republicanism was a loose ensemble, especially driven by its prioritization of equality over liberty, its commitment to resisting political and social oppression, and its utopian aspiration to imagine a better world. While it expressed itself in different sensibilities, through its embrace of Rousseauism, this republican tradition was united by a common attachment to key ideals of the radical Enlightenment: the concept of the sovereignty of the people, the idea of the general will as the inalienable foundation of the political order, the belief in the human capacity for regeneration, the vision of citizenship based on the practice of the virtues and the rejection of tyranny, and the universal sense that all humans were bound by a sense of fraternity.

Dual Constituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
The People ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
We The People ◽  
Actual Decision ◽  
The Eu

This chapter addresses the public narrative of ‘We, the people and peoples of Europe’, which presents constituent power in the EU as shared between a European demos and the national demoi, and examines whether it amounts to a systematic model that withstands critical scrutiny. For this purpose, it draws on the political theory of split popular sovereignty, which interprets the EU as a federation (Bund) based on the democratic pillars of European citizens and European peoples. The chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s hypothetical notion of a pouvoir constituant mixte, which projects constituent power into the past, can be developed into a future-oriented model for actual decision-making in EU constitutional politics based on Habermas’s own idea of a permanent founding. Assessing the plausibility of this view, the chapter argues that the idea of dual constituent power avoids some of the shortcomings of regional cosmopolitanism and demoi-cracy, but also entails a problematic pre-commitment to the preservation of the EU member states, perplexingly stratifies constituent power across national and supranational levels, and blurs the procedural-institutional line between constituent and constituted powers.

Democratic Aesthetics: Scenes of Political Violence and Anxiety in Nari Ward and Ocean Vuong

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Scully
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Consensus Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Equality ◽  
New Form ◽  
We The People

Abstract By attending to art and writing that interrogates US citizenship and state violence, this essay foregrounds the structural antagonism between democracy as an instituted form of rule, which depends on inegalitarian hierarchies, and democracy’s egalitarian drive. It argues that the realization of democracy as a form of governance (consensus democracy) occurs by substituting the rule of a part for the whole, which violently forces democracy’s constitutive figures to conform to and negotiate its organizing logics. Nari Ward’s We the People (2011) allegorizes this inherent tension in democracy as one between synecdoche and metonymy. The article then theorizes a new form of democratic politics through an engagement with Jacques Rancière before turning to Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments” (2016) and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” (2016) as articulations of a democratic aesthetics constituted by figures—including metonymy, irony, and catachresis—that interrupt the substitutions of synecdoche. Vuong’s poetry foregrounds the violence enacted by state fantasies and insists on the democratic equality disavowed by consensus democracy. Together, Ward and Vuong locate the political force of aesthetics not in reassuring visions of inclusion but in operations that disturb and resist any form of hierarchy.

Making We the People

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaihark Hahm ◽  
Sung Ho Kim
Keyword(s):  
The People ◽  
We The People

We the People

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Dahlin
Keyword(s):  
The People ◽  
We The People

On the Will of the People: Notes on the Political “Theory” of Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Offe
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
National People ◽  
The Will

The “will of the (national) people” is the ubiquitously invoked reference unit of populist politics. The essay tries to demystify the notion that such will can be conceived of as a unique and unified substance deriving from collective ethnic identity. Arguably, all political theory is concerned with arguing for ways by which citizens can make e pluribus unum—for example, by coming to agree on procedures and institutions by which conflicts of interest and ideas can be settled according to standards of fairness. It is argued that populists in their political rhetoric and practice typically try to circumvent the burden of such argument and proof. Instead, they appeal to the notion of some preexisting existential unity of the people’s will, which they can redeem only through practices of repression and exclusion.

PERAN ULAMA SELAKU PEWARIS NABI DALAM KONTESTASI PEMILU-PILPRES TAHUN 2019 DI INDONESIA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
abdul muiz amir
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Archival Data ◽  
Political Event ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
The People ◽  
Religious Issue ◽  
The Face ◽  
Religion And State

This study aims to find a power relation as a discourse played by the clerics as the Prophet's heir in the contestation of political event in the (the elections) of 2019 in Indonesia. The method used is qualitative based on the critical teory paradigm. Data gathered through literary studies were later analyzed based on Michel Foucault's genealogy-structuralism based on historical archival data. The findings show that, (1) The involvement of scholars in the Pemilu-Pilpres 2019 was triggered by a religious issue that has been through online social media against the anti-Islamic political system, pro communism and liberalism. Consequently create two strongholds from the scholars, namely the pro stronghold of the issue pioneered by the GNPF-Ulama, and the fortress that dismissed the issue as part of the political intrigue pioneered by Ormas NU; (2) genealogically the role of scholars from time to time underwent transformation. At first the Ulama played his role as well as Umara, then shifted also agent of control to bring the dynamization between the issue of religion and state, to transform into motivator and mediator in the face of various issues Practical politic event, especially at Pemilu-Pilpres 2019. Discussion of the role of Ulama in the end resulted in a reduction of the role of Ulama as the heir of the prophet, from the agent Uswatun Hasanah and Rahmatan lil-' ālamīn as a people, now shifted into an agent that can trigger the division of the people.

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