Constituent Power and Constitutive Exceptions: Carl Schmitt, Populism and the Consummation of Secularisation

This chapter considers the role of the people in Carl Schmitt’s theorizing on democracy, and invokes the concept of constitutive boundaries as a way of understanding how communities are reproduced by way of territorial borders as well as criteria for membership and cultural markers, e.g. symbols, rituals, and holidays. The chapter suggests that the latter constitute instances of a larger logical space of constitutive exceptions, that, Schmitt implies, reproduce existing orders, but also threaten to replace them with new ones; thus, such exceptions may be surrounded by protective boundaries of the sacred, concretely as well as abstractly. Ultimately, we may visualize an entire topology of the exceptional, which is subject to fierce contestation, since it points to the possibility of new orders beyond existing ones, which may be interpreted in terms of different trajectories of highly ambiguous processes of secularization.

The People: Ethnoracial Configurations, Old and New

In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.

The Power of the People

In this chapter Hirvonen and Lindroos-Hovinheimo argue that the revolutionary power of constituent power and popular sovereignty are relevant conditions of radical emancipatory and egalitarian politics. How the people become the people – and what makes the people in its becoming – are relevant questions in modern democracy. The article considers the power of the people as a theoretical idea and political possibility. It brings together the older tradition of political philosophy with contemporary theory by discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas together with those of Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou.

Katechontic Democracy? Carl Schmitt and the Restraining Mediation of Popular Power

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s conception of an ‘illiberal’ democracy is based on seemingly contradictory elements of both ‘populism’ and ‘technocratic elitism’, attempting as it does to wed the popular enthusiasm of mass democracy to a concrete order through the principle of a shared homogeneous identity and the somewhat paradoxical idea of a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’. This amalgamation of authoritarianism and popular sovereignty emanates from what can be described as Schmitt’s ‘katechontic impulse’, a name derived from a Biblical figure introduced by St Paul. The Katechon is the principle or the person that restrains lawlessness or ‘the lawless one’, often interpreted as Antichrist and his reign before the end of days. The chapter shows how Schmitt’s apocalyptic imagery of an ordered popular sovereignty can be illustrated by this politico-theological mytheme and further investigates the implications thereof for contemporary democratic politics.

Hannah Arendt and the Glimmering Paradox of Constituent Power

This chapter presents a reading of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional thinking from the perspective of the paradox of constituent power. The paradox at issue here is that, on the one hand, in order to exercise its constituent power, ‘the people’ needs some kind of representation, but on the other hand, all forms of representation are determinations of collective existence and held, in a constitutional democracy, to derive their power from ‘the people’. At stake in constitutional democracy is the contingency of representations of ‘the people’ and the possibility of their modification in response to claims that exclusion from or inclusion within ‘the people’ is violent and alienating. This chapter argues that the paradox ‘glimmers’ in Arendt’s work: it almost crystallizes into an account of the tensions present in ‘the act of founding’, but the ambiguities are again obscured by her republican ideal of constitutio libertatis. The chapter also traces an implication of this ‘glimmering’ in Arendt’s work that is problematic from the perspective of political pluralism: her ‘civilisationalism’.

Are There Inherent Limits to Constitutional Amendment? An Analysis of Carl Schmitt’s Argument

This chapter discusses Carl Schmitt’s argument for inherent limitations of the power of amendment under the Weimar Constitution - an argument that Schmitt thought was applicable to any constitution based on the principle of popular sovereignty. Most authors who claim that there are inherent limits to amendment base those limits on an appeal to rights or values that are perceived to put external limits on the permissible outcomes of the democratic process of legislation. In such a view, inherent limits to amendment are not interestingly or specifically democratic. Schmitt’s argument, by contrast, purports to derive limits to amendment from the idea of democracy itself, and not from a liberal concern with individual rights or human dignity that political constitutionalists are likely to perceive as extraneous to democracy. If successful, Schmitt’s case provides a more direct reply to democratic worries over the democratic legitimacy of strong constitutionalism than is provided by constitutionalist authors whose argumentative strategy consists in redefining democracy in liberal terms.

Public Space, Public Time: Constitution and the Relay of Authority in Arendt’s On Revolution

In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt addresses the central conundrum of legitimacy: the source of authority to found a new political form. On Arendt’s account, for revolutionary founding to evade the twin dangers of an infinite regress or a vicious circle, and to succeed in the constitution of a political body, it must enact and invoke both a worldly and a temporal component. To understand the bond between authority, constitution, and constituent power, Arendt thus analyzes the exchange between political space and political time. For the inauguration of a stable and secure public space, the events of founding must permit the independence of what it founds, unbinding the founding deed from the worldly object. For the inauguration of enduring public time, the constitutional document must contain a principle of self-preservation or endurance, allowing the present to appeal to both the past (ancestors) and the future (descendants). By thus distinguishing the authority of a constituted document, which maintains jurisdiction through time, both from the public theater within which the people’s plurality, creativity, and power can flourish, and from inaugural violence, the authoritative relay between space and time also sustains a politics of inheritance that moves between binding and unbinding.

Editors’ Introduction

The notion ‘constituent power’ is an answer to the question about the origins of the constitution and the legal order. Within democratic-constitutional thought, it expresses the conviction that power is ultimately vested in an entity known as ‘the people’ which is the fundamental source of all political authority. Accordingly, a constitution is deemed legitimate only if ‘the people’ has both created it and continues to endorse it....

‘Enemies of the People’? The Judiciary and Claude Lefort’s ‘Savage Democracy’

The chapter attempts to, first, clarify the position of human rights in Claude Lefort's unique blend of phenomenologically and psychoanalytically inspired political theory. Human rights, and by extension rights more generally, are in this account an integral element of a 'savage democracy' that Lefort envisioned as the only plausible challenge to the totalitarian tendencies of neoliberalism. From this starting point, the chapter will then discuss the position of the judiciary in contemporary democracies. Standard accounts of the separation of powers reduce the courts' constitutional functions to the application and interpretation of laws issued by an elected legislator. But as the relationship between the legislator and the executive has changed, so, too, has the relative position of the judiciary. A strong executive as the engine of legislative initiatives, supported by a weak 'rubber-stamp' legislature, has highlighted the need to emphasise the democratic potential of the judiciary that goes beyond the 'deferential' role of standard accounts. The chapter will provide a theoretical framework for understanding this democratic role through Lefort's account of human rights.

Politics, Shamelessness and the People of Ressentiment

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Senator Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuffaround. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it....