What Bounds A-Legality?

This comment discusses Hans Lindahl’s central idea of a-legality. It begins by positioning the idea of a-legality in the literature on the constituent power of the people, showing how it ad-vances the discussion at hand. Having done that, it raises two questions regarding the conceptu-al and normative significance of the politics of a-legality. Is a-legality contingent on a certain form of consciousness, or a certain form of government? And, what is the basis of the normative recommendation that legal collectives ought to respond to a-legality with collective self-restraint? The aim of both questions is to identify what bounds Lindahl’s idea of a-legality

The democratic production of political cohesion: partisanship, institutional sesign and life form

Online: 27 November 2018What binds a democratic society together? This would seem a well-rehearsed topic in modern political theory, but on closer scrutiny, it may appear less so. If we reformulate the question, it may become clearer why: what binds democratic society together? The emphasis on ‘democratic’ is the clue here. Much recent discussion on the cohesive force in democracies has been parasitic on other debates, such as that between cosmopolitans and communitarians on justice as the first virtue of society; that between nation-state-based and post-national views of contemporary politics or that about the cultural aspects of democratic citizenship as the glue that makes democracy work. All such views and debates tend to assume a somewhat ‘externalist’ perspective, so to speak, of the problem of cohesion in democracies. Cosmopolitans and liberal communitarians have argued over the relative importance of values and identity as the basis for the stability of a just society, whose legitimate political arrangements they generally agree must be democratic, so as to reflect the demands of equality and self-government. Disputes over whether the institutions of democracy still require the background conditions provided by the nation-state, with its consolidated networks of party system, solidarity, civil society organisations and public opinion formation, or whether similar conditions can be reproduced at a more trans- and post-national level, are very similar in scope to those between cosmopolitans and liberal communitarians. Both these disputes concern the social, institutional, ideal or identitarian pre-conditions of democracy, which help it to work with a modicum of stability, in so far as they guarantee the political cohesion of either the demos or the regime itself. Discussions over the quality and competence of citizenship look at democratic culture as an important condition for democratic institutions and procedures to function smoothly and effectively. Debates over the ‘civic culture’ in the 1960s and more recently on ‘social capital’ lay emphasis on a mixture of attitudes, practices, participation in associational networks and consolidated norms of sociability as formative components of democratic citizenship, on which the working of democratic institutions and rules depends. This suggests something more internal, or at least a virtuous circle between the culture and the institutions of democracy. But is democracy itself capable of producing political cohesion, and on what basis

The an-archical state : logics of legitimacy in the social contract tradition

The modern state is today under great pressure. In the face of globalization, many theorists seek to rethink the boundaries of the state. They call for a transformation of the state from the national to the global level. But there is a deeper theoretical question at stake. It has to do with the way we conceive of the state itself; what purposes it serves and what notion of legitimacy it harbours. This thesis undertakes a rereading of the state within the social contract tradition. It replaces a traditional conception of statehood with a version called the an-archical state. The an-archical state is sustained by way of a distinction between two different logics of state legitimacy: a vertical and a horizontal. If the vertical logic has been at the centre of the social contract tradition, the horizontal logic has for the most part been unexplored. By retrieving this horizontal logic, the thesis seeks to contribute to a new way of thinking about legitimacy. Two arguments are made. Together they make up the essence of the an-archical state. Firstly, it is argued that the rationale behind the modern state is to limit an infinite responsivity to the other. Unlike those who argue that the raison d’etre of the state is to free people from an anarchical war of all against all, this thesis contends that it frees people from the an-archical responsivity of the one for all. Secondly, it is argued that this negative act of freedom alters the political structure of the state itself. The legitimacy of the state no longer resides in the will to consent, but in the act of dissent

Representative democracy as tautology : Ankersmit and Lefort on representation

First published online: 1 July 2006Representative democracy is often assessed from the standpoint of direct democracy. Recently, however, many theorists have come to argue that representation forms a democratic model in its own right. The most powerful claim in this direction is to be found within two quite different strands of thinking: the aesthetic theory of Frank Ankersmit and the savage theory of Claude Lefort. In this article, I show that while Ankersmit and Lefort converge in their critique of direct rule, they provide us with two distinct models of democracy. Aesthetic democracy, I argue, in the end falls short as a democratic recuperation of representation. It reduces representation to delegation. Savage democracy proves more fruitful in this respect. It offers a representative view of politics without committing itself to the premises associated with political delegation

Democratic self-defense : Bringing the social model back in

The rise of authoritarian populism has forced many democracies to consider how best to defend democracy against its inner enemies. In the literature on democratic self-defense, one often distinguishes between three models: a legal (militant), political (procedural) and social (integrational). If much scholarly attention is on the merits and limits of the first two models, the social model has fallen behind. This is surprising given its success in the interwar years in many Scandinavian countries, and the empirical correlation between high levels of social equality and high levels of political tolerance. This article examines the merits and limits of the social model. More specifically, it makes two contributions. First, it introduces ‘the social security’ approach proposed by early Swedish social democratic thinkers as an alternative to ‘the social homogeneity’ approach proposed by Hermann Heller. The aim is to show that they provide different solutions to the loser's dilemma: the fact that losers in a democratic election must be ready to support the winners, whose decisions are at odds with their own convictions. Second, the article examines a common objection against the social security approach, namely, that it politicizes democracy, and thereby undermines the distinction between procedure and substance in the defense of democrac