d e pa rt m e n t o f p o l i t i c a l s c i e n c e
university of copenhagen
Democracy
BeyonD
the State
On the Institutionalization of
Democratic Self-Government
BenjamIn aSk POPP-maDSen
master Thesis
march 2014
advisor: Christian F. Rostbøll
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
MA Thesis, March 2014
Democracy Beyond the State
On the Institutionalization of Democratic Self-Government
Master Thesis, March 2014
By
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
Advisor: Christian F. Rostbøll
Department of Political Science
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Copenhagen
Number of Words (without front page, table of content, tables, abstract, notes and
bibliography): 27960
Submitted 31th of March 2014
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Objectively, that is, seen from the outside and without taking into account that man is a
beginning and a beginner, the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always
overwhelming. Not quite so overwhelming, to be sure, but very neatly so as the chances
were that no earth would ever rise out of cosmic occurrences, that no life would develop out
of inorganic processes, and that no man would emerge out of the evolution of animal life.
The decisive difference between the ‘infinite improbabilities’ on which the reality of our
earthly life rests and the miraculous character inherent in those events, which establish
historical reality, is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the
‘miracles’. It is men who perform them – men who because they have received the twofold
gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, 170-171.
Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution
founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicit and in
essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus posited as the people’s own
creation. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality: the free creation of man.
In democracy, man does not exist for the sake of the law, but the law exists for the sake of
man, it is human existence, whereas in other political systems man is a legal existence. This is the
fundamental distinguishing feature of democracy.
Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, 87, 88.
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Abstract
There is widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary representative democracy. Distrust
in politicians rises; the levels of political participation decline, and there is a growing
distance between the opinions of the professionalized political elites and the electorate in
many Western countries. In this thesis I investigate the lack of participation and the
growing apathetic attitude towards politics by exploring the history of political ideas. I
provide two main arguments. Firstly, I argue that the lethargic condition of contemporary
politics is not only current or accidental, but that it rests on a historical and conceptual
relation between democracy and the state. By analyzing the development of state
sovereignty in Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes and the American Federalists, I argue that
despite their internal differences, they all write against advocates of popular participation in
politics; they understand direct popular participation as an unpredictable and anarchical
force, which their theories of state sovereignty are to counter. Bodin, Hobbes and the
Federalists provide similar notions of sovereignty as the uncommanded command of a
superior and the obedience of an inferior, therefore inscribing hierarchy and domination
into the core of the modern political experience. I therefore conclude that a participatory
democracy that valorizes popular participation and acknowledge the importance of a
vibrant public sphere cannot be institutionalized within the state form.
Secondly, I argue that a participatory democracy can be institutionalized within a federation.
This argument has two parts. Firstly, I reconstruct a positive theory of democracy as
constituent power from the basis of Hannah Arendt’s political thought. Taking Arendt’s
phenomenology of promises as a starting point and a non-sovereign alternative to the
command of the state, I translate Arendt’s notion of promise making into a political theory
of world building and constitution making. I argue that democratic political action is to
participate in the co-institution of the constitutional laws of the community, and I provide
a series of principles of democratic action, which a participatory political form is to
institutionalize. Secondly, I deliver the arguments for why a federation can institutionalize the
provided principles of democratic action.
The thesis concludes by establishing the conceptual connection between democratic
constituent power and federalism, and by engaging with Arendt’s discussion on the
revolutionary council tradition, I conclude that federal democracy is no theoretical utopia,
but a stable political form, which has historical precedents that keep inspiring
contemporary political experimentation and new democratic practices.
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT 3 1.0 INTRODUCTION: DISSATISFACTION AND DEMOCRACY IN THE POST WAR CONSTITUTIONAL SETTLEMENT 6 9 1.1 DEMOCRACY AND THE STATE 1.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: POLITICAL THEORY AS PEARL DIVING 1.3 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS 1.3.1 THE STATE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOVEREIGNTY 1.3.2 DEMOCRACY AS PROMISE AND CONSTITUTION MAKING 1.3.3 FEDERAL DEMOCRACY 13 16 16 17 17 2.0 THE STATE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOVEREIGNTY 19 2.0.1 RESISTANCE, TYRANNICIDE AND SOVEREIGNTY 2.1 JEAN BODIN’S THEORY OF SOVEREIGNTY 2.1.1 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEMOCRACY 2.2 THOMAS HOBBES’ THEORY OF SOVEREIGNTY 2.2.1 THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF CONTRACT 2.2.2 A NEW CONCEPT OF LIBERTY 2.2.3 THE INDIFFERENCE OF DEMOCRACY 2.3 THE AMERICAN LEVIATHAN 2.3.1 THE AMERICAN FOUNDING: STATE OR FEDERATION? 2.3.2 THE FEDERALIST PAPERS 2.3.3 THE REDEFINITION OF DEMOCRACY 2.4 CONCLUSION 20 22 23 25 26 27 29 32 33 35 37 38 3. DEMOCRACY AS PROMISE AND CONSTITUTION MAKING 41 3.1 HANNAH ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF SOVEREIGNTY 43 3.2 THE PROBLEM OF ABSOLUTES 47 3.3 TAMING THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF ACTION: THE HUMAN FACULTY OF PROMISE MAKING 50 3.3.1 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PROMISES 50 3.3.2 FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO THEORY: PROMISE MAKING, WORLD BUILDING AND CONSTITUENT POWER 52 3.3.3 THE PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC ACTION 54 3.4 TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF CONSTITUENT POWER 57 3.5 CONCLUSION 60 4.0 FEDERAL DEMOCRACY 61 4.1 FORM OR FORMLESS: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 4.2 THE ART OF ASSOCIATION: FEDERAL FORM, FEDERAL VALUES 4.2.1 THE ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL FORM OF MODERNITY: FEDERALISM AGAINST THE STATE 4.2.2 ITERATION AND COVENANTING 4.3.3 THE FEDERAL INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES 4.4 A FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF COUNCILS 4.4.1 THE NORMALIZATION OF DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUENT POWER 4.4.2 THE LOST TREASURE 4.4.3 FEDERAL DEMOCRACY BETWEEN DIRECT AND REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY 4.5 CONCLUSION 61 63 63 66 69 71 72 73 76 80 Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
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5.0 CONCLUSION 82 5.1 DEMOCRACY AND THE POWER OF THE LIVING 86 6.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY 88 7.0 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 93 Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
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1.0 Introduction: Dissatisfaction and Democracy in the Post
War Constitutional Settlement
“’Representative democracy’ might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron”1.
“The people is like Janus: it has two faces. It is at once a danger and a possibility. It menaces the
political order as the same time as it grounds it”2.
There is widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary democracy. The crisis of liberal
democracy is openly expressed in the declining participation through the normal political
channels of representative democracy, the pervasive distrust in elected politicians,
increasing professionalization of politics and the fast growing distance between the
opinions of the electorate and the politics of necessity conducted by the political elites3.
With the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of liberal triumphalism heralding the
end of history with an overlapping consensus beyond left and right4, liberal democracy was
said to have defeated the last of its adversaries. Even so, discontent with the political elites
has increased5, right winged populism has spread across Europe6 and bureaucrats were
appointed in Greece and Italy in 2011 to clean up the mess after the popular elected
governments.
The contradiction between the global victory of democracy as the only legitimate political
regime and the persistent frustration and apathy with ‘real existing democracy’7 is in many
ways a consequence of the post WW2 constitutional settlement. Although the ‘free,
democratic world’ defeated the ‘anti-democratic, totalitarian threat’, the European
democratic regimes turned out to be not that democratic. The dominant narrative of
European democracy in the post war era can roughly be summarized as in the following8:
As totalitarianism in Germany, Italy and Soviet was a consequence of too much
democracy, as it showed the vices of unconstrained popular sovereignty, post WW2
Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, 2006, 53.
Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 2006, 84-85.
3 Hay, Why We Hate Politics, 2006, 1.
4 Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, 1994.
5 Stoker, Why Politics Matters, 2006, 9.
6 Mouffe, On the Political, 2005, 66-69.
7 The term ‘real existing socialism’ was introduced (and sometimes sarcastically used) to bridge the
gap between the existing political and economic realities in the East bloc and the propagated
ideological visions for a socialist society.
8 See for example, Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005; Loewenstein, Max Weber’s
Political Ideas in the Perspective of out Time, 1966; Lindseth, “The Paradox of Parliamentary Supremacy:
Delegation, Democracy, and Dictatorship in Germany and France, 1920-1950s.”, 2004.
1
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democracy were to be – with the words of Jan-Werner Müller – a “disciplined
democracy”9. European parliaments were weakened in order to render another democratic
suicide like the one of the Weimar republic impossible, constitutional courts were created
across Europe after American example to safe-guard individual rights, limitations were set
up on the freedom of speech and assembly for specific discredited opinions in Germany,
and the executives were strengthened and proclaimed guardians of the constitution and
individual liberties. Political elites agreed that democratic activity was to be understood
narrowly as the election of representatives, not as actual participation in politics10.
No one summarized this understanding of modern democracy better than Joseph
Schumpeter, who in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947) written in the aftermath of
war, introduced his model of ‘minimalist democracy’. Instead of popular participation in
politics, which were discredited by the totalitarian mass movements, democracy should be
understood as the competition for votes among the elites, which by allocating individual
preferences through the political parties on the election day would ensure that the people
had the possibility of accepting or rejecting their leaders11. Hence, the democratic virtue par
excellence is not participation, but the peaceful turnover of political elites through
elections. Anthony Downs, in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), developed the
minimalist model further, and described democracy as functioning by a market mechanism
similar to a market economy. Voters maximize their self-interest on the political market by
voting for the elites, which resemble their preferences the most, and by the compromise
between these different interests, a stable system emerges – a rational equilibrium is
established. Popular influence will only have dysfunctional influence on the system; the
equilibrium will be distorted12. Carol Pateman has summarized this minimalist
understanding of democracy as the conviction that “only minimal levels of activity and
interest, and largely apolitical attitudes, are required from most citizens; anything more
would threaten the smooth working of the political system”13.
The glory of the political realm, which the Romans attributed to it, politics as the highest
moral good as Aristotle understood it, public virtues in the republican tradition – all these
understandings were only a disguise for the totalitarian threat of a homogenized people
Müller, Contesting Democracy, 2011, 147.
Ibid., 148-149.
11 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1994, 269.
12 Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957, 1-15. 13 Pateman, “The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique”, 1989, 65. 9
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governed irrationally by emotions14. As leading Labour Party intellectual Tony Crosland
claimed (and hoped), “all experience shows that only a small minority of the population
will wish to participate”, the rest always “prefer to lead a full family life and cultivate their
garden”15.
Much subsequent democratic theory has aimed at reinvigorating democratic thought and
praxis by conceptualizing an alternative to the impoverished political process of minimalist
democracy. Whether we turn to such completely different strands of social thought as
Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and its development into a model of
deliberative democracy16, to the participatory democracy of the 1970s17, to post-Marxian poststructuralist radical democracy18 or contemporary explorations in agonistic democracy19, we see a
shared commitment to the ideal that politics is an important human activity, that
deliberation and participation by ordinary people improve the quality of decision making
and that democracy can be a transformative power enhancing equality, freedom and justice.
I am fundamentally sympathetic to these different attempts to reconceptualize democracy
along more participatory lines. Instead of seeing the widespread indifference to democratic
politics as healthy signs of a well-functioning minimalist democracy, I understand the
frustration with contemporary democracy as symptoms of a general wish to participate, as
an inclination to influence the collective life in a political system, which does not provide
the institutional sites for popular participation. I understand the discontent with
contemporary politics precisely as dissatisfaction with the incapability of liberal democracy
to let citizens partake meaningfully in determining the political direction of their own
communities. In my account, these problems are not only contemporary or accidental
ones, but rest on a historical and conceptual association between democracy and the
dominant form of political organization of modernity: the state.
Müller, Contesting Democracy, 145-146.
Crosland, Socialism Now, 1970, 65-66.
16 Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy”, 1996; Cohen, “Procedure
and Substance in Deliberative Democracy”, 1996.
17 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 1970; Barber, Strong Democracy, 2003.
18 Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2001; Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy”, 1996;
Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 1988; Derrida, Rogues, 2005.
19 Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013; Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 1993; Connolly,
Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, 2002. 14
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1.1 Democracy and the State
The central aim of the thesis is to conduct a political theoretical analysis of the relation
between democracy and institutional form. What kind of political institutions can facilitate
participatory democratic regime? What is the relation between democracy and the state,
and can democracy be institutionalized in a more participatory way through other
institutional forms?
Through a series of detailed, textual interpretations of key figures in the canon of political
thought I will provide two main arguments: 1) Democracy cannot be institutionalized within
the institutions and imaginary of the modern state. Democracy and the state are historically
and conceptually incompatible. 2) A participatory democracy can be institutionalized within a
federation20. There exist historical and conceptual connections between democracy and the
federation.
Obviously, these arguments are ambiguous and rest on a specific understanding of
democracy – as any theory of democracy does – namely a reconstruction of a democratic
theory in the thought of Hannah Arendt. This will be elaborated further in this
introduction, but before the research questions are presented and the methodological
considerations and overview of the thesis provided, I will briefly engage with the relation
between the state and democracy in contemporary political science in order to grasp the
background of the problem, which I will investigate throughout the thesis.
The state is modern in origin and emerged through a unification of the pluralistic legal
structures of the middle ages. Similarly, we are often told, democracy is modern in origin as
well. Despite the direct democracy of the Ancients, which is unsuitable for the political
reality of the Moderns, democracy is a modern phenomenon bursting unto the scene with
the revolutions in the 18th century and the establishment of the nation-state. The state,
again we are often told, is thus the historical precondition for democracy21. One celebrated
author on democratization, Samuel Huntington, puts it the following way:
“The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government
but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than
the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community,
Here, I do not allude to the understanding of the federation as for example in the federalism of
the contemporary American political system. I will explain this in much detail below in section
2.5.1, and footnote 258.
21 See for example Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 1989, 2.
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legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in
these qualities”22.
In Huntington’s later work he is even clearer: “The distinction between order and anarchy
is more fundamental than the distinction between democracy and dictatorship”23. For
Huntington, and this goes for minimalist democrats as well, the important political
question is that of order, stability and organization. The question of democracy, conversely,
can be addressed once stable political institutions are in place. For democrats, the primary
issue should not be democracy, “but the creation of a legitimate public order. Men may, of
course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order”24. In short,
the state is understood as the necessary conceptual precondition for democracy, because
every type of political rule – also the democratic one – requires stability and effectiveness.
Other authoritative authors on democratization, Julian Linz and Alfred Stepan, have
developed this idea further. To them, quite simply, ”Democracy is a form of governance of
the state. Thus, no modern polity can become democratically consolidated unless it is first
a state”25. Before starting to consider other possible preconditions for democracy such as
civil society, the rule of law, a well-functioning bureaucracy and a stable economy26, they
assert that “without the existence of a state, there cannot be a consolidated modern
democratic regime”27. Why is it that “democracy is impossible until the stateness problem
is resolved”28? The answer provided by Linz and Stepan, and agreed upon by minimalist
democrats is the classic Weberian answer of the monopoly of violence. Without this
monopoly no government, “even if it is democratically elected”29, can execute its
commands authoritatively.
This of course raises the question of what these authors understand by democracy. What
kind of democracy is conditioned by the existence of the state? The answer is a
representative democracy in an instrumentalist model equal to the minimalist form of
Schumpeter and Downs. Democratic activity lies in voting for competing elites in order to
enhance private preferences, and obviously stable institutions and a sovereign state are
necessary in order for the elected representatives to carry out their decisions authoritatively.
Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968, 1.
Huntington, The Third Wave, 1991, 28. 24 Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 7-8.
25 Linz & Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 1996, 7.
26 Ibid., 7-15.
27 Ibid., 7.
28 Ibid., 16.
29 Ibid., 18. 22
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From within the theoretical imaginary itself, the claim that the state is a necessary
precondition for democracy is perfectly reasonable. Furthermore, empirical evidence seems
to justify the claim: One could argue that the failed democratization in Afghanistan and
Iraq after the international invasion in 2001 and 2003 are due to unstable institutions and
the lack of a clear monopoly of legitimate violence by the state.
The first of the two main arguments of this thesis is, as said, to dispute this relation
between democracy and the state, and argue that democracy and the state are historically
and conceptually in opposition. Consequently, this also entails a different understanding of
democracy than the minimalist one, which I provide in full detail through engaging with
the political thought of Arendt in chapter 3. Initially, one could ask why one should favour
my understanding of democracy and not the minimalist, competitive and representative
one? If the minimalist democratic vision described above is coherent, empirical plausible
and maybe even normatively good in the light of the totalitarian mass movements, why not
stick with it?
My answer is simple: Because many ordinary people are dissatisfied with contemporary
democratic life. Because many ordinary people want to participate, but find the institutions
of representative democracy inadequate and unappealing30. Moreover, because democracy
has never in the history of political thought, neither for the Greeks nor the Romans,
neither at the brink of modernity nor at the moment of the two modern revolutions, been
associated exclusively with representation and elite competition. Instead, democracy has
always also been associated with the participatory self-government of the community itself.
Therefore, there are – I believe – good reasons, empirical, theoretical and normative, for
exploring a different understanding of democracy and for seeking a different relation
How do I know that this is the case? How do I know that the lack of participation is simply not
just due to a lack of interest in politics? Empirically, I do not know. But this does not mean that I
cannot interpret the dissatisfaction with contemporary politics as a symptom of the lack of possibilities
of participation. Carol Pateman made a similar argument in her critique of Almond and Verba’s The
Civic Culture. Here she stated that the theorists of minimalist, representative democracy “are caught
in a perpetual present, where established forms of electoral participation can be described and
called ‘democratic’, but nothing substantive can be said about other activities, or about possible
future developments of democratic political action“ (Pateman 1989: 96). The essence of this
critique also applies to my critique of minimalist democracy. If the lack of participation is
interpreted as satisfaction with the current state of affairs, then one does not take into account that
citizens would want to participate if the institutions allowed it. Therefore, as Pateman also stresses
“the identification of democracy with liberal representative government prevents the recognition of
key problems of democratic theory as problems” (1989: 92). As such, the key problem of the lack
of participation is not understood as a problem, because the theory of minimalist democracy does
not expect or valorize popular participation.
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between democracy and institutional form than the dominant one between democracy and
the state.
Some political thinkers have already begun this task. Without going into the detail of their
arguments, let me provide a couple of observations. Jacques Ranciere has, for example,
envisioned the relation between the state and democracy in complete opposition to the
minimalist democrats:
”Strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms.
Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian, and necessarily forgotten, foundation of the
oligarchic state. Beyond, insofar as it is the public activity that counteracts the tendency of every
State to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere. Every State is oligarchic”31.
According to Ranciere, democracy is instead a political form, which counters the
monopolization of power by the state, which is – as we have seen – the precondition for
democracy in the Weberian tradition. Another contemporary political theorist, Miguel
Abensour, has formulated the relation between democracy and the state quite similarly:
“Democracy can only exist inasmuch as it rises against the state … political action remains what it is
inasmuch as is resists transfiguration into an organizing, unifying form, in short, into a State …
Democracy is anti-static or else it is not”32.
Ranciere and Abensour agree that democracy must resist the organization, unification and
hierarchy inherent in the state from. Furthermore, every broadening of democratic
participation will weaken the state, because “As democracy expands and experiences a real
fullness of life, the State diminishes”33. As such, the state cannot institutionalize a
participatory democracy, and so “Democracy gives rise, works steadily towards giving rise
to, a political community against the state”34. This is at least the argument of Ranciere and
Abensour. Problematically, neither of them explain why this is so, what they mean by
‘democracy’ and which kind of institutional structure democracy is to inhabit. While I
welcome their attempts to conceptualize a democratic experience beyond the state, I will
discuss these matters in a more historical and conceptual cohesive way. I now turn to the
research questions and the methodological considerations directing my thesis.
Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, 71.
Abensour, Democracy against the State, 2011, xxxii-xxxiii.
33 Ibid., 2.
34 Ibid., xli. 31
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1.2 Research Questions and Methodological Considerations: Political
Theory as Pearl Diving
The thesis will be divided into three broad sections, each having their own guiding research
question. The overall research questions structuring the thesis are:
What is the relation between democracy and institutional form? Which political form(s) can institutionalize
a participatory democracy?
As I will elaborate in detail in section 1.3 on the structure the thesis, the above research
question will be investigated in three chapters:
-
Chapter 2 will explore the historical and theoretical relation between democracy
and the state in modern political thought, by investigating the understanding of
democracy in classical state theory through textual analyzes of Jean Bodin, Thomas
Hobbes and the American Federalists. The chapter’s guiding question will be: How
has state theory understood democracy and popular participation?
-
Chapter 3 will reconstruct a theory of democracy beyond the statist imaginary
through engaging with Arendt’s thoughts on political action, new beginnings and
promise making. The chapter’s guiding question will be: How can a theory of democracy
be modelled on the anti-statist, anti-sovereign thought of Arendt?
-
Chapter 4 will investigate the relation between democracy and federalism and argue
that the federation can institutionalize the values and practices of a democracy
building on Arendt’s thought. The chapter’s structuring question will be: How can
the federation institutionalize the values and practices of democracy?
It is obvious from the research questions and the overall aim of the thesis that I am
undertaking an investigation in political theory and political intellectual history. In order to
do this consistently it is necessary to discuss some methodological considerations.
I am inspired by two different methodological approaches to the study of political thought:
The approach by Arendt and her image of the theorist as a pearl diver informs the
normative ethos of the thesis, it animates the reasons for choosing to study democracy
beyond the state. Conversely, the historiographical approach of Quentin Skinner and the
Cambridge School informs the way I look at the classical texts. I will briefly describe the
consequences of these approaches.
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Why study political theory? If one desires to know anything about democracy, why not
study the democracy that is an empirical reality today? I believe Arendt provided good
answers to these questions, when she wrote on the methodology of Walter Benjamin in the
introduction to his collected essays, Illuminations (1968). Arendt equates the theorist with “a
pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea” in order to “pry loose the rich and the
strange, the pearls an coral in the depths”. Because when it comes to both pearls and
historical experiences, “the process of decay is at the same time a process of
crystallization”, where old modes of thinking wait “only for the pearl diver who one day
will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living”35. The history of
political thought thus offers a range of neglected experiences and institutional
arrangements, which by the recovery of the theorist can encourage to new ways of imaging
political existence, which we can learn from and can inspire to action. Seyla Benhabib has
described the normative force of this way of conducting research as “an act of
remembering, in the sense of a creative act of rethinking which sets free the lost potentials
of the past”36. The aim is thus neither to construct the ideally best polity on quasitranscendental grounds as in some strains of analytical political philosophy37, nor to
excavate the precise mind-set of a historical age, as Skinner sometimes seeks, when he is
most extreme38, but instead to use the resources of the past to understand and counter the
problems of the present. As reaching beyond contemporary minimalist democracy
motivate the thesis, the pearl diver approach seems particularly useful. The tradition of
political thought is full of alternative modes of political interaction waiting to be put into
debate with the problems of contemporary democracy. The pearls I find are roughly the
same as Arendt finds, namely a mode of political action without sovereignty, and a federal
manner to institutionalize this action in the revolutionary councils. But the narrative I
construct with the pearls of Arendt is related to my own research questions and my own
motivation for studying the relation between democracy and institutional form.
Again, one could ask why one should accept my reconceptualization of democracy through
engaging with the pearls of yesterday, and not the present understanding of the minimalist
model. The answer is – again – that today’s democracy is dissatisfying for the many, and
Arendt, “Introduction. Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940”, 1999, 54-55.
Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative”, 1994, 127.
37 McDermott, “Analytical Political Philosophy”, 2008, 11-28.
38 See for example the essay ”Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” in Skinner,
Visions of Politics, 2002, 57-89.
35
36
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that much contemporary political thought does not deliver an adequate language to address
these problems.
Besides this general normative ethos of investigation, I am inspired by Skinner’s (more
modest this time) approach to studying classical texts. When I discuss the main thinkers of
the thesis – Bodin, Hobbes, the Federalists and Arendt – I will employ some elements of
Skinner’s approach and leave others. I will not make an extremely thick historical
description of every thinker who wrote on the same subject at the same time, as Skinner
sometimes recommend. Instead, I situate the thinkers in their historical debates, address
the political intensions of their interventions and seek to elucidate their understanding of
democracy through the concepts available to them39. This has the very important
consequence that the canon of political thought, which has been so masterfully crafted that
it seems to naturally progress towards our modern well-known representative democracy,
where each thinker ‘naturally contributes’ to the progression from ancient unfamiliar
concepts to modern recognizable ones, is seen in a different light. When analyzing the
thinkers in the debates in which they were engaged in their own time, it becomes obvious
that (this will be analyzed in depth in chapter 2) Hobbes’ individualism, for example, or
James Madison’s redefinition of the republic, for example, are not just new, progressive
elements well-known to contemporary representative democracy. Instead, they will be
analyzed as strategic arguments employed to achieve specific outcomes in specific political
debates. In short, the statements of the thinkers will be analyzed as political interventions
trying to accomplish something political.
The combination of the pearl diver approach and a historiographical approach has
consequences for the types of conclusions I reach. When I argue that the state and
democracy are incompatible and that democracy can be institutionalized within the
federation (the two main arguments of the thesis), I do not deliver purely theoretical
arguments. My arguments are not applicable in a transcendental world deprived of
empirical phenomena or historical experiences. Instead, as a process of decay is also a
process of crystallization, as Arendt told us, historical events and experiences can be
recuperated into theories and concepts. As such, my arguments concern how the tradition
of political thought has understood the relation between democracy and institutional form
(the historiographical approach), and what alternative relations the tradition also has to
offer (the pearl diver approach).
39
Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol.1, 1978, x-xiv.
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1.3 Structure of the Thesis
The thesis will be divided into three broad chapters: 1) The State and the Development of
Sovereignty, 2) Democracy as Promise and Constitution Making, 3) Federal Democracy. Below, I will
discuss each section in detail.
1.3.1 The State and the Development of Sovereignty
In this chapter I provide an analysis of the development of state sovereignty and its
perception of democracy. I show that the early modern theorization of the state takes place
against the idea of popular participation in politics and that state theory redefines
democratic politics to consist of individual freedom and representation instead of popular
participation. The chapter is thus the historical background for the equation of democracy
and the state by the thinkers of minimalist democracy discussed above.
As will become clear in the chapter, the concept of sovereignty is central to the argument
of the thesis. Sovereignty is not just a characteristic of the state, but its very essence40, and
the primary attempt of modern political thought – from Bodin over Benedict de Spionza
and Hobbes to John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – has been to understand the
notion of sovereignty and to relate it to the concept of the state. The analysis of
sovereignty and the state’s depiction of democracy will be provided by an interpretation of
three classics in modern political thought, namely Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists. As
the first systematic attempt to formulate a theory of sovereignty is made by Bodin in Six
livre de la Republique (1576)41, the chapter begins with Bodin’s theory of sovereignty. It then
precedes to the clearest formulations of state sovereignty in both its European and
American versions, namely Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and the Federalists’ collections of
arguments for an American sovereign state in The Federalists Papers (1788). I have chosen
these three representatives of state theory for specific reasons: Bodin is the first theorist of
sovereignty, and he inaugurates the tradition; Hobbes is the tradition’s most cohesive
exponent and the Federalists provide the most sophisticated redefinition of democracy
through representation42.
Through the analyses of these key figures, I do two interrelated things: 1) I show how the
concept of sovereignty and the related concepts of the people and the constitution develops
internally in state theory. 2) I demonstrate the gradual re-definition of democracy by the
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought Vol. 2, 1978, 351; Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law,
2010, 183–184.
41 Franklin, “Introduction,”, 1992, xli.
42 In a genealogy of state sovereignty, the choice of the Federalists is somewhat controversial. In
section 2.3 and 2.3.1, I provide additional reasons for engaging with the Federalists.
40
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state, starting with Bodin’s obvious fear of democracy, which for him equals tyrannicide
and anarchy, over Hobbes’ redefinition of liberty as an individual and physical quality, and
ending with the Federalists’ denigration of ancient democracy and their new ‘extended
republic’ with representation and barriers to popular participation.
One clarification remains: In addition to the focus on sovereignty, why focus on the people
and the constitution? As sovereignty (political power) stands in relation to the people (the
political subject) through the expressions of the constitution (the institutionalization of
power), the interrelatedness of these concepts are used as a heuristic tool to open the
debates on sovereignty and the development of state theory’s depiction of democracy.
The chapter concludes that state theory in its own understanding is hostile to democratic
participation of ordinary people and has inscribed domination and hierarchy into its core.
1.3.2 Democracy as Promise and Constitution Making
To develop an anti-statist, non-sovereign, participatory democratic theory, I engage with
the political thought of Arendt. Ultimately her thinking in The Human Condition (1958),
Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963) and On Violence (1970) are attempts to
think politics without sovereignty and beyond the modern state, as she delivers an
altogether different understanding of politics than what through classical state theory have
come to characterise modern political thought.
I begin by reconstructing Arendt’s theory of promise making as an alternative to the
sovereign command and translate it into a political theory of world building and
constitution making. I show that Arendt’s phenomenology of promises equals a theory of
the constituent power – i.e. the power to give the fundamental laws of the community,
which will be a central concept in the thesis – and that such a theory can be reconstructed
along participatory lines based on non-domination and political freedom. In short, I argue
that there exists a conceptual relation between promise and constitution making that both
centres on popular participation and the abandonment of domination and hierarchy.
I end the chapter by surveying the existing literature on constituent power and democracy
in Antonio Negri, Andreas Kalyvas, Sheldon Wolin and Mark Wenman, positioning my
own theory based on Arendt’s thinking and enumerating certain principles of democratic
action, which an institutional form is to encompass in order to be democratic.
1.3.3 Federal Democracy
How can democracy be institutionalized if not within the state form? In this last chapter I
argue that the principles of democratic constituent power can be institutionalized in a
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federal polity. To other thinkers of democratic constituent power43, democracy resists
attempts of institutionalization. I disagree, as I will explain in the chapter, for both
theoretical, historical and normative reasons. Through an analysis of the political values of
the federation and by a brief historical comparison between the state and the federation, I
argue that the federation – just like democracy – has been in historical and political
opposition to the state. Furthermore, and in a more constructive manner, I argue that the
democratic promise is equal to the core value of the federation; the Latin foedus meaning
covenant or community creation. The federation is thus a political form, which allows for
refoundation, continuing constitution making and political participation on many different
institutional levels – the federation keeps the democratic constituent power alive, whereas
the state seals it of. In conclusion, I discuss the feasibility of my reconstruction of federal
democracy by analyzing Arendt’s hope for a council democracy and comparing federalist
democracy to the democracy of the Ancients (direct democracy) and the Moderns
(representative democracy).
I now turn to chapter 2 and the development of state sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes and
the Federalists, and their depiction of democracy.
43 Negri, Insurgencies, 1999, 225; Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 1989 36; Wenman, Agonistic Democracy,
2013, 7.
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2.0 The State and the Development of Sovereignty
“What their consent signifies is their willingness to make over, in whole or in part, their powers and
products to be used by the state. While their power is being made available to government, the loss
is experienced by them as political passivity”44.
When following the development of state theory during the 200 years from Bodin over
Hobbes to the Federalists a progression is visible: The individual as a right-bearing subject
emerges, civil society with public deliberation is established, and political representation
permits the citizenry to express its opinions on the election day. These aspects of
contemporary representative democracy are important and are not to be dismissed as such,
when one – as I will do in the following – constructs an opposing narrative. There is always
the danger of constructing a Verfallsgeschichte when the canon is challenged, but I believe I
have good historical arguments on my side: Both Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists write
in times of constitutional crises, and they debate against opponents, who wanted more
popular participation in politics. Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists equate democracy with
anarchy, and they imagine a sovereign state as the only alternative to this anarchy. This has
an interesting consequence: Although they see themselves in opposition to the democratic
writers of their own time, state theory redefines a new type of democracy for the Moderns:
A system governed by representatives with extensive individual freedom.
As I will construct this alternative narrative of the development of state sovereignty, the
aim of the chapter is to analyze the development of state theory from its absolutist
formulations in Bodin and Hobbes to its gradual redefinition of democratic politics in The
Federalists Papers. In doing so, I will show that Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists employ
somewhat similar understandings of sovereignty, the people and the constitution, but that
democracy becomes gradually redefined by the state. A development, which is finalized
with Madison’s representative system in which democracy’s radical potentials are
disciplined. As such the chapter is the background analysis on how the minimalist
democrats discussed in the introduction envision the state as a precondition for democracy.
The chapter’s central concept will be sovereignty, as sovereignty is the essence of the state.
To Skinner, for example, the “precondition for arriving at the modern concept of the state
is that the supreme authority within each independent regnum should be recognized as
having no rivals within its own territories as a law-making power”45, and for Loughlin “the
44
45
Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 12.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought Vol. 2, 351.
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state is inextricably linked to the concept of sovereignty. The state assumes sovereignty just
as sovereignty assumes the state; the notion of the ‘sovereign state’ is tautological”46. Thus,
the analysis of state theory must begin with the concept of sovereignty, which sudden burst
unto the political scene can be attributed to Bodin’s novel formulation of the concept in
Six livres de la république (1576)47.
One may still wonder why I return to early modern times to understand the concept of
state sovereignty. In Liberty Before Liberalism (1998) Skinner asserts that although the
classical theory of sovereignty plays an enormous role in today’s actual politics, most of us
do not understand what the theory entails48. One way to improve our understanding of the
sovereign state, Skinner asserts, is “to go back to the historical juncture at which this way of
thinking about politics was first articulated”49. To go back to the historical juncture, when
the theory of state sovereignty was first conceived, and to understand the consequences of
this way of thinking about politics, is indeed the aim of this chapter.
2.0.1 Resistance, Tyrannicide and Sovereignty
Bodin’s novel description of sovereignty was not only an intellectual achievement, but also
a political intervention against the Huguenot resistance movement50. The Huguenots were
a group of radical Calvinists who challenged the absolute monarchy in France. They
argued, most notably in the writings of Francois Hotman, Theodore Beza and Philippe
Mornay, that because the people had originally instituted the sovereign, they could also
control him. This let them to formulate a theory of resistance, which most famously
Locke51 was to develop further. The Huguenot theory of resistance consisted in the
conviction that the people have a fundamental right to political resistance and even
Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law, 183-184.
Although Bodin’s work is of major importance to the genealogy of the state and the concept of
sovereignty, not much work has been devoted exclusively to studies on Bodin. The work of Julian
Franklin is an exception from the general picture, and his works (Franklin 1966, 1969, 1973, 1992)
are the best entry points to understanding Bodin’s thought. The comparative analysis of Bodin and
Hobbes by Preston King (1974) is also informative and Quentin Skinner (1978: 284-301) in
addition provides a good discussion of Bodin in his Foundations. In addition, no full English
translation of Bodin’s Six livre work exists. I quote from the Cambridge edition On Sovereignty (1992),
where only four chapters of the original text are translated by Julian Franklin.
48 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 1998, 109-110.
49 Ibid., 110, italics added.
50 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2, 285; Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance
in the 16th Century, 1969, 1; Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law, 64.
51 Contrary to normal depiction of Locke as foundational thinker for modern liberalism, Skinner
describes Two Treatises of Government (1689) as “the classical text of radical Calvinist politics”
(Skinner 1978: 239).
46
47
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tyrannicide, when the sovereign acts as a tyrant52, because – as Locke was to argue in the
Second Treatise – the people can never alienate their original power. Thus, the power of the
prince can only be that of a trustee. The result was the first “fully political theory of
revolution, founded on a recognizable modern, secularized thesis about the natural rights
and original sovereignty of the people”53. Bodin’s “response to the Hugeunot
revolutionaries is direct and uncompromising: he insists that no public act of resistance by
a subject against a legitimate sovereign can ever be justified”54.
Just as the first contemplation on political issues in the Western tradition in writings of
Plato was a critique of Athenian democracy; the beginning of modern political thought is
equally marked by distrust in political participation of ordinary people. As Skinner
concludes, with Bodin’s “analysis of the state as an omnipotent yet impersonal power, we
may be said to enter the modern world”55. Modern political thought is thus inaugurated by
the “crucial transition from the idea of the ruler ‘maintaining his state’ to the more abstract
idea that there is an independent political apparatus, that of the State”56. The political
aspiration for Bodin’s formulation of an inviolable sovereign was to render impossible the
possibility of popular participation in politics. Thus, the birth of the modern state and the
concept of sovereignty is an attempt to ensure that the people cannot be sovereign, that the
people cannot rule, and that every limitation on sovereign power equals anarchy57. From
the outlook of state sovereignty there really is no difference between anarchy and
democracy. This is what I take to be the defining characteristic of the statist experience – a
claim I will show textually in Bodin’s Six livre.
Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the 16th Century, 11-46.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2, 338.
54 Ibid., 285.
55 Ibid., 358.
56 Ibid., 353.
57 Contrary to the lack of engagement with Bodin as a primary source (see footnote 47), many
historians on absolutism paraphrase Bodin and associate his theory of sovereignty with monarchical
rule. A typical paraphrasing of Bodin as that of Sommerville in The Cambridge History of Political
Thought 1450-1700 (1991): “The two main objectives of absolutist writers were to defend the
independence of the prince from foreign (and especially papal) jurisdiction in temporal matters, and
to end constraints upon his rule at home. Both objectives were commonly achieved by the assertion
of the Bodinian doctrine of sovereignty. Sovereignty was sometimes treated as a logically necessary
feature of every state, but more frequently it was portrayed as the only practical alternative to
anarchy, and (given the nature of man) mayhem. The prince alone should possess coercive power
within the state” (1991: 350).
52
53
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2.1 Jean Bodin’s Theory of Sovereignty
Bodin begins his treaty on sovereignty with the famous definition: “Sovereignty is the
absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth … that is, the highest power of
command”58.
This definition of sovereignty has three crucial elements, which I will discuss in turn: the
commanding nature of sovereignty, its absoluteness and its perpetuality.
What does it mean that sovereignty is a command? What is the nature of a command? A
command is a law, which requires unconditional obedience and to which its subjects
cannot appeal, because “persons who are sovereign must not be subject in any way to the
commands of someone else … in fact the very word ‘law’ in Latin implies the command of
him who has the sovereignty”59. The commanding nature of sovereignty thus introduces
formal hierarchy within the political sphere. To be sovereign is to engage in a hierarchical
relation in which the other part have no rights of participation in the political process,
because it would involve “intolerable absurdities … to equate the lord and the subject, the
master and the servant, him who gives the law and him who receives it, him who
commands and him who owes obedience”60. Or with Bodin’s fear of the lack of hierarchy
and order: “to have a companion is to have a master”61. The command thus testifies that
the people have “transferred all of its powers, authority, prerogatives and sovereign
rights”62. For Bodin, the command furthermore equals unconditionality: “the main point of
sovereign majesty and absolute power consists of giving law to subjects in general without
their consent”63. The defining mark of the state sovereignty for Bodin is thus that it
unconditionally can command its subjects without their consent.
This brings me to the absoluteness and perpetuality of Bodin’s sovereign. That the sovereign’s
power is absolute and perpetual means that it “is not limited in either power, or in
function, or in length of time”64. The sovereign must be able to decide exclusively on any
matter at any time. This consequently means that sovereignty functions without
restrictions, thus “totally extinguishing the idea of a constitutional state”65, and that it
cannot be shared, because it is simply indivisible. The prerogatives of sovereignty must
Bodin, On Sovereignty, 1992, 1.
Ibid., 11.
60 Ibid., 42.
61 Ibid., 59.
62 Ibid., 7.
63 Ibid., 23, italics added.
64 Ibid., 3.
65 Gierke, The Development of Political Theory, 1939, 158.
58
59
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reside in the sovereign himself, if not, sovereignty is lost: “The best expedient for
preserving sovereignty is never to grant a prerogative to any subject”66. This has the
consequence that every political form in order to become stable must become a sovereign
state. A democratic state, insofar as a state implies sovereignty, cannot exist: “I answer that
no such state has ever existed and that none can be imagined, because the prerogatives of
sovereignty are indivisible”67.
For Bodin, the idea that the people stand in a relation of superiority to the king was the
political project of his enemies, the Huguenots, who “have often been portrayed as the
main founders of modern constitutionalism and even democratic thought”68. Thus, for
Bodin a theory of popular participation was at the core of democracy, as he understood the
concept.
Here we begin the genealogy of democracy in the eyes of state theory. Bodin, in
formulating the first theory of state sovereignty, envisions democracy in its revolutionary
formulation, as he – simply – understands democracy as the idea that the people are
superior to the prince, and that the people through participation at any time can depose the
prince. Democracy is not understood as free elections of representatives as in the
minimalist model, but as direct participation of the people in constituting their own modes
of political existence. It is this understanding of democracy, this fear of the constituent
capabilities of the people, which drove Bodin to formulate the first theory of the state
sovereignty, in which he could see nothing but anarchy in the democratic imaginary.
2.1.1 The Impossibility of Democracy
It is now time to discuss the relation between sovereignty, the people and the constitution in
Bodin’s thought. As the analysis has shown, Bodin is not a contractualist thinker; rather it
was the Huguenots who imagined the relation between the people and the prince as a
contract, which provided the people with rights towards the prince, and which under
special circumstances could justify political resistance. The political tool of the contract is a
way of laying down a constitution, which is to govern the relationship between the people
and sovereign, and to constrain the sovereign’s exercise of power69. But for Bodin no
contract has been agreed upon, thus no constitution can constrain the ruler, and
consequently the people have no rights towards the sovereign. The essence of the state for
66 Bodin, On sovereignty, 71. Ibid., 104.
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2, 174.
69 Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law, 1-6. 67
68
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Bodin is thus a special relationship between sovereignty, the constitution and the people:
The constitution offers no constraints on the exercise of commands; thus to grant the
people rights against the sovereign is for Bodin “not only dangerous but almost inherently
absurd”70. This is the meaning of sovereignty for Bodin: The state is by definition sovereign,
because in order to be a state it must possess a power, which is unbound and cannot be
participated in by the people. There are at least two reasons for Bodin’s argument. First, it
follows as an analytical truth that sovereignty is the unbound command of the ruler. As
shown in the analysis above, if sovereignty is shared, it is not sovereign power at all.
Second, Bodin makes a political argument. For the Huguenots, whose theory of resistance
Skinner depicted as democratic in origin, the relationship between sovereignty, the
constitution and the people is the opposite of Bodin. The people – in the Huguenot
conceptualization71 – retain the ultimate sovereignty, which they through the original
contract, i.e. the constitution, have delegated. Logically, every breach of the constitution by
the instituted ruler can justify a revolution. This is exactly how Bodin understood
democracy, and it is exactly this chain of consequences, which Bodin’s theory is to obstruct
as continuing revolts for him equals anarchy. This means, and this will be an important
argument in this chapter, that for Bodin and for state theory, order becomes the primary
political value72. When Huntington and Linz and Stepan in the introduction argued that
stability and ‘stateness’ were the preconditions for democratic rule, they implicitly drew on
Bodin’s (and Hobbes’ and the Federalists’ as well, as we shall see) idea of order being the
most important political value.
The result is the first conception of the modern state, which in its own self-image – in
Bodin’s own words – has excluded democracy from its core. As Franklin concludes in his
study on Bodin: “With Bodin, however, a legal path was opened to autocracy”73. The
analysis of Bodin provides a first answer to the question why the state cannot
institutionalize democracy. Bodin’s formulation of state sovereignty deliberately seeks to
render popular participation in politics impossible, and as the unconditional command is
Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory, 1973, 93.
Both Skinner and Franklin classify the arguments of the Huguenots within the constitutionalist
tradition, that is, within a tradition, in which the power of the ruler is limited by the constitution.
Such a tradition – in the analysis of Skinner and Franklin – stems from debates between the
ecclesiastical and secular government from Marsilius of Padua and onwards (Skinner 1978: 113-134;
Franklin 1969: 11-46).
72 Preston King have in The Ideology of Order: A Comparative Analysis of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes
(1974) attributed Bodin as origin of a certain ideological obsession with order, which is not only
characteristic for absolutism, but for sovereignty in general (1974: 140-153).
73 Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory, 103.
70
71
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the defining characteristic of sovereignty, the state has conceptually inscribed domination
into its foundation.
It is thus no coincidence that the state is born in the image of absolutism; that for Bodin
sovereignty and absolutism is one and the same74; that sovereignty ultimately “takes shape
in the mirror of monarchical power”75.
2.2 Thomas Hobbes’ Theory of Sovereignty
I now turn to Hobbes’ Leviathan, its development of Bodinian sovereignty and its
sophisticated argument for domination as inherent in the state form. There are good
reasons for analyzing Leviathan in order to understand the development of state theory and
its relation to democracy. Hobbes is often described as “the founder of modern political
philosophy”76, and there is a strong link between Bodin and Hobbes as “Bodin was to
provide the English royalists with a ready-made arsenal of arguments, or, more precisely,
with a model for developing their arguments”77. Just as Bodin was writing in the midst of a
constitutional crisis and reacted to democratic political demands, Hobbes argued that his
intervention was “occasioned by the disorders of the present time”78. Thus, Hobbes’
account of sovereignty also rises in times of crisis and attempts at providing “a powerful
attack on a number of new opponents of absolute sovereignty”79.
The disorders of the present time were the English civil war and the republican
commonwealthsmen, who sought to introduce popular participation in politics80. Hobbes’
understanding of the state as a sovereign person was to provide the arguments for the
royalists against the republicans, thus, as with Bodin, the formulation of state sovereignty
was delivered against popular influence in politics. The argument Hobbes puts to the fore
was a new individualist interpretation of the social contract, which otherwise since
Marsilius of Padua and Johannes Althusius had been a communal contract81 combined with a
new understanding of liberty delivered against his republican political enemies such as
Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law, 63.
Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 1999, 58.
76 Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1988, viii. Skinner has done the same in relation to the
state: “It is Hobbes who first speaks, systematically and unapologetically, in the abstract and
unmodulated tones of the modern theorist of the state” (Skinner 1989: 126).
77 Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory, 106. 78 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1994, 496.
79 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 2008, 138.
80 Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, 1978, 22-53. 81 Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, 1993, 8-9; Gierke, Community in Historical
Perspective, 1990, 105-124.
74
75
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James Harrington and John Milton82. Before turning to Hobbes’ understanding of
sovereignty, the people and the constitution, and his depiction of democracy, I will discuss
these two theoretical innovations, as they are important preconditions for Hobbes’ concept
of the sovereignty.
2.2.1 The Individualization of Contract
The idea of a contract explaining the emergence of political society was certainly not new
when Hobbes applied it. What Noberto Bobbio called the Aristotelian contract model, had,
ever since Aristotle explained the development of the polis through the association of a
large number of families83, been one of the most applied arguments in political thought84.
Hobbes’ remarkable innovation was an individualization of the contract and connecting it
to statist absolutism85. Thus, Hobbes’ contractatrian argument is important in order to
understand his theory of the state and his depiction of democracy. As Wolin puts it: “The
startling aspect in Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty was its belief that from a society of
disconnected singulars effective political power could be generated”86.
Before Hobbes, the contract had always been a communal contract, where different villages,
districts and provinces came together to constitute a common life through free, selfgoverning communities, as “the communal constitution determines the organisation by
means of which the collectivity governs itself”87. This means, in turn, that the associated
communities never relinquish their right to self-government, precisely as the Hugeunots
had argued against Bodin.
Having seen the uproar of the civil war, the idea of equal, self-governing communities was
exactly what Hobbes argued against. By individualizing the contract, by abandoning the
image of a communal contract and by replacing it with a prepolitical, individual contract
agreed upon in a hypothetical state of nature, Hobbes was able to provide an argument for
the absolutist state. Because each individual had consented to give up all its power and
hereby created a sovereign person88, each individual also lost its right to participate in
politics or to re-politicize the contract, because the subjects “cannot lawfully make a new
Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty; Pettit, Republicanism: A
Theory of Freedom and Government, 1997; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 1975.
83 Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, 1958, 1–39.
84 Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, 8.
85 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 112.
86 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 2004, 246.
87 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 110.
88 Hobbes, Leviathan, 109.
82
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covenant amongst themselves”89. As Otto Gierke asserts: “The dissipation of all local
communities and fellowships into the concept of the state” is a way to ensure that “apart
from the state there are only individuals”90. This obviously means that all the associations,
which existed during the civil war, could not achieve legitimacy in Hobbes’ view, because
his political imaginary consisted only of the sovereign state and individualized subjects
authorizing it. In short, by individualizing the contract, Hobbes achieves the disappearance
of the people as an active entity91, and “by transforming the state into a machine and not
recognizing lesser organic associations ... [he] had undermined the active freedom of the
people”92.
2.2.2 A New Concept of Liberty
It is this ‘active freedom of the people’, which the analysis now turns to. Hobbes delivered
his new concept of liberty against the republicans and their ideal of freedom. As neorepublicans such as Philip Pettit and Skinner have pointed out, republican freedom – in
contrast to liberal freedom of non-interference – can be understood as non-domination,
meaning the freedom of being one’s own master and not someone’s slave, and thus being
free of the arbitrary will of another93. In the contemporary revival of republicanism there is
a debate on the extent to which popular participation is inherent to the republican ideal of
freedom. In both Skinner’s94 and Pocock’s95 historical reconstruction of the English
republicanism of Harrington, Milton and Sidney and their debate with royalists as Hobbes
and Filmer, participation in law-making is to different degrees inherent in the freedom of
89 Ibid., 110. Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 112.
The disappearance of all the intermediate layers between the individual and state, which was
achieved by Hobbes’ individualization of the contract, has also been interpreted as a progressive
move, constructing the possibilities for a genuine public sphere with extensive deliberation. For
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, in Civil Society and Political Theory (1994), the construction of the
sovereign state also makes possible the separation between state and civil society. Such a separation,
for them, is necessary for the appearance of social movements and a public sphere, which
problematizes and corrects the political decisions taken by the state (Cohen & Arato 1994: 492564). While this argument certainly has merit, I see a political imaginary consisting of only one
public sphere and one civil society as a reduction of sites for political participation and as
homogenizing force destroying the plurality and autonomy of different political communities.
92 Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 117.
93 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 1-59; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 124-178; Pettit,
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 57-110.
94 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 30.
95 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 226, 335, 551. 90
91
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non-domination96. Pettit, contrary hereto, asserts that if popular participation is part of the
republican liberty, it is an instrumental value97. But when he analyzes the institutions of a
republican commonwealth, public contestation and popular deliberation are indeed
important features98. Whether democratic participation is an instrumental or intrinsic value
is not the main importance for the argument here. Instead, the fact that the English
republicans did value democratic participation in politics to some extent placed them in
opposition to Hobbes, who saw only “perpetual war” in both Athenian and Roman
liberty99.
One of the central aims of Leviathan was to critique republican freedom and to replace it
with a new understanding of freedom: “Hobbes is the most formidable enemy of the
republican theory of liberty, and his attempt to discredit it constitutes an epoch-making
moment in the history”100. The attempt to deliver a new understanding of freedom is not
only a theoretical move, but also a political intervention. Against the republicans, Hobbes
argues that freedom has nothing to do with the commonwealth’s type of government. In
short, he wanted to tear apart the ancient assumption that freedom could only exist in free
republics, argued by Aristotle, Cicero and Machiavelli and after Hobbes, by Rousseau and
Montesquieu. Instead, Hobbes wants to reject the ancient understanding “that the subjects
in a popular commonwealth enjoy liberty, but that in a monarchy they are all slaves”101.
In the chapter 21 of Leviathan, Of the Liberty of Subjects, Hobbes provides the “proper and
generally received meaning of the word, a free-man”102. This place is, as Skinner has aptly
put it, “the most outrageous moment of effrontery in the whole of Leviathan”103, because
Hobbes’ understanding of a free man was not the generally received, but an entirely new
For Pocock, the English republican tradition is an adaption of the Roman understanding of the
Aristotelian concepts zoon politikon and viva activa “operating in a communal climate where men were
indeed called to assemble and make decisions” (1975: 335).
97 Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 82. Pettit begins by saying that
republicanism is not a tradition “that hails the democratic participation of the people as one of the
highest forms of good” (1997: 8). Afterwards, he asserts that participation has important
instrumental qualities in achieving freedom as non-domination: “while the republican tradition
finds value and importance in democratic participation, it does not treat it as a bedrock value.
Democratic participation may be essential to the republic, but that is because it is necessary for
promoting the enjoyment of freedom as non-domination” (1997: 8).
98 Ibid., 183-190.
99 Hobbes, Leviathan, 140.
100 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xiv.
101 Hobbes, Leviathan, 215.
102 Ibid., 136.
103 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 151.
96
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one. For Hobbes, freedom is the individual and physical freedom of non-interference104; to
be unfree is to have external, physical obstacles to one’s motions: “Liberty, or Freedom,
signifieth (properly) the absence of opposition (by opposition, I mean external
impediments of motions)” and “when the words free and liberty are applied to anything but
bodies, they are abused”105. With this new definition of freedom, Hobbes could conclude
that “Whether a commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the
same”106. Whatever the type of government might be, there is no connection to the degree
of freedom. A strong, authoritarian state with no mechanisms for popular participation can
provide the exact same amount of freedom as a participatory, democratic system, because
freedom for Hobbes is a physical quality. This analysis leads Hobbes to a devastating attack
on his republican enemies, who “by reading these Greek and Latin authors, men from their
childhood have gotten a habit (under a false show of liberty) of favouring tumults and of
licentious controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and again of controlling those
controllers, with the effusion of so much blood”107. Just as Bodin contributed the
constitutional crisis of late 16th century France to the democratic demands of the
Huguenots, so does Hobbes accuse the republicans and their theory of freedom for the
tumults during the civil war. With his new theory of individual liberty, Hobbes had a
powerful argument against the republican idea of non-domination and popular
participation in politics, as he could blame the republicans for the political upheavals,
which their theories had caused. In short, Hobbes’ notion of liberty “meant that the laws
of an authoritarian Leviathan could not be faulted on traditional republican grounds and
his case for such a state could be given a decent hearing”108. Hobbes thus inscribes
domination into the core of the political, because it is possible to be free and dominated at
the same time: “It is possible, in other words, to live in freedom without living in a free
state”109.
2.2.3 The Indifference of Democracy
I now turn to Hobbes’ concept of sovereignty, and how his understanding of democracy
marks the beginning of the redefinition of the concept by state theory. By redefining liberty
For a modern expression of Hobbesian, negative freedom; see Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of
Liberty, 1958.
105 Hobbes, Leviathan, 136.
106 Ibid., 140. 107 Ibid., 141.
108 Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 38. 109 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 155.
104
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and by individualizing the contract, Hobbes had achieved the conceptual disappearance of
the people as the founding authority of the political order and a normative re-evaluation of
freedom. I will now analyze how this affects Hobbes’ theory of the state.
Hobbes proceeds in three successive steps in which the individuals leave the state of nature
and construct a sovereign state: the initial unification of individual wills, the subsequent
alienation of wills and finally the representational existence of the people. The starting point
for Hobbes is the well-known description of the state of nature as a condition of war,
scarcity, hardship and deprivation, which can only be abandoned by creating a common
power. “The only way to erect such a common power” Hobbes tells us, is that the
individuals “reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will”110. By a unification111
of wills, by silencing the plurality of different demands, the individuals institute the
common power and leave the state of nature, and the unification is only achievable due to
Hobbes’ prior individualization of the contract. The leap from nature to society is made
possible by alienating the individuals’ natural freedom and right to govern themselves to
the sovereign. The unification of the plurality of wills and their complete alienation112 to the
sovereign person, i.e. the state, has the consequence that the people for Hobbes only exist
in the figure of “the confusion of a disunited multitude”113 or indirectly through
representation. As every individual has authorized the sovereign in each of its actions,
resistance or rebellion a logical absurdity, as one cannot rebel against himself114. Thus, by
individualizing the contract and by following the successive steps of unification, alienation
and representation, Hobbes have managed to construct a political imaginary, which only
exists of the powerful sovereign state and a disunited multitude. Political subjectivities exist
only through representation; they are never existentially present and can never act
legitimately against the state, as they author all its actions. “Because the Hobbesian
community had surrendered its unity, unity must now be located with the unified will of
Hobbes, Leviathan, 109, italics added.
As will become apparent in the next chapter on the democratic critique of the state, plurality is
exactly the condition of democracy. For Hannah Arendt, which is the focal point in the next
chapter, plurality is the very condition for politics (Arendt 2007: 93).
112 Echoing Gierke’s difference between the communal and the individual contract, Jean E.
Hampton has distinguished between an agency social contract and an alienation social contract, which
Hobbes is a representative of. For Hampton, rightly, the alienation social contract is characterised
by the way it “makes the ruler into a kind of master of the people, insofar as his authority over them
is permanent and rebellion against him is always illegitimate” (Hampton 1997: 41).
113 Hobbes, Leviathan, 111.
114 Ibid., 204. Whereas active resistance is a logical absurdity for Hobbes, there are a few
circumstances in which the subjects do not need to obey the sovereign. These being cases in which
the sovereign demands that the subjects harms, testifies against or kills himself (Hobbes 1994: 191,
204).
110
111
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the sovereign”115, or – famously – in Hobbes’ own words, “it is the unity of the representer,
not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one”116. The individual is thus the
author of every action performed by the sovereign, because the sovereign represents every
individual. In short, the people have agreed to its own individualization, to dismantling its
own constituent capabilities, and its own passivity. In return they gain security. Democracy,
in contrast, is inherently insecure as it “undoes today all that was concluded yesterday”117.
Whereas democracy for Bodin was either dangerous – in the figure of the insurrectionist
Huguenots – or was a theoretical impossibility due to the indivisibility of sovereignty,
democracy for Hobbes is indifferent, because it cannot provide for (Hobbes’ new) freedom
any better than a monarchy, and worse, it is prone to conflict behaviour, because “a
monarch cannot disagree with himself out of the envy or interest; but an assembly may;
and that to such a height as may produce a civil war”118.
This brings me to Hobbes’ understanding of sovereignty, the people and the constitution.
Sovereignty is the supreme authority of the unified person, whom the disunited individuals
have consented to be the author of all laws. Just as sovereignty for Bodin was the
‘uncommanded commander’, who gave the laws to which the individuals obeyed, for
Hobbes the sovereign “law is a command, and a command consisteth in declaration or
manifestation of the will of him that commandeth”119. The people, as we have seen, are
non-existing. It has been disunited by the individualist contract and now exists only as a
fictional, juridical category represented by the sovereign. The constitution, which for Bodin
did not constrain the sovereign, because no contract had been agreed upon, plays a peculiar
role for Hobbes. The sovereign is obviously limited by the contract (see footnote 114), but
apart from these scarce limitations, the constitution/contract secures order against internal
conflict120.
In conclusion, it can be asserted that this theory of sovereignty, as Bodin’s, has become the
paradigmatic expression of the modern state121. This expression is delivered against what
Hobbes sometimes calls the “Democraticall writers”122, these republican readers of the high
Wolin, Politics and Vision, 248.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 104. 117 Ibid., 120-121.
118 Ibid., 121.
119 Ibid., 177.
120 Ibid., 189. 121 Kalyvas “Constituent Power”, 2013. Taken from the online journal Political Concepts, therefore no
page number can be provided. Accessed 30th March 2014 at
http://www.politicalconcepts.org/constituentpower/.
122 Hobbes in Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 140.
115
116
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spirits of ancient Athens and Rome. By individualizing the contract and re-defining
freedom, Hobbes delivers an idea of the modern state as existing independent from the
people, because they have neither authorized or consented to the contract, as only
individuals exist. Instead of public freedom and popular participation, order becomes the
first value of the state: “For the prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratical or
democratical assembly cometh not from aristocracy, nor from democracy, but from the
obedience and concord of the subjects; nor do the people flourish in monarchy because
one man has right to rule them, but because they obey him”123.
We can see how the introductory statement by Huntington that it is not the type of
government, but the degree of government, which matters, is developed by Hobbes. A
sovereign state can – despite being without channels for popular representation – provide
freedom and order. The ancient question of the relations between virtues and types of
government is replaced by the modern, statist question of how individuals can achieve
security, and how the complete alienation of the right to self-government becomes the
answer, thus obedience and hierarchy is the “artificial soul”124 of statist politics.
2.3 The American Leviathan
I now turn to the last representative of state theory: the Federalists and their commentary
on the American constitution The Federalist Papers (1788). The engagement with the
Federalists is ambiguous: to many they did not argue for a state, but for a federation (I will
discuss this matter in section 2.5.1), they emphasized progressive elements such as
representation, individual freedom and public debate and despite the thesis by Gordon
Wood that the American founding replaced republicanism with liberalism in toto125, much
scholarship agrees that the Federalists employ both liberal and republican arguments126.
When I engage with the Federalists in a genealogy of the sovereign state, it is because their
relation between the state and democracy reaches a high level of sophistication. The
papers’ description of democracy as an antiquated and dangerous political form – for
example in the famous paper no. 10 – and the emergence of Madison’s “extensive
republics”127 is, with some differences, a continuation of Bodin’s and Hobbes’
understanding of sovereignty, the people and the constitution. Moreover, the description
Hobbes, Leviathan, 222.
Ibid., 3.
125 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, 1998, 606–618.
126 Ackerman, We the People, 1991; Kalyvas & Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings Making a Republic for the
Moderns, 2008.
127 Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 1961, 77. 123
124
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of the small republic as a political form of the Ancients, which cannot be realized in a
modern world, therefore direct participation must give way for representation, is an
extremely sophisticated re-definition of democracy, and one that naturalizes the lack of
popular participation and makes it the modus operandi of modern democracy.
In what follows, I will first discuss whether the founders sought to found a state or not. I
then analyze the papers, and finally, I review the Federalists understanding of sovereignty,
the people, the constitution and democracy.
2.3.1 The American Founding: State or Federation?
Despite their name the Federalists were thinkers of the state and had a hostile attitude to
political participation of ordinary people128. One may argue that the founders established
the first democracy in modern times, and that the American system by its checks and
balances nuanced the question of sovereignty. This argument has some merit, and the
Federalists often understood themselves as acting against European absolutism129. On the
contrary, I want to argue that the Federalists sought to found a sovereign state, and that
they shared – in many respects – the understanding of sovereignty, the people and
democracy with Bodin and Hobbes before them. As such, it is one of history’s confusions
that Hamilton, Madison and Jay took the name Federalists, as they argued against the real
Federalists, that is, the Anti-federalists130.
The papers begin with an allusion to the superiority of a government instituted by choice.
Hamilton famously remarks in the first paper that “it seems to have been reserved to the
people of this country by their conduct and example, to decide the important question,
whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from
reflection or choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political
constitutions on accident or force”131. By describing the ratification process in the language
of deliberate choice, and by assuring that “the people are the only legitimate fountain of
power”132, the Federalists could legitimately organize power to ensure that the new
“Constitution presupposed that political power was to be a governmental monopoly”133.
Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, 595-596.
Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 405-406.
130 See my (forthcoming 2014) “The American Constitutional Debate and the Question of
Constituent Power”. In Ideas in History. See also footnote 258.
131 Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 27.
132 Ibid., 310.
133 Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 181.
128
129
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Just as with Bodin and Hobbes it is necessary to situate the Federalists in their historical
context. When delegates from the states met in February 1787 to reform the Articles of
Confederation, which had governed the relation between the 13 states, Madison proposed
an altogether new constitution. The intention was to unite the states into one sovereign
state and shift the emphasis “from the states to a new national government”134. The
opponents of the constitution, the Anti-federalists, understood the unification as a loss of
possibilities of participation and depicted themselves as democrats: “My great objection to
this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights; or, of
waging war against tyrants”135, which for the Anti-federalist Patrick Henry was – like the
French Huguenots before him – “the language of democracy”136. Just as Bodin and
Hobbes developed their theories of the sovereign state in times of constitutional struggle,
and just as they argued against writers, who were understood as democrats, so is the debate
between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists a debate between proponents of the state
form and advocates of the idea that state sovereignty and democracy are irreconcilable. As
Hobbes charged his democratic opponents with the responsibility of the tumults of the
present day, so did Madison associate democracy with instability and violence: “Hence it is
that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have
in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”137.
Madison’s alternative was the extensive republic, that is, a large territorial state with
complex mechanisms of representation. In direct contrast to Madison’s valorization of the
extended republic, the Anti-federalist pseudonym writer ‘Brutus’ stated his understanding
of democracy and the institutional structures securing it: “In a pure democracy the people
are the sovereign, and their will is declared by themselves; for this purpose they must all
come together to deliberate, and decide … it must be confined to a single city”138.
Thus, it can be argued that the Federalists’ aspiration to build a sovereign state is the
continuation of the Hobbesian theme139. As Wolin points out, the Federalists “stood for a
highly restricted system of citizen participation associated with representative government,
the latter (the Anti-federalists) for direct and continuous participation. Thus, the choice
134 Ibid., 3. Ketcham, The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, 1986, 203.
Ibid., 206.
137 Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 76.
138 Ketcham, The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, 289.
139 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, 519-564; Cornell, The Other Founders, 1999,
290.
135
136
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was twofold, between centralized power and decentred power”140. It is the Federalists’
argument for the centralization of power, to which I now turn.
2.3.2 The Federalist Papers
From October 1787 to May 1788 Hamilton, Madison and Jay issued 85 newspapers articles
arguing in favour of the ratification of the American constitution. The central argument in
The Federalist Papers is that the choice between the Constitution and the Articles of
Confederation is in fact a choice between stability and anarchy, between security and
violent struggle – in short a Hobbesian choice: “Among the many objects to which a wise
and a free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their safety
seems to be the first”141, and to obtain this first principle of politics a strong sovereign is
required. Ultimately, it is a choice between “an adoption of a new Constitution or a
dismemberment of the Union”142, or with Hobbes: anarchy or sovereignty.
The argument strongly echoes Bodin’s and Hobbes’ idea of the indivisibility of sovereignty,
because the confederate states would be in a state of nature without a sovereign
government: “To look for continuation of harmony between a number of independent,
unconnected sovereignties situated in the same neighbourhood would be to disregard the
uniform course of human events”143. Thus, the freedom the Americans obtained with the
revolution must give way for raison d’état: “Safety from external danger is the most powerful
director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time give way to its
dictates … To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less
free”144. Here we can see the Federalists’ understanding of the relation between freedom
and security: the revolution granted freedom, but in order not to fall back into “the
pernicious labyrinths of European politics and war”145, security needs to be provided at the
expense of freedom. This relation is confirmed when Madison in federalist no. 49 discusses
the idea of a recurrent appeal to the people in moments of crises: “there appear to be
insuperable objections against the proposed recurrence to the people” Madison stated, and
these being that “frequent appeals would, in great measure, deprive the government of that
veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and
Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 180. Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 36.
142 Ibid., 31.
143 Ibid., 48.
144 Ibid., 61-62.
145 Ibid., 60.
140
141
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freest governments would not possess the required stability”146. Just as Hobbes asserted in
Leviathan, it is dangerous to revisit the commonwealths’ foundations, thus the founding
cannot be re-politicized and the people cannot be appealed to. Therefore, the value of
security requires that the freedom of the founding should be replaced with the stability of
government; stability in other words requires that a political community abstain from
returning to its principal source of legitimacy, that is, to the constituent power of the
people147.
So far, the Federalists have posed the problem of unification in a Hobbesian vocabulary of
the inevitability of conflict, and the trade of freedom for the ultimate political value of
security. Moreover, the Federalists solution is also in many respects Hobbesian:
“Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law that it
be attended with a sanction; or, in other in words, a penalty or punishment for
disobedience”148. In order to establish a secure, governable republic, the Federalists wanted
to destroy all the intermediate layers of political communities and associations that
theorists of the communal contract had relied on. Just as with Hobbes’ individualization of
the contract, a sovereign state requires a direct, hierarchical relation between the sovereign
and the subject in order to govern: “we must extend the authority of the Union to the
persons of the citizens – the only proper objects of government”149. The Federalists’
argument for the constitution thus resembles Hobbes’ individual contract argument.
Instead of a political community held together by multiple pledges and contracts between
numerous layers of power, the Federalists aspired for a political imaginary consisting
primarily of individual citizens and a unified state.
No analysis of the Federalists without a discussion of Madison’s paper no. 10. For
Madison, the main political problem for a republic is the problem of factions; and the
problem cannot be solved in the small, confederate republics – what Madison calls ‘pure
democracies’ – due to the problem of majoritarianism150. Instead, only through extending
the size of the republic and channelling the will of the people through complex
representational mechanisms can the factional disaster be avoided. With this “republican
Ibid., 311.
The question is not whether the people are the source of legitimacy or not. As Madison asserted,
”the people are the only legitimate fountain of power” (Hamilton et el. 1961: 310), but whether
they should be appealed to in moments of crises and exception – that is, whether the constituent
power should be re-activated.
148 Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 105.
149 Ibid., 105.
150 Ibid., 76.
146
147
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remedy”151, the Federalists reach the apex of their Hobbesianism: social life is factional
strife, the end of politics is the control of these factional conflicts, and the instrument is the
creation of a system, where the people only exist through representation (like Hobbes’
solution). Wolin has argued, as the analysis of Bodin and Hobbes has also shown, that
unity is intrinsic to sovereignty. Thus, the Federalists needed to be hostile to difference,
because “difference signified exception, anomaly, local peculiarities, and a thousand other
departures from the uniformity that a certain kind of power prefers” and “the Founders,
however, looked upon the new society with a vision in which local differences seemed
divisive, even destructive, while conditions of uniformity seemed to form a natural basis
for a truly national power”152.
This picture of political reality is combined with the priority of security over freedom, with
the fear of the people as existentially present outside representation – manifest in
Madison’s warning against re-experiencing the foundational moment – and, finally,
combined with the Bodinian demand for a direct hierarchical relation between the
sovereign and the subject.
Essentially, the Federalists wanted to render impossible the experience of freedom and refounding that the Americans experienced with the Declaration of Independence in 1776
and instead replace these expressions of freedom with sovereignty: “Stability, on the
contrary, requires that the hands in which power is lodged should continue for a length of
time the same”153. In sum, the Federalists created the American Leviathan.
2.3.3 The Redefinition of Democracy
As Hobbes’ redefined liberty to such a great extent that Benjamin Constant needed to
distinguish between liberty of the Ancients and that of Moderns, so did the Federalists
redefine modern democracy from its Ancient meaning of direct participation to its modern
meaning of representation. This is done by applying an understanding of sovereignty, the
people and the constitution, which in many respects are similar to Bodin and Hobbes.
Sovereignty is understood as the uncommanded commander and a hierarchical relation
between the sovereign and the individual. As Hamilton said, individuals are the only proper
objects of government, thus in order to directly command the individuals, the power of
intermediate communities has to be diminished. Thus, the aspiration of the Federalists
resembles the Bodinian command and the Hobbesian individualization. Moreover, as
151 Ibid., 79. 152
153
Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 93.
Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 223. Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
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Madison makes clear in paper no. 10, the people outside representational mechanisms are
only self-interested factions, or a volatile multitude striving for power. The people can
therefore only be admitted to politics through representation, and direct popular
participation in the re-politicization of the constitution is – just as Hobbes asserted – too
dangerous as the founding moment is contaminated with violence and anarchy. This is
precisely the Federalists’ argument why democracy must be redefined for the Moderns.
Democracy, which in the tradition of political thought has always been related to the small
republic with extensive participation, cannot control the vices of factions, which mean that
“democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in
general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”154.
Instead, modern democracy is – precisely as in the minimalist model in Schumpeter and
Downs – a representative one, in which the people are called upon occasionally to decide,
which elites are to govern them. Thus, this is the end of the genealogy of state sovereignty
and its redefinition of democracy, which I sought to construct. Although many new
progressive elements entered political reality and theory from 1576 to 1788, a specific
understanding of political power as a sovereign command and democracy as a
representational system without actual popular participation emerged and came to
dominate the minds of the Moderns.
2.4 Conclusion
It is time to conclude on the arguments provided so far. I this chapter, I have argued four
interrelated claims, two historical and two conceptual: Historically, I have argued firstly that
state theory in Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists in its own understanding has argued
against agitators for popular influence in politics, and secondly, that whereas Bodin, Hobbes
and the Federalists have a consistent depiction of (ancient) democracy as dangerous or
impossible, the authors have slowly redefined (modern) democracy from a participatory
praxis to a system of representation.
Conceptually, I have argued firstly that the theorists of the state throughout different historical
periods have employed somewhat similar notions of sovereignty, the people and the constitution,
and secondly – as a consequences – that the state is incompatible with the democratic selfgoverning of the people. I will take a closer look at each of the arguments.
154
Ibid., 76.
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Historically, Bodin’s theory of sovereignty inaugurated a specific way of thinking about
political power, which through different historical settings became the dominant mode of
conceptualizing the state. Thus, the Bodinian notion of the sovereign as an uncommanded
commander has provided clear traces in modern political thought:
“Bodin’s theory of sovereignty became paradigmatic for political modernity, an essential property
of the modern understanding of the state, its authority, and its unity. In proposing a theory of state
sovereignty in the closing of the sixteenth century, he set the foundations for what came to be the
exemplary theory of sovereignty in western political and legal thought”155.
Furthermore, every time this exemplary theory of the sovereign state has appeared, it has
done so in direct polemic with groups, who aspired for more participation in politics.
Whether it is the Huguenots and their theory of resistance, the English republicans and
their notion of freedom or the locally oriented Anti-federalists, state theory emerges as a
response to democratic demands.
As a way of challenging their opponents, the theorists of the state have redefined
democracy into a representational system. Whereas Bodin conceptualized democracy as a
revolutionary force, Hobbes used the contract argument, which primary had been an
instrument employed by democratic and constitutional thinkers. By individualizing the
instrument of his opponents, Hobbes imagined the institution of political authority as a
voluntary act dependent on the consent of each individual, thus giving the state the
legitimacy of voluntary association, so that “Staaträson has acquired a “democratic” element
previously lacking”156. Moreover, Hobbes introduced the idea of representation, where the
sovereign represents every individual through its actions. This notion was to find its
political expression in the Federalists’ representational system. As Pateman has aptly put it,
as state theory developed, “the political role allotted to the citizen was extended from the
complete nonparticipation of Hobbes’ theory to the participation consequent upon the
emergence of competitive elections”157.
The redefinition of democracy reaches it highest level of sophistication with the
Federalists, who reconceptualize modern democracy as a system that acquires its legitimacy
from the people, but which never needs the actual existence of the legitimating entity.
Modern democracy is distinguished by its representational mechanisms, which ensures that
the failures of the ancient democracy are transcended.
Kalyvas, ”Constituent Power”.
Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 167.
157 Pateman, “The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique,” 63. 155
156
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Thus, this is the historical background for the introductory claim by the democratization
literature and minimalist democrats, which sees the state as the precondition for
democracy: Democracy in the eyes of the state is understood as representation through
elections. What happens in modern representative democracy is a formal transfer of power
from the king to the people, and thus “sovereignty changes hand but essentially it remains
the same … it also tends to reduce modern democracy to the state form”158.
This brings me to the conceptual side of the arguments. Even though Bodin, Hobbes and
the Federalists differ in many respects, and even though the 200 years separating Bodin
from the Federalists provided many innovations in political thought and praxis such as
individual rights and representation, they understand the relation between sovereignty, the
people and the constitution quite similar, and this relationship is what I take to be the
defining characteristics of the statist model of politics.
Sovereignty is understood as an unbound, executive power; a command, which establishes
a direct, hierarchical relation between the sovereign and the individual and leaves no
possibilities of participation besides voting to the individual.
This relation between the sovereign and the subject is made possible by a dismantling of
the category of the people – either by Hobbes’ individualization of the contract or by the
Federalists’ unification of power – where the intermediate layers of associations are
destroyed and the plurality of voices is unified in the sovereign. The people now exist only
as a juridical category, which can be appealed to for legitimation, but which is too unstable
to be assembled physically, and in which actual ruling cannot be trusted. Finally, this has
the consequence that the constitution can never be re-politicized, because the founding
moment is full of conflict and uncertainty. As the chapter’s epigraph by Wolin points at,
and as Gierke showed in the discussion of Hobbes, the state only recognizes the power,
which it possesses itself, therefore leaving the citizens as passive, individualized subjects to
enjoy their private freedom. As the chapter began, it will end with the words of Wolin:
“For those who care about creating a democratic political life, a strong state must be rejected
because the idea of a democratic state is a contradiction in terms. By its very nature the state must
proceed mainly by bureaucratic means; it must concentrate power at the centre; it must promote
elitism or government by the few; it must elevate esoteric knowledge of experts over the experience
of ordinary citizens; and it must prefer order and stability to experiment and spontaneity”159.
158
159
Kalyvas, “Constituent Power.”
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3. Democracy as Promise and Constitution Making
“What makes man a political being is his faculty of action; it enables him to get together with his
peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter his mind,
let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift – to embark on something new”160.
Before turning to a democratic theory in Arendt’s thought, and in order to nuance the
depiction of the modern state, it can be objected that the modern statist experience
incorporates two new progressive elements: individual freedom and political
representation. Although many scholars understand these elements as the most estimable
features of political life161, and although these mechanisms might have provided for
increased order, wherever they have sprung up, I have argued in the previous chapter that
freedom of non-interference and representation should not be understood as democratic
innovations162. The reason being that freedom of non-interference, which Hobbes
provided, is a consequence of the abolishment of the intermediate layers for participation,
which were open to individuals prior to the statist unification of political power. The
unification of power in the hands of the sovereign state is a way to establish a direct
relation of command between the state and the individuals, and because the unification
leaves the individuals de-politicized, representation becomes the sole way of incorporating
them into the body politic.
I have presented these arguments on the incompatibility between state and democracy in a
peculiar manner: I have not yet provided my understanding of democracy. This way of
conducting the analysis is in accordance with the methodological considerations in section
1.3: In analyzing the development of state theory, I have provided an internal critique of
the texts, meaning that instead of comparing state theory to some standard of democracy, I
have let the works of Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists ‘speak’ for themselves163. Thus, I
Arendt, On Violence, 1970, 82.
The liberal tradition of political thought precisely cherishes these elements: See for example John
Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Representative Government, Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty and
John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. For recent claims concerning the inherent democratic quality of
representation, see David Plotke, 1997 and Nadia Urbinati, 2006.
162 One does well to remember that Madison precisely saw representation as a means to filter out
‘extreme’ opinions and let the most worthy rule. As such Madison’s extended republic was in his
own view precisely not a democracy. By engaging with this aspect of Madison’s thinking, Martin
Breaugh concludes that “representative democracy can therefore be thought of as an ‘aristocratic’
political form, one distinct from democracy” (Breaugh 2013: 107).
163 Obviously, it is impossible that texts speak entirely for themselves, and I acknowledge the
researcher’s own role in constructing the narrative. The attempt to let the material speak for itself is
shared by the Cambridge School in intellectual history, the German conceptual school (see
Koselleck, 2004) and Michel Foucault’s attempt to uncover the rules of formation of discursive
160
161
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have analyzed the thinkers in their own historical debates and showed that they in their own
self-understanding write against democratic opponents.
This way of analysis will not suffice, as the rest of the thesis will provide the constructive
side of the argument, namely to show that democracy and the federation are connected
conceptually and historically. It is important to remember the general ethos of the thesis:
Political theory as pearl diving. I will not claim that democracy and the federation are
logically connected such that a federal system is the necessary or sufficient precondition for
democracy under all circumstances or federal system will always be democratic. Instead, I
argue that a specific historical and conceptual reconstruction of a democratic theory in
Arendt’s work and in federalist scholarship reveal common ideals, shared understandings
and similar institutions, when concerned with popular participation.
The chapter will be structured in the following way: 1) A review of Arendt’s thought and
the usefulness for my argument. 2) An analysis of Arendt’s critique of sovereignty and
‘absolutes’. 3) A reconstruction of Arendt’s theory of promises and a translation of this
theory into a political theory of democratic constituent power. 4) A discussion on the
principles of democratic action.
By weaving together Arendt’s critique of sovereignty and her theory of promises, action
and new beginnings, I provide a theory of democracy as the collective self-instituting of
common life and the recurrent re-politicization of the instituting moment164. In combining
these elements into a cohesive theory, I will establish principles165 of democratic action – a
task that Arendt embarked on166, but never explicated with clarity, and which “remains a
mystery” as “this aspect of her political thought remains relatively neglected in the
secondary literature”167.
practices, see Foucault, 1972. These approaches can be opposed by the esoteric reading between
the lines by Straussians (Strauss, 1988: 22-38).
164 Arendt, On Revolution, 2006, 194; Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political
Thought, 1993 122-123.
165 Sections 3.3.3 and 3.4 will take issue with the question of the status of principles. Principles in the
way Arendt saw them are not universal norms or moral prescripts for action or rational
transcendental guidelines. Principles, instead, are certain values inherent in democratic action,
values, which are not only enacted in democracy action, but also presupposed before action.
166 Arendt, On Revolution, 206; Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 152.
167 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
2008, 247. For some attempts Andreas Kalyvas, 2008: 254-292, John Sitton, 1994: 307-335, and
David Ingram, 1996: 221-251.
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3.1 Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Sovereignty
Arendt’s critique of sovereignty will be approached from two sides: first, her argument that
sovereignty is anti-political and belongs to the oikos, and second, her critique of ‘absolutes’
in political thought168.
Before turning to the critique of sovereignty, I will provide general reasons for engaging
with Arendt. What occupies Arendt throughout her writings is to recover (to pearl dive) a
tradition of political thought, which has been neglected in Western political thinking169. Her
attempt is to recover the political meaning of key concepts such as power, freedom, action,
authority and the people, and to rehabilitate the political as something important and
inherently human. For Arendt, political action is a testimony to the human condition of
plurality, natality and the capacity for new beginnings170. From this understanding of the
political as something vital for human beings, Arendt delivers a critique of the tradition of
political theory, which to her is characterized by a rejection of politics. As politics has been
understood as an unpredictable activity, “political philosophy since Plato could easily be
interpreted as various attempts to find theoretical foundations and practical ways for an
escape from politics altogether”171. Above all, Arendt identifies the kernel of political
thought’s distrust with politics as the understanding of political relationships as command
and obedience as if “men can law-fully and politically live together only when some are
entitle to rule and others forced to obey”172.
This denigration of politics coincides with Arendt’s famous critique of modernity: the rise
of the social173. The rise of the social is for Arendt a testimony to the degree that modernity
Arendt, On Revolution, 149-152.
As Calhoun and McGowen put it: “One of Arendt’s favourite theoretical tactics were anamnesis,
an attack on out forgetting of the heritage offered us by the past” (1997: 3). The approach, in turn
and along with Arendt’s deep concern for the Greek polis, has often faced her with the critique of
conservatism, nostalgia and romantic anti-modernism (Benhabib 2003: 22-23; Canovan, 1996: 1114). See also Hans Morgenthau’s famous question on Arendt’s political allegiances at a Conference
in Toronto in 1972 (Hill 1979: 333-334). George Kateb has even called her a “great anti-modernist”
(Kateb 1984: 183). In an essay on the labelling of Arendt as a modernist/anti-modernist, Dana Villa
has with great conviction showed how the parties attempt to fit Arendt’s thought within categories,
which she do not herself apply (Villa 1997: 179-182). In my reading, which will become apparent
throughout this chapter, a conservative reading cannot be sustained. Firstly and negatively, Arendt’s
thoughts take shape directly with the encounter with modern totalitarianism, and secondly and
positively, her understanding of freedom as new beginnings and the claim that only the modern
revolutionary tradition made such freedom possible (Arendt 2006: 10-11) evades the accusation of
conservatism.
170 Arendt, The Human Condition, 1998, 9.
171 Ibid., 222.
172 Ibid., 222.
173 This distinction has been criticized both normatively and conceptually. An often raised
normative critique takes issue with the fact that suppressed groups are always also economically
168
169
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has forgotten political action and the importance of the political sphere174. The
consequence is a depoliticized mass society, which values private enjoyment and security
over the freedom of speech and deed of a political life175. In spite of the harsh criticisms of
modern society, Arendt’s work is not a Verfallsgeschichte, as modernity also provided the first
political moments of new beginnings in the two 18th century revolutions, as these
“revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the
problem of beginning”176.
It should be clear from these preliminary remarks why Arendt is an obvious companion for
the purpose of developing a democracy theory beyond the state. Arendt clearly sees the
deplorable in a tradition that understands the political in terms of command and
obedience, which are the defining similarity between Bodin’s, Hobbes’ and the Federalists’
understanding of politics. As such her attempt to get rid of sovereignty, her excavation of
political action and the capacity for new beginnings as non-sovereign alternatives are
promising starting points for developing a democratic theory, which do not take
sovereignty into account and valorizes popular participation.
I now turn to Arendt’s critique of sovereignty. In The Human Condition Arendt criticizes
sovereignty for being inherently apolitical; as a concept belonging to the household rather
than the political sphere. Arendt understands the two spheres as determined by –
respectively – necessity and freedom. As such, all behaviour that concerns the necessities
of life is apolitical. Without action and freedom “political life as such would be
meaningless. The raison d’ëtre of politics is freedom”177. The freedom, which can be enjoyed
through politics, derives from Arendt’s understanding of action. The capacity to act signifies
suppressed (Zaretsky 1997: 225), which means that Arendt’s understanding of economic life as
apolitical is “essentially aristocratic, (and) antidemocratic” (Zaretsky 1997: 208). Conceptually, the
distinction has been deemed as political itself, as Richard Bernstein aptly puts it, “the question
whether a problem is itself properly social (and therefore not worthy of public debate) or political is
itself frequently the central political issue” (Bernstein 1986: 252). Arendt herself, when forced to
answer her friend Mary McCarthy’s doubt about what was actually going to happen in the political
sphere, when social and economic questions were taken out, had to admit “that I ask myself this
question” (Hill 1979: 316). John McGowan describes this allegedly narrow definition of the political
as “the classic problem facing Arendt’s readers” (1997: 263). Benhabib has tried to nuance this
debate, although admitting Arendt’s ‘phenomenological essentialism’ (1996: 123) by arguing that
the division between the political and social is “attitudinal rather than content-specific” (1996: 140).
174 The rise of social and the following de-politicization of modern mass society also inform
Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism (Canovan 1992).
175 Arendt, The Human Condition, 38.
176 Arendt, On Revolution, 11.
177 Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 146.
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the human ability to break with the circular evolution of time, to do the unexpected and
unforeseen. Action is an individual and collective enterprise178 and relates to freedom: It is
the capacity to distinguish oneself in speech and deed in the public sphere among equals,
but also acting in concert in constituting new political institutions. Individually, the
freedom in action lies in the possibility of showing oneself to one’s peers; collectively it
resides in the ability to create new political futures. Collectively or individually, action
cannot be done alone. It is always conditioned by the presence of others – what Arendt
calls plurality: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is
human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else”179. Because every
human being is different, but equal in this difference, political action is rooted in plurality.
Arendt elaborates this phenomenology of the political by stressing that because every new
birth is a beginning of something new, it is not mortality – the great fear of death that
dominates the theories of the state – but natality, which correspond to the human capacity
for action. “The constant flux of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers”
signifies the connection between the unpredicted, the new and political action, “because
the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting”180.
Arendt asks us to remember that “it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of
realism, to look for the unforeseen and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect
‘miracles’ in the political realm … human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to
create what is new”181.
We can see the contours of Arendt’s understanding of politics: Politics is the action of men
in plural, and freedom is experienced in deliberation with others in public spaces.
Henceforth, politics is permeated by equality as only equal men and woman can act
politically. This understanding of politics has the consequence that concepts such as rule,
domination and most importantly sovereignty are not political concepts182. Rather, they
belong to the private household: “to force people by violence, to command rather than
persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis,
178 As Kalyvas has discussed in The Human Condition, freedom and action signify mostly the
individual capacity to situate oneself in the public sphere and to be seen and heard by equals,
whereas in ‘What is Freedom?’ and On Revolution freedom and action have a more collective
meaning of acting in concert and experiencing new constitutional beginnings (Kalyvas 2008: 201202).
179 Arendt, The Human Condition.
180 Ibid., 9.
181 Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 170, 192.
182 This is another aspect concerning the thesis of the rise of social, which also has been thoroughly
discussed. See Kalyvas 2008: 210-223, Canovan 1974: 69-73, Breen 2012: 15-35. For a different
understanding of Arendt’s relation to the concept of rule, see Markell 2006: 1-14.
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of home and family life … because absolute, uncontested rule and a political realm properly speaking
were mutually exclusive”183. These lines are remarkable. The central effort of modern political
thought from Machiavelli’s personal princely power over Bodin’s and Hobbes’
development of a sovereign office to Rousseau’s general will has been to describe the
highest power of a community and to locate it in an uncommanded commander. The
concept unfolding from these experimentations are sovereignty as command, and the
institution – as we have seen – is the state. Furthermore, the sustained attempt by the ‘great
tradition’ to find a relationship between rulers and ruled are completely in vain from
Arendt’s perspective as “Ruling itself and the distinction between rulers and ruled belong
to a sphere which precedes the political realm … the polis is based upon the principle of
equality and knows no differentiation between rulers and ruled”184.
Now, we see Arendt’s thesis of the rise of the social and its relation to the modern state in
full light. The identification of politics with the sovereign command that “became
authoritative for the whole tradition of political thought”185 equals an enormous
enlargement of the private sphere, where concepts, which were used to describe the Greek
oikos, is now taken as crucial political concepts. The statist space consisting only of private
individuals and the sovereign (which we saw with both Hobbes and the Federalists) is a
space “deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that
comes from being seen and heard by others”186. Kalyvas has rightly summarized this aspect
of Arendt’s critique of sovereignty: “the modern state is somehow a mere replica, in a
larger scale, of the private realm, where a monologic, mostly silent patriarch rules over all
its subjects … sovereignty emerges as an apolitical force, belonging to the private sphere of
domination, darkness, dependence and inequality”187.
We can see how Arendt’s critique is consistent with the analysis in chapter 2. The
command and the direct relation between subject and sovereign replace the freedom of
political action and the equality of a public space shared by peers. Instead, the state offers
privacy and order, and demands obedience and passivity. This means that the most
apolitical figure of the Greek imaginary, the household despot, who unconditionally
commands his family and slaves; this figure has been elevated by the tradition of political
thought to the core of the political imaginary: the sovereign state. It is with this insight at
Arendt, The Human Condition, 27-28, italics added.
Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 117.
185 Arendt, The Human Condition, 225. 186 Ibid., 58.
187 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
211.
183
184
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hand that Arendt concludes, “that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny
are the same”188.
3.2 The Problem of Absolutes
To this understanding of sovereignty as an enlargement of the private sphere permeated
with command, one could object that the development of political thought and praxis have
resulted in a popularization of sovereignty – that the sovereign command has been made
accessible to popular influence through representation and elections; that the people
control the sovereign command, which through its constitutional limits no longer is
unconstraint. One could argue that Rousseau189 through the general will takes the
Hobbesian notion of sovereignty and places the people in the position of the sovereign
king, thus creating a popular notion of sovereignty. But even though popular elections and
representation190 might be the hallmark of minimalist democracy, it will not suffice in a
participatory democracy.
From the basis of the transfer of power from the king to people, Arendt is able to deliver
her critique of absolutes, which involves a logical and a political problem. Logically, it
concerns the problem of infinite regress. As arguments have to be reasoned in accordance
with fundamental normative principles191, every chain of argument will inevitably end in a
principle, which cannot be argued logically – an axiom. In the political sphere an axiom is
what Arendt calls an absolute, and here the problem concerns constitution making. As
constitution making will be at the core of the democratic theory I reconstruct from
Arendt’s thought (in section 3.3), it is necessary to take a look at this problem.
Ordinary law making is usually codified in procedural laws in the constitution, which make
sure that ordinary law is conducted constitutionally. But what about the constitution itself,
can it be issued constitutionally like ordinary laws? If the constitution is adopted in
accordance to existing law, how could the existing law be legitimate? What about the
constituting subject? Are the people created legitimately prior to the constitution and if so,
how? Or, if the people are created in the constitution (as for Hobbes), who created the
Arendt, On Revolution, 144.
Despite its seemingly egalitarian character, Rousseau cannot “endow it (i.e. the people) with
movement and will” without referring to the external, hierarchical force of the legislator, who is “in
all respects an extraordinary man” (Rousseau 2002: 178, 181).
190 Obviously, Rousseau himself was extremely critical of representation (2002: 170-172).
191 For example, a fundamental normative principle could be that all human beings are born equal.
This principle cannot be empirically proven, but must be taken as a first cause in normative
argumentation.
188
189
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constitution? These problems are called the vicious circularity of constitution making192. To
Arendt “those who get together to constitute a new government are themselves
unconstitutional, that is, they have no authority to do what they have set out to do”193.
Instead, political thought has appealed to extra-human ‘absolutes’ to legitimate constitution
making. Whether it is knowledge for Plato, divine rights for Bodin, natural law for the
contract theorists of the 17th and 18th century, the general will for Rousseau or the nation
for Emmanuel Sieyès, an absolute entity has always been placed above law, providing it
with legitimacy.
These problems have – in less explicated form – been with us from the beginning. To
Bodin, individuals could never partake in constitution making, which was equal to the will
of the sovereign. Hobbes tried to solve the problem by letting the individuals – not the
people – constitute the sovereign in the first place, whereas afterwards no attempt to reinstitute a new sovereign could be legitimized due to the insecurity without a sovereign.
Finally, Madison stated that although the people through their representative can partake in
ordinary law making, a re-experience of the founding moment is too dangerous.
A democratic theory beyond the state must solve these problems of absolutes differently
than Bodin, Hobbes and Madison, but also differently than advocates of popular
sovereignty such as Rousseau and Sieyès. The way they addressed the vicious circle is by
appealing to the general will of the people. As such, they solve the problem of the
beginning by imagining that a homogenous people through an act of will constitute the
political system. As Sieyès says, “The nation exists prior to everything; it is the origin of
everything. Its will is always legal”194. By solving the problem of beginning by placing the
people’s will above law, the problem of the legitimacy of law is solved by a recurrent appeal
to the self-same general will. By appealing to the general will “popular sovereignty
presupposes that the people compose a solid, seamless homogenous collective entity,
becoming a surrogate for the personal properties of the fallen monarch”195. So, whereas
192 Jacques Derrida discusses these difficulties in Declarations of Independence (1986), where he states
that the “people does not exist. They do not exist as en entity, does not exist, before this declaration,
not as such. It if gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can only
hold in act of signature. The signature invents the signer” (Derrida 1986: 10). This retrospective,
self-instituting act of the people comes close to the account in Hans Lindahl’s Constituent Power and
Reflexive Identity: Towards an Ontology of Collective Selfhood (2007).
193 Arendt, On Revolution, 176. 194 Sieyès, Political Writings, 2003, 136.
195 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
211-212.
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introducing a first cause solves the logical problem of infinite regress, introducing an unmoved
mover solves the vicious circle of constitution making.
By introducing the popular will as the solution to the perplexities of constitution making,
popular sovereignty has done the same thing as state sovereignty did: reduced the plurality
of voices to sameness and organic homogeneity. The people becomes One, thus destroying
– exactly as monarchical sovereignty did – the political condition par excellence: plurality. Of
primary importance to Arendt is that plurality cannot coincide with sovereignty (as we have
seen above), and just as important, that the sovereign command in discourses of popular
sovereignty becomes a concept of the will (the general will, the will of the people). For
Arendt, the will and the command are inescapably bound together as the “Will, seen as a
distinct and separate human faculty, follow judgement, i.e., cognition of the right aim, and
then commands its execution”. It is “the power of command”, and as such “freedom as
related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will”196. The general will replace plurality
with homogeneity, deliberation with command and freedom with certainty. Thus, “where
men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups (i.e. popular sovereignty),
they must submit to the oppression of the will … If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty
they must renounce”197. According to Kalyvas, the will “deified the people, moulded according
to the attributes of a limitless divine power and located outside human laws”198.
The problem of absolutes is apparent in all law making. The solution made by popular
sovereignty and the general will does not solve the vicious circles of law making, but
destroys – like all types of sovereignty does – human plurality, the experience of political
freedom and possibilities for political action among equals.
A democratic theory beyond the state must take issue first with the problems of
sovereignty as command (discussed in section 3.1) and, second, with the problems of
absolutes (discussed in this section). As I in the next section (3.3) develop a democratic
theory from Arendt’s idea of promise making and constitution making, I will necessarily
confront the problem of the arbitrariness of beginning discussed in this section. Instead of
solving it by appealing to an external absolute, which destroys plurality and freedom by
imposing homogeneity and command, Arendt gives us another possibility: “it is futile to
search for an absolute to break the vicious circle in which all beginning is inevitably caught,
Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 151.
Ibid., 164-165, italics added.
198 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
214.
196
197
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because this ‘absolute’ lies in the very act of beginning itself”199. This internal principle of
action will be the centre of my development of the principles of democratic action in
section 3.4.
First I turn to Arendt’s theory of promises as a democratic alternative to the sovereign
command of the state.
3.3 Taming the Unpredictability of Action: The Human Faculty of Promise
Making
I now take the next step toward providing a democratic theory beyond the state. This
theory will centre on the concept constituent power and will be delivered in a general
formulation in section 3.4. In this section I discuss the central human capacity in a
democratic theory beyond the state: the ability of promise making and world building.
3.3.1 The Phenomenology of Promises
Arendt’s explanation of the omission of action by the tradition of political thought is that
because action is always in concert, it is unpredictable; there follows an “impossibility of
foretelling the consequences of an act”. Furthermore, “the impossibility of remaining
unique masters of what they do, of knowing the consequences and relying upon the future,
is the price they pay for plurality and reality, for the joy of living together with others”200.
By now, we know how state theorists handle this unpredictability of action: by instituting
the perpetual command of the sovereign and the hierarchy between rulers and ruled. But
through persistent pearl diving, Arendt finds “another tradition and another vocabulary”;
she finds “a concept of power and law whose essence did not rely on the commandobedience relationship”201. This is the human capacity for promise making: “The remedy
for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to
make and keep promises”202. By making promises a new form of power is generated, and a
stable political structure arises. One can object that the paradigmatic theory of the state,
Hobbes’ Leviathan, rests similarly on man’s ability to make covenants. But promises cannot
“cover the whole ground of the future and map out a path secured in all directions”, as
Hobbes’ contract does. If used in this way, promises simply “lose their binding power”203.
199 Arendt, On Revolution, 196. Arendt, The Human Condition, 244.
Arendt, On Violence, 40.
202 Arendt, The Human Condition, 237.
203 Ibid., 244.
200
201
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This means that promise making is a continuing process of recreating power and the
conditions of living together. By making promises lasting political institutions can be
created and be combined with the power to begin anew. Before turning to how promises
relate to the constitution of stable political structures, I will investigate how promises
inherently have democratic attributes.
As we saw with the command, it requires hierarchy and presupposed attributions of power,
it leaves out dialogue, is unaffected by arguments and treats all homogeneously. A promise,
in contrast, can only be reached if the promising parties are equal and participate equally.
The idea of the other as someone, with whom a promise can be reached requires reciprocal
respect, mutual confidence and presupposes that the parties engage freely and voluntarily.
By making a promise no one is ruled or rules, the act itself has binding power. Also, there
cannot be command in a promise, if one is forced to promise something, it cannot be a
promise – it is a command. Furthermore, whereas obedience to a command is a reaction, to
make a promise is an action, it brings something new into the world. As all political actions
for Arendt require both speech and deed, so does promising. The promise is thus a
collective speech-act; it is a set of performative utterances exchanged by men in plural, which
create something that was absent before204. Besides the results of the promise, promising
simultaneously presupposes equality, volunteerism and mutual participation in the act of
promising.
As such, the promise illuminates a different imaginary than the command: Democracy
cannot take place where the sovereign command exists, but instead democracy can be
modelled on the inherent qualities of the promise. If done so, democracy is no ruling
power, but a constituting, creative power, which brings something new into the world, and
which does so on the premise of equality and mutual participation.
We can illuminate this democratic and participatory nature of the promise and its
opposition to the command further by looking at Arendt’s discussion on two types of
political contracts: one contract building on the promise, which can be re-instituted
multiple times and which Arendt attributes to Locke205 and a contract building on consent,
Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 1975, 6-7.
Contrary to Hobbes’ contract, which only consists of one step – from the state of nature to
society and sovereign power (Hobbes 1994: 109), Locke’s contract in the Second Treatise of
Government consists of two succeeding steps. First, the people form an original community without
alienating power to any external sources (Locke 2010: 52). Thereafter, the people agree on a
second, administrative contract, in which the government is appointed (68). This has the important
consequence that whereas Hobbes’ contract is a contract of alienation of power, Locke’s is only a
delegation of power – a delegation from the constituting, original community (the people) to
204
205
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which is perpetual and finds its agitator in Hobbes. The democratic contract “by which
people bind themselves together in order to form a community is based on reciprocity and
presupposes equality; its actual content is a promise, and its result is indeed a ‘society’ or
‘cosociation’”, whereas with the Hobbesian, statist contract “we deal with a fictitious,
aboriginal act on the side of each member, by virtue of which he gives up his isolated
strength and power to constitute a government … far from binding himself through
promises, he merely expresses his ‘consent’ to be ruled by the government”206.
A participatory democratic praxis is thus not reached “through Hobbes’ Leviathan, which
‘overawes them all’ and thus unites them, but through the strength of mutual promises”207. In
sum, the differences between the two contracts are that “those who ‘covenant and
combine themselves together’ lose, by virtue of reciprocation, their isolation, while in the
other instance it is precisely their isolation which is safeguarded and protected”208.
It is clear from this discussion that the two contracts lead to different understandings of
politics: the consent to passivity through the alienation of power, which is shared by the
thinkers of the state and minimalist democrats or the construction of a community of
equals through the promise, which rests on mutual participation and evades concepts of
rule. As such, every democratic organization “ultimately relies on man’s capacity for
making promises and keeping them”209.
3.3.2 From Phenomenology to Theory: Promise Making, World Building and
Constituent Power
How can this phenomenology of the democratic promise be brought into politics proper?
To institute the new in political terms is to activate the constituent power. As Wenman has
pointed out, the constituent power “nominates the human capacity for creation, to institute
new forms of life, to bring new ways of being into the world … the constituent power
manifests as an ‘interruption’ of an established state of affairs, and as such, it is associated
constituted authorities. This means that the people can by accusing the constituted authority for
tyrannical behaviour retain their original power: “when the government is dissolved, the people are
at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative … for the society can never, by
fault of another, lose the native and original right it has to preserve itself” (108). It is precisely in
this respect that Skinner can state that Locke is the last of the great Calvinist thinkers in line with
the French Huguenot Monarchomacs (Skinner 1978: 238). For a thorough exposition of this
argument, see Franklin’s John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (1978).
206 Arendt, On Revolution, 161.
207 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1972, 87, italics added.
208 Arendt, On Revolution, 162.
209 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 92.
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with the human capacity for initiative”210. The constituent power is the praxis of a plurality
of actors, who engage in founding something politically new. According to Arendt and to
the democratic theory I want to propose,
“… binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in
existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between
them during the course of a particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of
constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action. There is
an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making and keeping promises”211.
Making promises are politically equal to building worlds. By making promises the
participants constitute modes of common, shared lives. Out of action and promise making
arise stable institutions for the generation of power, worldly structures appear and a space
of appearance, which “precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various
forms of government”212, is created. In short, making promises constitutes common worlds
– or ‘original societies’ as in Locke’s democratic contract.
That promises are inherently democratic means that building worlds is a genuinely
democratic activity. Translated into a political vocabulary, it follows that to partake in
constituting the fundamental laws – the constitution – of a political community, and to
participate equally and without hierarchy, is the democratic activity par excellence, when
developed on Arendtian principles and in confrontation with sovereignty. Furthermore,
due to action’s inherent unpredictability and the short temporal impact of the promise (it is
precisely not perpetual as the command), the common world must be re-built, the promise
of living together must be re-stated and the constitution must be re-instituted recurrently in
order to keep the power of the promise alive. As humans are conditioned by natality,
democratic institutions must be able to begin anew, to re-constitute the terms of collective
living together.
This is precisely how democracy and the state differ. The state theorists never allow for the
re-politicization of the original contract: Bodin does not even consider the institution of
government, as the sovereign command is perpetual, Hobbes seals of the possibility of
renegotiating the contract and leaves us with the choice between sovereignty and anarchy,
and Madison assures that constitutional beginnings are too contaminated with arbitrariness
to be revisited.
Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 7.
Arendt, On Revolution, 166, italics added.
212 Arendt, The Human Condition, 199.
210
211
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In order to deliver a democratic theory of constituent power, it is necessary to translate
Arendt’s theory of promise making and world building into more familiar concepts. To
create the politically new is the modus operandi of the constituent power. The constituent
power is thus, as the notion itself implies, the power to co-institute the constitution. To
engage in democratic promise making and world building thus politically means to
participate in constitution making, and – as we have seen – in order for democratic promise
making not to ossify, the people have to be involved continually. Herein resides political
freedom, because of the association between new beginnings and freedom discussed
above. Democratic action is thus to be engaged in constitution making, in revitalising the
constitutional structures of the community; to constitute together the fundamental
structures of the common life. This re-creative action is democratic, because it rests on
human beings’ capacity to act in concert, to experience the freedom of new beginnings, and
is guided by the ability to make promises, which are based on voluntariness and equal
participation: “Through the act of promising individuals make a voluntary and deliberate
choice to bind themselves to perform particular deeds in the future. In entering
agreements, individuals exchange mutual promises for the purposes of cooperating together
on common enterprises”213. As such, promises are not in opposition to law; promises are
exactly translated into law, when agreed upon mutually through participation. Therefore,
democratic law and constitutions rest on a different relation between the participants than
sovereign law, because there is no command. Through democratic promise and
constitution making “the law is something that establishes new relationships between men,
and if it links human beings to one another it does so not in the … commandments
handed down from above and promulgated for all people, but in the sense of an agreement
between contractual partners”214. Democracy is thus concerned with this equal
participation in giving the higher laws of the community; with participating in constitution
making on the premises, which are inherent in the promise.
3.3.3 The Principles of Democratic Action
In this section, I develop the principles of democratic action, which the federation (in the
next chapter) is to institutionalize. The two preceding sections developed the idea of the
promise as an alternative to the command and translated it into a theory of democratic
constituent power, which rests on equal participation in instituting the constitutional
213
214
Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism", 2010, 40-41, italics added.
Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 2005, 180. Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
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structures of a community. A democratic theory of promise and constitution making
therefore expels sovereignty and depicts a non-sovereign, participatory mode of politics.
By focusing on constitution making I instead face another problem discussed above: the
vicious circle of constitution making and the problem of absolutes. Arendt, to be sure, does
not appeal to the absolutes of divinity, nature or the people, but instead she develops a
novel and difficult account on the authority of constitution making. It is important that we
discover how constitution making – democratic constituent power – can be conducted
authoritatively, so that we not just substitute one problem with another, like the advocates
of popular sovereignty do.
This means that democratic constituent power must be principled action; it must involve and
enact certain principles. If not, it will be caught in the perplexities of beginning discussed
above, and if solved by referring to external absolutes, it will compromise freedom and
plurality. What type of principles do I refer to? As touched upon in footnote 165, the
principles are not universal prescripts directing action at all times, neither are they
particularistic cultural expressions of a community. Instead, they are principles inherent to
the act of foundation; principles, which are presupposed in order to constitute and act
democratically and which therefore also guide constitution making, so that it becomes
principled. “For unlike the judgement of the intellect which precedes action, and unlike the
command of the will which initiates it, the inspiring principle” of the act of beginning,
Arendt says, “becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself”215. That which
inspires the action – that which is presupposed before the action – will also be enacted; will
become fully manifest in the action. Habermas has alluded to a similar understanding of
principles of constitution making: “The performative meaning of this constitution making
practice already contains in nuce the entire content of constitutional democracy”216. In sum,
in praxis the substantial principles are also found.
What are these principles of democratic action? Arendt asserts, as discussed, that “it is in
the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness”. We
know how this problem of beginning has been solved in state theory, namely “through the
introduction of a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to question”217 – a
logical axiom or political absolute. But what authority does the act of foundation carry
Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 152.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 1996, 453.
217 Arendt, On Revolution, 198.
215
216
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within it, how does praxis guide substance? Here Arendt draws attention to the fact that
authority and refoundation have the same conceptual root:
“The word auctoritas derives from the verb augere, ‘augment’, and what authority or those in
authority constantly augment is the foundation”218.
“The very concept of Roman authority suggests that the act of foundation inevitably develops its
own stability and permanence, and authority in this context is nothing more or less than a kind of
necessary ‘augmentation’ by virtue of which all innovations and changes remain tied back to the
foundation which, at the same time, they augment and increase”219.
The authority of continuing constitution making, which is at the core of a democratic
theory of constituent power, is that the constituent activity augments the foundation. In
Honig’s phrasing, democracies do “not rest on one world-building act of foundation but
are manifestly committed to augmentation, to the continual preservation and amendment
of their foundation”220. By constantly re-turning to the foundational act, by being in
“Constitutional Assembly in continuous succession”221, the people are “committing itself
institutionally to continual world-building”, such that “this commitment to augmentation
maintains a republic and its revolutionary spirit, by, in a curious sense, keeping its
beginning always present”222. Because democratic constituent power is concerned with
augmenting the constitution, the people do not act in the state of nature, as they do in the
foundation of the state, but they act according to the principles of foundation.
“The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who
have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and bring about its accomplishment. As such,
the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action
lasts”223.
Because promise and constitution making require mutual participation, equality, and
voluntariness, and because they involve the augmentation of what has already been
constituted, the institutional form, which is created, must adhere to these principles. Out of
the democratic promise and constitution making there cannot be created a hierarchical
political form like the state; there cannot legitimately be created a non-participatory
political form out of a participatory act. This is what Arendt means when she argues that
Arendt, Between Past and Future - Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 121-122.
Arendt, On Revolution, 194.
220 Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 1993, 111.
221 Woodrow Wilson in Arendt, On Revolution, 192.
222 Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics., 112, italics added, 113.
223 Arendt, On Revolution, 205.
218
219
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act of foundation entails its own absolute: “What saves the act of beginning from its own
arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that
beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are
coeval”224.
Kalyvas has aptly summarized this insight: “The extraordinary act of constituent higher law
making enacts those principles of equality, autonomy, mutuality and solidarity, which are
also the very conditions of its possibility – already performed during the manifestations of
the constituting act … By engaging in democratic constitutional politics, the participants
perform, recognize, and conform to these principles”225.
In sum, a democratic regime must make possible the continuation of promises and
constitution making; it must ensure that the constituent power, that is, the creative,
founding power of the many, resists ossification, bureaucratization and alienation.
3.4 Toward a Democratic Theory of Constituent Power
Having reconstructed Arendt’s phenomenology of promises into a political theory of world
building and translated these concepts into an idea of democracy as continuing constitution
making, it is time to raise the gaze and look at a democratic theory of constituent power
more generally226.
I am not the first to associate democracy with constituent power. Negri asserts that “To
speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy”227. Kalyvas follows saying
“Constituent power is the truth of modern democracy … constituent power and modern
democracy are intrinsically associated”228. So do other exponents of constituent power229.
My study differ from these in three aspects, relating to the three main chapters of the
thesis: 1) First, in relation to chapter 2, although these authors mention constituent power’s
and democracy’s opposition to the state230, none of them explicate through detailed textual
analysis the opposition between the state form and democracy historically, politically and
conceptually. 2) Second, in relation to Arendt, no earlier study on democratic constituent
power deliberately grounds the theory on Arendt’s understanding of promises and the
Ibid.
Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
250-251.
226 To see how democratic constituent power relates to normal, everyday politics, see section 4.4.1.
227 Negri, Insurgencies, 1.
228 Kalyvas “Constituent Power".
229 Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 3; Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 37.
230 Negri, Insurgencies, 13; Kalyvas, “Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power",
225-226; Kalyvas “Constituent Power”; Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 12. 224
225
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inherent opposition to the command. Although Arendt is an often-mentioned reference in
studies on constituent power and democracy231, to use the triad of promise making, world
building and constitution making as the core of a democratic theory is novel. 3) Finally, in
relation to the following chapter on federalism as the political form of democracy, writers
on this subject have been in disagreement concerning democracy’s institutional form.
Negri, Wolin and Wenman understand democracy as unable to be institutionalized232, as a
discontinuous233, ever-recurrent revolution. These authors thus disregard the lasting effects
of the Arendtian promise and the fact that constituent power is not only concerned with
revolution (one of Arendt’s objections to the French revolution234), but also with
augmenting the existing constitution and building a permanent structure for freedom and
participation. Kalyvas provides a few hints to the connection between democratic
constituent power and federalism235, but never substantially illuminates federalism as an
alternative political form to the state and its relation to democratic constituent power.
Although I take contribution 1 and 2 to be substantial, it is this last contribution, which is
genuinely novel, and which points towards an alternative to the present constellation of
participation, freedom, equality and institutional form.
Before turning to the federal institutionalization of democracy, I return to the democratic
principles of constituent power, which are inherent in the power to constitute, and which
thus determine the institutional structure following the constituent act. In table 1 the
principles, which the federation is to institutionalize, are listed.
Kalyvas, “Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power", 230-233; Kalyvas,
Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt, 187-292;
Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 7-8; Negri, Insurgencies, 15-25.
232 Negri, Insurgencies, 225; Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalization of Democracy",
1994, 37; Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 7.
233 In a new, extremely interesting study by Martin Breaugh, The Plebian Experience: A Discontinuous
History of Political Freedom (2013), Breaugh asserts that democratic discourse must be councilist
(relating to the direct participation of the people) and agoraphile (relating to the assembled people in
physical and existential form). This comes very close to the approach I will apply in the next
chapter. But Breaugh also asserts that democratic experiences can only be limited to temporal
experiences: they are the insurrectionist ‘gaps’ between past and future, with Breaugh’s reference to
Arendt’s introduction to Between Past and Future (Breaugh 2013: xxiii).
234 Arendt, On Revolution, 156-157.
235 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
254-292; Kalyvas “Constituent Power", footnote 44. 231
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Table 1: Principles of Democratic Action
1) Conception of Power
Democracy as constituent power is a power to,
not power over. Democratic constituent power is
the power to create, found, alter and abolish the
constitutional foundations of collective life. It is
not a ruling, coercing and commanding power,
but a constituting power.
2) Mode of Association
Democracy is modelled on the promise, thus
resting on equality and volunteerism in the
participatory process and in the constituted
institutions. One cannot constitute something
alone, only by the plurality of the engagement of
the many, and the many cannot constitute
something, which reduces them to one
homogenous subject.
3) Relation Between the
Participants
Democracy as constituent power emanates at
the bottom by collaborating horizontally building
constitutional structures through the Lockean
contract. State power arises from the top and
inhabits a vertical structure through the
Hobbesian contract.
4) The Relation Between
Constituent Power and
Constituted Institutions
Constituent power cannot be exhausted in
constituted institutions and retains the ultimate
control over its constitutions. This follows
directly from the limited temporal effect of the
promise and the augmentation of the
foundation. The constituting entity, the people,
can at any moment alter, redefine, amend and
abolish the constituted institutions. In fact, in
order to regenerate power and to re-experience
the freedom of the founding, they must do so.
5) The Authority of the
Founding
The authority by which the people can
continuously amend the constitution is the
authority of the beginning itself. As such,
democratic beginnings can only take place in
concert through promises.
These principles of democratic constituent power are in every aspect unable to be
institutionalized by the sovereign state, but on the contrary, a federation – reconstructed in
the right manner – can.
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3.5 Conclusion
This chapter has taken the argument from its negative to its constructive side. I have
developed a democratic theory from Arendt’s thought, which evades sovereignty,
command, absolutes, and which instead rests on the idea of the promise as a different –
inherently democratic – way to constitute political communities. The analysis has provided
the idea of democracy as constituent power and a set of principles of the power to
constitute, which can be traced back to the internal structure of the promise. Before
turning to the task of institutionalizing democratic constituent power in the political form
of the federation let us briefly return to the overall research questions.
The thesis is basically motivated by dissatisfaction with the lack of participation in
contemporary, minimalist democracy, and it attempts to investigate the history of political
thought to find alternative conceptualizations of democracy and the people than the passive
status as privatized voters in minimalist democracy. With Arendt’s reconstruction of
political action, plurality and promise making and by translating these concepts into a
political understanding of democratic constituent power, I have developed a vision of
politics, which is participatory in nature, banishes the formal hierarchy, which is at the core
of the sovereign command by the state, and recognizes the value of political freedom and
public life. How this vision can be institutionalized is the task I now turn to.
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4.0 Federal Democracy
“It is time at least for democratic and republican theorists to recuperate insights of the federal
vision while freeing it from the statist paradigm”236.
In On Revolution Arendt links promise making with both democracy and federalism: “the
mutual contract where power is constituted by means of promise contains in nuce both the
republican principle, according to which power resides in the people … and the federal
principle … according to which constituted political bodies can combine and enter into
lasting alliances”237. Promise making entails both the democratic and the federal principle.
Why? This final chapter will analyze how promise making, world building and constitution
making is kept alive by the federation.
The chapter will be structured in the following way: As I enter into the institutional side of
the argument, I begin by discussing the notion of political forms and the widespread idea that
democracy is formless. Thereafter I provide an analysis of federalism as a historical
alternative to the state resting on iteration of the democratic foundation and the Latin
foedus, meaning covenant. I argue that federal iteration is equal to the democratic
augmentation, and the federal covenant is equal to the democratic promise, therefore
democracy and the federation share understandings of how power is generated
(promise/covenant), and how higher law making is authorized (augmentation/iteration).
The argument is thus an institutional sequel to the argument in chapter 3, as I attempt to
show how Arendt’s “critique of sovereignty must be read as part of a common whole
alongside her analysis of the Republican, federalist alternative”238.
After having established the fundamental traits of the federation, I show how this federal
form can institutionalize the principles of democratic action (listed in section 3.4), thus
showing that democracy is not formless. Lastly, I discuss Arendt’s analysis of the council
tradition and compare the reconstructed federal democracy to direct and representative
democracy.
4.1 Form or Formless: The Institutionalization of Democracy
It is well known that political thought has ascribed different values to different regime
types. In order for a certain political life to exist, it has been custom to designate a
Cohen, “Federation". Published in the online journal Political Concepts, Vol. 1, in 2012, thus no
page numbers can be provided. The article is accessed 30th March 2014 at
http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/federation/.
237 Arendt, On Revolution, 162.
238 Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism", 34.
236
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particular institutional structure, which it is to inhabit. Form is thus not only a set of
institutions, but also a distinctive way of political life.
The importance of political forms for my endeavor is the analysis of the political form of
democracy. As such, it is instructive to return to our oldest constructor of political forms,
Plato, to hear his opinion on the democratic form. For Plato, democratic life is
characterized by absolute freedom, by ignorance of form. Socrates tells Glaucon, “in a
democracy, there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of it, or to
submit to authority if you don’t want to”239. Thus, “Democracy permits all manner of
dress, behavior and belief: it is informal, indifferent to formalities … it does not conform. It is
inherently formless”240. This idea of democracy as a formless force negating all positive
formulations has inspired the thinkers of state, who associate democracy with anarchy, but
also some of the theorists of democratic constituent power, which I touched upon in
section 3.4. For them, democracy can only exist momentarily. To Wolin “democracy is a
rebellious moment”241, and to Breaugh it is “an irruptive event that temporarily fractures
the order of domination” that “per se cannot be sustained for any length of time”242. Due
to this democratic disrespect of institutionalization, we can only experience selfgovernment in fleeting moments. The moment we invoke the democratic constituent
power and institutionalize our democratic demands, the democratic experience is over. As
Ulrich Preuss acutely puts it, “By making a constitution, the revolutionary forces are, as it
were, digging their own graves”243, and Negri follows by asking “What if the very condition
for maintaining and developing the juridical system were to eliminate constituent
power?”244. This debate on form between the state theorists on the one hand, who because
of democracy’s formlessness reject the democratic experience, and the ‘democrats of the
moment’ on the other, resembles Bruce Ackerman’s two attitudes towards
institutionalizing a revolution: Permanent revolution or revolutionary amnesia245. Wolin,
Breaugh and Negri stress the permanent revolution without institutionalization, whereas
Hobbes and Madison neglects that the political form were originally instituted by
individuals (Hobbes) or a constituent assembly (Madison). I will argue that there is a way
between the moment and perpetuity; between revolutionary frenzy and statist passivity.
Plato, The Republic, 2007, 293.
Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalization of Democracy", 50.
241 Ibid., 56.
242 Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience, 2013, xxiii.
243 Preuss, “The Exercise of Constituent Power in Central and Eastern Europe", 2007, 220.
244 Negri, Insurgencies, 10.
245 Ackerman, We the People, 1991, 171.
239
240
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There are two reasons for this. One follows directly from Arendt. Promise making is a
democratic activity, which besides the experience of freedom, equality and collaboration
inherent in the action, has lasting institutional effects as it builds political spaces of appearances.
Precisely because these effects are lasting, but not perpetual, democracy is not a moment,
but a continuing process.
The second reason follows from the central motivation of the thesis. As I seek a political
form for participatory democracy, democracy must be institutionalized and become
everyday praxis, otherwise there are few arguments in favour of it besides the adrenaline of
revolution. Although I agree with Wolin, Negri and Breaugh that democracy must entail
popular participation in instituting the shared constitutional structures of the community, I
disagree with their vision of democracy as a formless force, which only momentarily rearranges political life. What should we do between these fleeting moments? Accept the lack
of freedom and participation? By engaging with the political form of the federation, I
attempt to show that democratic constituent power can become normal, everyday – and not
momentary – activities. I thus adhere to Arendt’s fundamental challenge to “make the
extraordinary an ordinary occurrence in everyday life”246.
4.2 The Art of Association: Federal Form, Federal Values
In this section I provide the arguments for why the federation can institutionalize a
participatory democracy based on promise making and constituent power. The argument
will be structured in the following way: first, I do another pearl dive and discover the
federation as a historical alternative to the state emerging in political thought at the same
time as Bodin’s theory of sovereignty. Second, I discuss the core values of the federal form,
focusing on the iteration of the democratic foundation, and the federal covenant. Finally, I
show how the federation explicitly rests on Arendt’s thought and establish the conceptual
connection between federalism and democracy.
4.2.1 The Alternative Political Form of Modernity: Federalism Against the State
Political modernity is characterized by the dominance of the state form. As chapter 2
showed, theories of the state emerged in times of constitutional crisis (crisis of form) and in
opposition to demands for popular participation. Interestingly, these demands were often
articulated alongside aspirations for quasi-federal institutions. The genealogy of the
opposition between democracy and the state reconstructed in chapter 2 can thus be
246
Arendt, The Human Condition, 197.
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supplemented by the opposition between the federation and the state. It is evident that the
opponents of the state not only wanted more popular participation, but they also wanted it
through decentralized, collaborating organs. As such, the French Huguenots argued for a
federal organization of the groups of resistance to challenge the sovereignty of the
Bodinian state247, and the American Anti-federalists opposed the centralizing tendencies of
the Federalists248. As we shall see in section 4.4.2, Arendt also discovered this conflict
between the state and the federation in every constitutional breakdown in modern political
history. Moreover, the federation is linked to the constituent power and mutual promises:
“Constituent power does not only challenge the monarchical paradigm of sovereignty, it also
questions the legitimacy of the modern state. In fact, the development of sovereignty as the power
to constitute forms of government passes through the rediscovery of the federation as a superior
alternative to the unitary and indivisible authority of the modern state … federalism, understood as
the mutual binding of families, cities, guilds, communities, and provinces associate together through
mutual promises into a constituting body, outside and prior to any state form … the federation becomes
the most appropriate and natural expression of constituent politics; the state, by contrast appears as its
enemy”249.
Federalism is thus a historical alternative mode of organizing the polity, which enters the
modern imaginary at the same moment as state sovereignty is conceived, namely in the late
16th, early 17th century250. It does so through the writings of Johannes Althusius, who writes
the first treatise on federalism in political thought, Politica (1603), directly against Bodin.
Therefore, the idea that “federal theory offers a viable alternative model to the sovereign
state has deep roots in the federal tradition”251. To see how federalism is historically
connected to constituent power against state sovereignty, I will briefly engage with
Althusius before turning to the federal values of iteration and covenanting.
Althusius inaugurates Politica by stating: “Politics is the art of associating men for the
purpose of establishing, cultivating and conserving social life among them”252. Federal
politics is thus historically concerned with the association of people in order to live well
together. The entities associating ultimately share the same purpose; they “are co-workers
who, by the bond of an associating and uniting agreement, communicate among
Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the 16th Century, 23-26.
Cornell, The Other Founders, 1.
249 Kalyvas “Constituent Power", footnote 44 in Kalyvas' article, italics added.
250 Ward and Ward, “Introduction", 2009, 5.
251 Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism", 35.
252 Althusius, Politica, 17.
247
248
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themselves whatever is appropriate for a comfortable life of soul and body. In other words,
they are participants or partners in a common life”253.
These lines are remarkable as they point towards a different imaginary of political
organization than the state. Federal politics – in the first historical formulation – are not
concerned with security or motivated by fear, does not evolve around individualist action
of self-interest and mutual distrust. The purpose of federal politics is not alienation of
power, protection of individual rights or enjoyment of private liberty. Federal politics evade
– like Arendt’s critique of sovereignty – concepts of rule and are concerned with
associating together and sharing a common life. In order to achieve this common life,
Althusius conceptualizes the relation between the people and the magistrates differently
than Bodin: “I concede that the prince or supreme magistrate is the steward, administrator,
and overseer of these rights. But I maintain that their ownership and usufruct properly
belong to the total realm or the people”254. These are the rights of enacting constituent
politics through the “power of disposing, prescribing, ordaining, administering, and
constituting everything necessary and useful for the universal association”255. Thus,
federalist politics entails the power to constitute forms of collective lives, i.e. constituent
power.
Also against Bodin, Althusius asserts that “realm does not exist for the king, but the king
and every other magistrate exist for the realm and polity. By nature and circumstance the
people is prior to, more important than, and superior to its governors, just as every constituting body
is prior and superior to what is constituted by it”256. Again, remarkable lines: A constituting body is
politically superior to what it has constituted. A constituted entity like Hobbes’ leviathan or
Madison’s constitution cannot control what have constituted it, it can never seal of the reenactment of the constituent power by the constituent subject. For Althusius it reveals a
democratic principle, as “it follows that the people can exist without a magistrate, but a
magistrate cannot exist without a people, and a people creates the magistrate rather than
the contrary”257.
Thus, historically, federalism as a way of associating different communities into a
collaborating, non-sovereign association is an institutional account of how constituent
power is kept alive. As such, in a democratic theory of constituent power, democracy and
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 6-7.
255 Ibid., 70.
256 Ibid., 93, italics added. 257 Ibid., 122.
253
254
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the federation are historically connected. I now turn to the values of federal politics – iteration
and covenanting – in order to argue how democracy and the federation are also conceptually
connected.
4.2.2 Iteration and Covenanting
There exists no shared definition of federalism258. Despite divergent understandings of the
institutional set-up of federal systems, the federation is often connected to certain political
values: It is said to embody equality due to its horizontal organization of power259 and
promote participation because of the size of the confederated units260. Furthermore, the
federation expels sovereignty as the unitary command and replaces it with the plurality of
collaborating parties261. This plural institutional structure provides “numerous smaller
arenas for democratic self-governance … federalism offers citizens many opportunities to
hold elected office, and otherwise participate in public affairs … Federalism offers citizens
multiple points of access to public power”262. The federation is therefore important for
democratic theory. By having multiple sites of participation, the citizens of a federation can
participate at many institutional levels. Enlarging these sites of participation can reach
Arendt’s hope: extraordinary political action can become ordinary activities, because the
people “can exercise a constituent power on the level of the member-state by giving
themselves a constitution or by changing it, but they can also do so in the federal level, by
participating in the formation of the federal constitution through the ratification of the
federal pact as citizens of co-states and hence as co-constituents”263. Institutionally, the
federation therefore combines the democratic virtues of self-government of the small
republic, which has been known since the Greeks and repeated by Montesquieu and
Rousseau up to Madison’s extended republic with yet another site for promise making,
world building and constitution making, namely the federal level, where new communities
can be admitted, other regions can leave and new terms of corporation can be negotiated.
Important for my treatment of the American Federalists in chapter 2, there is a shared
recognition that the American system is not a federation, but a federal state (Riker 2011: 193;
Diamond 2011a: 225; Hueglin 2011: 334).
259 Diamond, “The Ends of Federalism", 2011, 222.
260 Inman, “Federalism’s Values and the Value of Federalism", 2011, 263; Kincaid, “Values and
Value Tradeoffs in Federalism", 2011, 250.
261 Elazar, Constitutionalizing Globalization, 1998, 199.
262 Kincaid, “Values and Value Tradeoffs in Federalism", 248.
263 Cohen, “Federation".
258
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Conceptually, this leads to the first core value of federalism. This process of continuing
federal politics can be understood through the notion of iteration264. Federalism “involves
extension through iteration … iteration of the republican or democratic constitutional form
as a condition of entry”265. Iteration is a repetition of something, which repeats it in spirit,
but reformulates it through action. When the concept is brought into the federal polity, it
denotes how political participation and deliberation on the local, regional and federal level
iterates the enactment of the constituent power. Just as Arendt’s way of escaping the
perplexities of beginning was to augment the foundations, political action in the federation
is an iteration of the spirit of foundation and an affirmation of living well together through
the constant keeping alive of the possibility of promise making and constituent power.
This leads to the second core value of federalism. As federal iteration is equal to
democratic augmentation, the other core value of federalism, covenanting, resembles Arendt’s
promise.
Federalism is derived from the Latin foedus, which means covenant. A covenant is a “pact
between peoples or parties having independent and sufficiently equal status, based upon
voluntary consent and established by mutual oaths or promises … covenant expresses the
idea that people can freely create communities and polities, peoples and publics”266. A covenant is thus
a type of constituent agreement, which creates a people from the basis of equal
participation in the process of association through mutual promises. Like Arendt’s
understanding of the Lockean contract, covenants – contrary to Hobbesian statist
contracts - are wide-ranged pacts establishing communal ways of life. Moreover, the
covenant, again like the promise, can be translated into a political constitution, as “a
covenant is the constitutionalization of a set of relationships of a particular kind. As such, it
provides the basis for the institutionalization of those relationships”267. Like the promise,
the covenant also becomes law, is translated into law, as it creates shared worlds and
constitutional structures. Covenanting and constitution making is co-equal, as covenanting
together is to constitute political collectivities. The federation is thus a polity, which
Derrida originally developed the concept iteration in his analysis of the structural preconditions
for linguistic systems, and brought up the idea that iteration always also implies alteration. Benhabib
has brought the concept into political theory with her idea of democratic iterations as a means of
broadening and deepening democratic deliberation and political rights.
265 Cohen, Ibid, italics added.
266 Elazar, “The Political Theory of Covenant: Biblical Origins and Modern Developments,” 2011,
3–4, italics added.
267 Ibid., 4.
264
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provides for the institutional mechanisms for covenant making, for continuing constitution
making on different institutional levels.
Why is this democratic? Because democracy, as I have developed it on the Arendtian triad
of promise making, world building and constitution making, means to participate in
constitution making. It means to exercise the creativity of the constituent power. In other
words: The federation can institutionalize democracy, because it has the covenant and the
promise inscribed in its core. But also, the federation is a stable institutional structure,
which through iteration and augmentation rescues democracy from being only a
momentary experience. Federalism does not ‘dig its own grave’ as Preuss puts it, but keep
its political life vibrant through iteration. Because federalist democracy re-iterates itself, the
citizens can always participate in re-constituting the shared forms of collective life.
In order to see the similarities between the federalism and the Arendtian concepts more
clearly, I want to draw attention to Arendt’s condition of politics sine qua none: plurality.
Whereas state sovereignty rests on being indivisible, because sovereignty cannot be shared,
the federation is a pluralistic political structure. In a federation many associations and
assemblies have power, and instead of leading to anarchy as it does in the statist imaginary,
it results in the re-generation of power: “power can be stopped and still be kept intact only
by power” so that it “provides a kind of mechanism built into the heart of government,
through which new power is constantly generated”268. Plurality is therefore an
indispensable part of federalism, which provides an institutional site to Arendt’s claim that
action and sovereignty cannot be conjoined. Precisely, because the federation is not
sovereign it can embody plurality and re-generate power: “Federalism uses combination269
to create a new source of power that augments the collective power of the union without
robbing its constituent units of their own sources of power”270. Thus, federalism adheres to
plurality as the condition of political action. But it does something more. It also enables the
world building capacity of man, which Arendt stressed as the core of politics, to be
exercised more freely. As Arendt said, “the more people there are in the world who stand
in some particular relationship with one another, the more world there is to be formed
between them, and the larger and richer that world will be”271. Whereas state sovereignty
permits new worlds to be built – the unification of power in one sovereign office – the
Arendt, On Revolution, 142-143.
What Althusius previously called the art of association.
270 Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism", 45.
271 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 176.
268
269
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federation has associating and forming new alliances as its basic modus operandi. The
federation precisely functions by covenanting and iteration, and thus entails the world
building capacity of man and the plural nature of politics.
4.3.3 The Federal Institutionalization of Democratic Principles
In order to put this argument on the conceptual linkages between federalism and
democracy into a cohesive structure, I will compare the principles of democratic action
(section 3.4) with the federal understanding of politics. As democratic action is to begin
something new through mutual participation in promise making, the federation can
institutionalize this impetus for the new, because it is an institutional structure for
covenanting. In table 2 a comparison between federalism and democratic constituent
power is listed272.
Table 2: The Federal Institutionalization of Democratic Principles
1) The
Conception
of Power
2) Mode of
Association
Democratic Constituent Power
Democracy as constituent power is a
power to, not power over. Democratic
constituent power is the power to
create, found, alter and abolish the
constitutional foundations of
collective life. It is not a ruling,
coercing and commanding power, but
a constituting power.
The Federation
The federation is a political
structure for associating political
communities; the federation is a
structure for creating new political
institutional identities and repoliticizing existing ones. The
concept of power in federalism is
thus not a commanding, sovereign
power, but a creating, constituting
power.
Democracy is modelled on the promise,
thus resting on equality and
volunteerism in the participatory
process and in the constituted
institutions. One cannot constitute
something alone, only by the plurality
of the engagement of the many, and
the many cannot constitute
something, which reduces them to
one homogenous subject.
The federation rests on the covenant,
which entails equality and
participation, and which creates
political communities without
commanding. The entities
associating into a collaborating
political structure will have to be
equal and the process of
covenanting will have to be marked
by reciprocal participation.
3) Relation Democracy as constituent power
Between
emanates at the bottom by collaborating
the
horizontally building constitutional
Participants structures through the Lockean
In a federation, the local levels are
superior to the regional and federal
levels, because they have
constituted them. Power thus
272 The left column is exactly the same as table 1 in section 3.4. The right column is a summary of
the provided interpretation of federalism.
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contract. State power arises from the
top and inhabits a vertical structure
through the Hobbesian contract.
originates at the bottom of the
federation, through the horizontal
coming together of equal parties.
4) The
Relation
Between
Constituent
Power and
Constituted
Institutions
Constituent power cannot be
exhausted in constituted institutions
and retains the ultimate control over its
constitutions. This follows directly
from the limited temporal effect of
the promise and the augmentation of
the foundation. The constituting
entity, the people, can at any moment
alter, redefine, amend and abolish the
constituted institutions. In fact, in
order to regenerate power and to reexperience the freedom of the
founding, they must do so.
In the federation, the power of the
local levels cannot be overruled at
the higher federal levels. Whatever
the local levels decide cannot be
cancelled at the higher levels. This
follows directly from point 3
above. Because the lower levels
have constituted the higher levels,
politically they remain in control of
them.
5) The
Authority of
the
Founding
The authority by which the people
can continuously amend the
constitution is the authority of the
beginning itself. As such, democratic
beginnings can only take place in
concert through promises.
Constitution making and law
making in the federation is an
iteration of the democratic
foundation. By iterating the
foundations, the federation solves
the perplexities of beginning by
adhering to the principles of
beginning.
In sum, the federation shares the principles of democratic action and gives them an
institutional dimension, which combined with the shared historical opposition to the state
provides good arguments for interpreting the federation as a stable institutionalization of
participatory democracy. The federation is thus a way “of institutionalizing the capacity for
spontaneous political creation”; it is an “attempt to preserve the capacity for making
beginnings through an act of political ordering”273.
At a more normative level, democracy can be institutionalized by the federation, because
they share two elements, which counter the statist imaginary: First, both democracy and
federalism, as I have reconstructed them, recognize that the people are able to, in fact best
at, governing their own lives. Neither the state, the representatives nor the general will are
better at governing than the people, when they have local institutions for participation,
because human beings have a creative capacity for building shared worlds. Second, both
democracy/promise making and federalism/covenanting testify that things change,
273
Holman, Politics as Radical Creation, 2013, 112.
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relations transform, and thus the political terms of living together must be able to be
restated.
Although it should be clear from chapter 2, let me re-state the differences between the
state and federalist democracy from the basis of these two points: First, the hierarchical
organization and the commanding nature of the state entail that the people cannot and should
not rule. Instead, the people are either irrelevant (Hobbes), as individuals are the basic
legitimacy for government or a juridical fiction appealed to ex post the foundation
(Madison). Secondly, even though circumstances change, the state will not permit popular
renewals of its foundations, because it is based on the perpetual command and the
understanding of the founding moment as sheer arbitrariness and unpredictability.
This, finally, brings me to the chapter’s concluding section on Arendt’s republic of
councils.
4.4 A Federal Republic of Councils With the connection between democracy and federalism we have reached beyond the
Hobbesian impasse shared by the thinkers of the state and the ‘democrats of moment’
alike, namely the understanding that politics is ultimately a choice between anarchy and
sovereignty, between action and order. With federal democracy, I have sketched out a type
of organization that expels the sovereignty of the unitary state, but simultaneously creates
institutions for the experience of freedom and self-government. I will end this chapter by
discussing Arendt’s lost treasure, the revolutionary council system, which precisely are
“organs of order as much as organs of action”274. This is the last pearl dive of the thesis: By
showing that the established connection between federalism and democracy has historical
precedents and rests on past democratic experiences, I argue against evaluations of the
council system and federal democracy as “wildly utopian”275 or a mere “metaphor suited
for turning the theoretical imagination in a new way”276. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has
argued, Arendt’s “appreciation of the power of promising and the potestas in populo of
the council system have seldom been taken seriously by contemporary political theorists,
most of whom cannot imagine a political life that is not organized primarily around electing
representatives to governments which dominate their citizens”277. As the thesis attempts to
imagine a different form of political life, I start by showing that the federated councils are a
Arendt, On Revolution, 255.
Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought", 1978, 20.
276 Wellmer, “Arendt on Revolution", 2000, 240.
277 Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, 2006, 131.
274
275
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way to normalize democratic constituent power, thus converting extraordinary political
action into normal, everyday activity. Thereafter, I lay out the historical conflict between
the councils and the state, and finally I compare federal democracy to direct and
representative democracy. Here I will also discuss some of the classic objections to
participatory democracy. I conclude by a contemporary example of federalist democracy
beyond the state.
4.4.1 The Normalization of Democratic Constituent Power
The normalization of democratic constituent power is a paradoxical endeavor. Can
constituent capabilities really be institutionalized? Arendt thought so, and she attempted to
provide an institutionalization through a redefinition of ordinary politics. In the words of
Hannah Pitkin, “what was needed was a vision of ‘normal’, ongoing ordinary politics that
was not really normal or ordinary: not in accord with the now conventional understanding
of politics, nor like the now ordinary practice of politics – petty, banal, and quotidian”278.
The redefinition of normal politics happens through the discovery of the council tradition
– what I have called federal democracy. The councils are sites for political participation and
action. This means that even though the content of the action may be ordinary, it is still
endowed with the intrinsic worth of political action. Moreover, normal political action,
even though it does not directly change the constitutional structures, is an augmentation
and iteration of the constitutional foundation: “Normal political action becomes a constituted
constitutional action”279. Thus, the federal councils “combined legal stability with
constitutional change and institutional novelty” so that “ordinary politics could still retain
its dignity, even its extraordinary character, by turning the constitution into an unfinished
project, open to further interventions, modifications, and amendments by an active
demos”280.
Instead of the vast difference between normal and constitutional politics and instead of
privileging the former or the latter as minimalist democrats and radical democrats
respectively do, the federal councils combine the two in a novel political institution. What
does this institution look like? Arendt never provided an exact institutional blueprint. As
the councils are the institutionalization of political freedom and democratic action, their
exact institutional structure cannot be determined theoretically; it must rely on concrete
Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 1998, 114.
Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt,
277.
280 Ibid., 278.
278
279
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democratic experimentation. Instead, Arendt’s purpose “is simply to sketch a political
structure to illustrate the possibility of realizing alternative political principles: direct
democracy, the experience of public freedom and public happiness in the modern world,
an arena for proper opinion formation, and a polity not based on the notion of
sovereignty”281. Now, I proceed to how the council tradition brings these principles to
light.
4.4.2 The Lost Treasure
Arendt observes – in the last chapter of On Revolution, The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost
Treasure – that during the modern revolutions in the late 18th century in America and France
over the late 19th century revolutions in France282 and Germany to the revolutions in
Russia, Bavaria and Hungary in the 20th century, local councils spontaneously sprang up
amidst the revolution. As such, Arendt “clearly believed that council democracy is the only
possible modern embodiment of her political principles”283. Remarkably, these councils
were neither initiated by professional revolutionaries, nor predicted in their theories of
revolutionary transformation. Even more surprising, the councils everywhere started a
process of collaboration in forming higher councils extending to regions and provinces284.
The councils thus testify that the federation is a political form of democratic action, as “the
federal principle, the principle of league and alliance among separate units, arises out of the
elementary conditions of action itself ”, because there is an “intimate connection between the
spirit of revolution and the principle of federation”285. This is extremely important: Out of
political action itself, out of promises and covenants, arises the federation. A federal
organization is the manner in which democratic action naturally organizes itself. In these
“spontaneous organs of the people”, Arendt sees the germs of “an entirely new form of
government”286, which is “found in the federal system … to which the principle of
Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy", 1994, 308.
It is interesting that Karl Marx in his commentary on French politics in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Bonaparte (1852), and especially in The Civil War in France (1871), departs from what has come to be
known as the ‘mature’ Marx: He understands revolution as a change in government, not as the
ultimate horizon and the end of politics, and he deliberately understands political institutions such
as the Commune to be important aspects of a revolutionary situation, and not withering away
together with class distinctions. Arendt herself mentions Marx’ discussion of the Paris Commune as
the radical break within his thought, as Marx came extremely close to associating democracy and
federalism with the Commune as a political form of human emancipation – obviously a thought in
opposition to the Marxian doxa (Arendt 2006: 249).
283 Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy", 325.
284 Arendt, On Revolution, 258.
285 Ibid., 259, 258, italics added.
286 Ibid., 241.
281
282
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sovereignty would be wholly alien”287. Historically, Arendt analyzed the spontaneous
federal organization of participation, when she engaged with the Hungarian Revolution of
1956288, where “new councils began freely to coordinate among themselves …
revolutionary councils in the provinces were coordinating and planning to set up a
National Revolutionary Committee with which to replace the National Assembly”289.
Naturally, the organization of the revolution produced alternative modes of
institutionalization, which incorporated clear federal and participatory elements. Therefore,
politically
“The councils say: We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in
public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the
country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of
public spaces within-it. The booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for
this booth has room for only one. The parties are completely unsuitable; there we are, most of us,
nothing but the manipulated electorate”290.
As such, the councils offer institutional sites for participation, which do not rest on casting
of votes, professionalized of elites, bureaucratized party hierarchies and other minimalist,
Schumpeterian elements. The councils and the parties are both children of the first modern
revolutions, but they ideal typically lead to two different political experiences: participation
and representation, the first being tied to the federal councils, the other to the modern
state. They also lead to two different understandings of freedom: the parties are connected
to the individual freedom from politics (which I have analyzed in Hobbes’ redefinition of
freedom); the councils are manifestations of political freedom, which “generally speaking
means the right ‘to be a participator in government’, or it means nothing”291. Basically, what
Arendt found in the tradition of the councils was the insight, which also became apparent
in the discussion of federal democracy in section 4.3.3, “that no one could be called happy
without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his
Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 231, 233.
She conducts this analysis in the article ‘Totalitarian Imperialism’ from 1958. The article has an
interesting publishing history: It appeared first in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism
published in 1958 two years after the Hungarian Revolution. In all subsequent editions of Origins,
the chapter is taken out and replaced by the now famous chapter 13 ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel
form of Government’. Later in 1958, the article appeared in The Journal of Politics.
289 Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism", 1958, 32.
290 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 232-233.
291 Arendt, On Revolution, 210.
287
288
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experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without
participating, and having a share, in public power”292.
This is the revolutionary treasure – but ultimately, it is a lost one. Not only in the sense that
the council system has fallen into oblivion, but also because the councils lost their political
struggle. Although the councils appeared in the modern revolutions, they were crushed
immediately after the upheavals either by professional revolutionaries, who sought to
capture the power of the state to introduce whatever despotic regime cloaked in
utopianism or by the the ancien régime293. Thus, the conflict between the state and
proponents of popular participation, which chapter 2 accounted for, the opposition
between the sovereign command and the Arendtian promise, which was at the center of
chapter 3, and the tension between the state and the federation, which this chapter touched
upon (page 63-66), is replicated in the historical struggle between the councils and the state.
Thus, the councils, “each a small power structure of its own and the self-government of
the Communes, were clearly a danger for the centralized state power”294. Ultimately, the
great failure of every revolution was that the councils were crushed, that the federation of
townships and regularly town hall meetings – the federal institutions of the re-enactment of
constituent power – were not incorporated into the constitution after the revolution295. The
spirit of beginning something new was lost due to its lack of institutionalization. This spirit,
which is at the heart of both democracy and federation, as I have reconstructed them, can
be institutionalized in the councils, because “the councils, obviously, were spaces of
freedom” and thus pointed towards “no paradise on earth, no classless society, no dream
of socialist or communist fraternity, but the establishment of ‘the true republic’”296. Instead
of looking at “the councils as though they were a romantic dream, some sort of fantastic
utopia come true for a fleeting moment to show, as it were, the hopeless romantic
yearnings of the people, who apparently did not yet know the true facts of life”297, the
councils are a vital part of the history of democratic modes of self-government beyond the
state.
Ibid., 247.
Ibid., 238-239.
294 Ibid., 237.
295 Ibid., 223-224.
296 Ibid., 256.
297 Ibid., 255.
292
293
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4.4.3 Federal Democracy between Direct and Representative Democracy
As a way of concluding this chapter, I want to discuss the reconstructed federal democracy
of councils against two major models of democracy, direct and representative democracy.
In doing this, I will confront some of the criticisms of popular self-government such as (in
relation to direct democracy) the impossibility of assembling the entire demos, (in relation
to both direct and representative democracy) the lack of time and interest in politics, and
(in relation to representative democracy) the need for representation. Obviously, the
following is not an in depth analysis of direct and representative democracy, which appears
in many variations and forms, but a way to situate federal council democracy between these
ideal typical forms of democracy. Moreover, I cannot engage thoroughly with the
objections to council democracy due to space constraints, but by sketching the similarities
and differences to direct and representative democracy, I hope to show that the councils
are not theoretical utopias, but practicable political structures with historical precedents.
My argument will be that federal democracy, despite its focus on participation also
encompasses representative mechanisms, and thus combines elements of ancient and
modern democracy in a genuinely new form of political institution, which reaches beyond
the state.
Classic, direct democracy is ideal typically characterized by social homogeneity, harmonious
interests, a clear understanding of the common good, and a small demos assembling
outside representational mechanisms298. These elements are rendered impossible by
modern democracy as formulated since Madison’s extended republic, because of social
heterogeneity, factional interests, individualism and representation. The most obvious
critique of popular self-government is the impossibility of assembling the entire demos. If
demos consist of only 1000 people, an extremely small demos almost impossible to
imagine in the modern world, it would still be difficult for everyone to partake in deliberation
and to participate equally. How does a federal democracy of councils respond to this
critique? In two ways, I argue. First, the local councils are indeed local. Territorially, they
cover neighborhoods and delineated districts in cities and rural areas. Furthermore,
historically the councils have often been subdivided in accordance with professions. There
have existed councils for soldiers, workers, students, artists, intellectuals and peasants299.
Every individual can thus be a member of many different councils, which means that it is
298
299
Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 18-19; Held, Models of Democracy, 2006, 11-28.
Arendt, ”Totalitarian Imperialism”, 28-33.
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not the entire demos, which is assembling in one assembly, but a multitude of plural demoi
assembling in a multitude of councils. Second, and more important in answering the
objection of the impossibility of assembling, not everyone would have to participate. As
Arendt puts it, “by no means every resident of a country needs to be a member in such
councils … anyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied
with their being decided without them. But each person must be given the opportunity”.
As such the demoi of the councils will be constructed through “a self-selective process“300.
Everyone is free to choose the liberal life of private enjoyment, already offered in modern
representative democracy, but everyone who wants to participate should be welcomed.
Therefore, federal democracy cannot be deemed utopian for the reasons direct democracy
have been, because it does not imagine one demos in one assembly. Even though politics for
Arendt is the activity coming closest to action, federal democracy does not understand
participation as a duty, but as a possibility, which is to be offered and enhanced. Moreover,
in relation to the small size of direct democracy, federal democracy is not a static
community, but a dynamic institutional structure, which through iteration and association
covers extensive areas.
The federal organization of a multitude of councils and a plural demoi also counter the
criticisms of social homogeneity, the common good and harmonious interests. Plurality, not
homogeneity, is the condition for federal, democratic politics. Importantly, the historical
experiences of councils in both the American and the Hungarian revolutions (which are the
two cases Arendt analyzed most closely) have shown that they consist of all the different
strata of society, which under normal representative democratic conditions would have
organized themselves in different parties301. Not homogeneity and a comprehensive
understanding of the common good characterize the councils, but difference, plurality and
heterogeneity.
Moreover, it is clear from Arendt’s critique of popular sovereignty and the general will in
section 3.2 that Arendt was extremely critical of direct democracy. Direct democrats have
often, as Rousseau also did, asserted that the will of the people cannot the represented, and
therefore argued for the plebiscite as their preferred mechanism for direct popular
decision-making302. This way of conducting politics is without deliberation and action, and
Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 233.
Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism", 27; Arendt, On Revolution, 255.
302 Carl Schmitt did also propose the plebiscite as a method for decision-making in his leader
democracy laid out in Constitutional Theory (1928). Inspired by Rousseau’s un-representable general
will, Schmitt imagined the people as accepting or rejecting political proposals by the leader in the
300
301
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the plurality of voices is silenced as the people become One in the plebiscite. As such, a
federal democracy of councils cannot be equated with classic direct democracy and agrees
on many of the criticisms that modern democratic have asserted against it.
This brings me to representative democracy. As David Plotke has argued, “representation
is not an unfortunate compromise between an ideal of direct democracy and messy modern
realities”; instead it highlights “core features of politics and democracy as such”303. The
most important feature of representative democracy is obviously that it is representational.
According to representative democrats this leads to many good things: It leaves the citizens
to follow their private interests outside politics, while they still have an occasional say in
political affairs, it makes large territorial states possible, grants formal political equality
through the vote and respects that no common good exists so that politics becomes the
representation of divergent, private interests304.
Importantly, a federal democracy of councils does not reject the idea of representation.
Instead, it reformulates it and combines it with participation. Historical experiences with
the councils show that the lower councils always send representatives to higher councils, in
accordance with their federal nature. Not everyone participates in every council at every
level. But the higher levels with representatives from the lower levels cannot “deprive the
constituent bodies of their original power to constitute”305. This means that the council
system rests on direct participation in the lower councils combined with representative
mechanisms in appointing the higher councils. This, Arendt asserts, is “a completely
different principle of organization, which begins from below, continues upward, and finally
leads to a parliament”306. Although the representation ends in a federal council, power, as
the principles of democratic action revealed, emanates at the bottom.
Therefore, citizens who do not want to participate in politics, can abstain, citizens who
want to participate to some degree can do so in the local councils, and finally citizens with
most interest can act as representatives in the higher councils. Whether one participates in
order to experience one’s status as zoon politikon, agreeing with Arendt that politics is
freedom or whether one participates in order to enhance private interests is not the most
plebiscite (2008: 131). Interesting, in this way Schumpeter’s elite democracy is not far from the
direct, plebiscite democracy of Schmitt. For this argument on the similarity between Schmitt and
Schumpeter through the notion of leader democracy, see Andreas Körösenyi 2005.
303 Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy", 1997, 19.
304 Dahl, Democracy and its Critics, 28-30. 305 Arendt, On Revolution, 259.
306 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 232.
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important for the argument. Rather, what is important is that for whichever reason one
participates, it is possible to do so. This possibility is clearly missing in contemporary
representative democracy. Thus by combining participation and representation, the
councils can confront “the primary problem for all theories of council democracy”, namely
“how can the federation be organized such that the integrity of each local council as an
arena of free action is maintained while also articulating the local councils into a national
federation which can act for the whole”307. Therefore, it is not the case that federal
democracy evades representation, but it grounds it in extensive participation in the local
councils.
A good way to conclude these comparisons is by a brief excursus to the latest political
experimentation with federal, council democracy. In 1999-2000 the water supplies in
Cochabamba, the third largest city in Bolivia inhabited by one million people, were
outsourced to private companies. After extensive popular participation, demonstration and
organization, the inhabitants of Cochabamba were able to organize popular councils, which
retook control over the water supply, executed decisions taken in direct assemblies and
formed a federal structure, where higher councils covered the entire city and suburbs. The
protesters spoke – in an exemplary way – the language of this thesis. First, their
organization was motivated by dissatisfaction with contemporary minimalist democracy
and the lack of possibilities for participation: “What is happening more and more today is
that democracy is being confused with elections … For us, politics is not the electoral market.
Politics should mean the collective discussion, decision-making, and implementation of
solutions for our common problems”308. The way to achieve this different mode of politics,
in which the people themselves can solve collective problems, is through a federal
democratic organization. “Neighborhood assemblies, peasant communities, unions and
irrigators’ associations; provincial and regional assemblies; state assemblies and town
meetings – all of these gave rise to a hierarchized structure that combined assembly-style,
deliberative democracy at each horizontal level with representative, assembly-style
democracy between each vertical level”309. Out of the elementary conditions of actions
arises federal council democracy, as Arendt told us. Importantly, as argued, representation
is very much a part of this system, but it is combined with participation, plural assembly
Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy", 313.
Olivera, Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, 2004, 20-21.
309 Linera, “The Multitude", 2004, 81.
307
308
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structures and a multitude of councils. Extremely important, the political experimentations
in Cochabamba envision themselves as acting against the state in constructing modes of
political existences beyond the state, as the people “briefly replaced the government, the
political parties, the prefects and the state itself with a new type of popular government
based on assemblies and town meetings held at the regional and state levels. For one week,
the state had been demolished. In its place stood the self-government of the poor based on
their local and regional organizational structure310.
The example testifies that federal council democracy combines elements from both direct
and representative democracy in a political form against and beyond the state. The
democratic federation is not a utopian political form, but has historical precedents and
contemporary exponents, thus presenting a potentiality for future democratic selfgovernment.
4.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have demonstrated a way to institutionalize participatory democracy. By
doing so, I have positioned the argument between two often rehearsed arguments in the
debate on the institutionalization of democracy. On the one hand, minimalist democrats
and thinkers of state assert that too much democratic participation is undesirable and that
(representative) democracy requires a sovereign state. On the other hand, radical democrats
argue that democracy is formless and exists only momentarily.
By engaging with the first federal thinker, Althusius, and by comparing the democratic
promise and democratic augmentation to the two core values of federalism, covenanting
and iteration, I have shown how the federation can institutionalize the principles of
democratic action. Because the federation itself is a political form grounded upon
association and covenanting, because the federation features autonomous, plural, local
levels with the power to constitute, it is a feasible way to institutionalize a participatory
democracy modelled on Arendt’s thinking.
Lastly, by engaging with the council tradition I have aimed at showing how federal
democracy has a long political history of institutional experimentation beyond the state,
which is still in an ongoing process. I end with Breaugh’s conclusion on his investigation of
communalist and agoraphile traditions in the history of political thought. For Breaugh, and for
me as well, council democracy’s contribution
310
Olivera, Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, 125. Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
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“has been the creation of a democratic regime based on the blossoming of a civic life open to the
participation of all citizens favorable to the communalist enterprise. Through the clubs and
associations in the districts, the Commune embodies the resurgence of political freedom in the
heart of modernity. By struggling against the state – that is, coercive – power (a power exercised on
others), the political experience of the Commune brought in a noncoercive form of power, one that
emerges through the concerted action of the citizens (a power with others)311.
311
Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience, 194.
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5.0 Conclusion
The motivation behind this thesis is the growing dissatisfaction with representative
democracy. Whereas contemporary democratic regimes have safeguarded individual rights
and enhanced security and private liberty, they have not provided institutional mechanisms
for extensive political participation. Therefore, the thesis has investigated the relation
between democracy and political form and examined how a participatory democracy can be
institutionalized. Based on this motivation, I have asked the following the research
question:
What is the relation between democracy and institutional form? Which political form(s) can institutionalize
a participatory democracy?
In order to answer this question the thesis has been structured in three chapters, each
guided by their own question:
-
Chapter 2: How has state theory understood democracy and popular participation?
-
Chapter 3: How can a theory of democracy be modelled on the anti-statist, anti-sovereign thought
of Arendt?
-
Chapter 4: How can the federation institutionalize the values and practices of democracy?
I will answer these three questions first, and then turn to the overall research question.
Moreover, the thesis has been inspired by two ways of conducting political intellectual
history. In relation to the thesis’ overall aim, I have been inspired by Arendt’s idea of
political theory as pearl diving. By engaging with forgotten historical experiences and
neglected modes of political thinking, I have argued that the tradition of political thought
offers alternative ways to imagine the institutionalization of democracy than through the
state form. The ethos of turning historical experiences and the meditation on these events
into theoretical understandings of political action, as Arendt often does, has informed the
way I have conducted the analysis. Moreover, in engaging with the classical texts I am
inspired by elements of Skinner’s historiographical approach, thus seeing the texts as
strategic political interventions in existing political debates.
Now, I turn to the research questions. In chapter 2, I argued that the analyzed state theory
in Bodin, Hobbes and the Federalists emerged in times of constitutional crisis and that they
argued against popular participation by describing democracy as an unstable political form
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equal to anarchy that can only be countered by indivisible sovereignty, thus inscribing
hierarchy and domination into the core of politics. Of main importance is that the state
theorists in their own self-understanding write against exponents of popular participation.
Whether we turn to the perpetual command of Bodin’s sovereign, to the alienation of
power and the representation of all in Hobbes’ sovereign or to the Federalists’ fear of
politics outside representation and popular constitutional renewals, democratic
participation never plays a productive role, rather it is something to be avoided. This means
that the people have been understood as a juridical fiction. Thus, from the basis of the
development of state sovereignty, participatory democracy cannot be institutionalized within
the state.
Instead, something else happens in state theory, which came to characterize modern
democracy. By individualizing the contract and by reconceptualizing freedom as existing
independently of the regime type, Hobbes was able to situate the individual and his private
liberty as the foundation of the political order. Moreover, by understanding the contract as
an alienation of power, Hobbes introduced representation into the body politic, by
imagining the subjects as represented by the actions of the sovereign. This argument had
political consequences, when the Federalists redefined the republic into a system with
representational mechanisms in order to balance interests against and make direct
participation unnecessary.
In sum, the thinkers of the state also redefined the meaning of democracy: From an
anarchical political form to a representative system with freedom from politics.
Against this backdrop, I provided in chapter 3 a positive theory of democracy on the basis
of Arendt’s thought. The main argument was developed on Arendt’s idea of the promise as
an anti-sovereign mode of engaging politically, which is adherent to the basic conditions of
political action such as plurality, natality and the freedom of beginning something new. By
engaging with Arendt’s phenomenology of the promise and by translating it into a political
theory of world building and constitution making, I provided an understanding of
democracy as the enactment of the constituent power. Democratic political action is to
constitute the foundational structures of the political community; an endeavour that can
only take place in collaboration with others through participation. For Arendt, and for a
democratic theory of constituent power, this endeavour coincides with political freedom;
the freedom of political participating in constituting the new. This understanding of
democratic action is distinctively anti-sovereign and anti-statist. Traditional sovereignty – as
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explained in chapter 2 – renders impossible the popular participation in founding and
directing the polity, and popular sovereignty in for example Rousseau and Sieyès
homogenize the people through the general will, so that plurality, deliberation and action
becomes impossible. In order not to replicate the problems of appealing to external
absolutes, which both traditional and popular sovereignty does, democratic action is
undertaken in adherence with the principles of beginning, resting on the authority of
augmenting constitutional structures by mutual and equal participation. The chapter
concludes by listing the principles of democratic action, which originate in the antisovereign promise and which a stable political form is to institutionalize.
In the final chapter, I investigated the relation between federalism and democracy. Other
exponents of democratic constituent power such as Negri, Wolin, Wenman and Breaugh
argue in different ways that democracy can only exist momentarily, because it is a formless
force resisting all attempts of institutionalization. In this way, they reproduce a Hobbesian,
binary schema of political life, where only revolutionary, anti-institutional politics in few
precious moments or the enduring passivity of state sovereignty exists. The chapter
sketches an institutional relation between democracy and political form between these two
extremes, as I argue that the federation can institutionalize a participatory democracy built on
Arendt’s concepts. Just as Arendt’s condition for politics is plurality, so is the federation
organized by a plurality of associations, sites for participation and institutional levels for
constitution making. Just as human beings for Arendt have constituting capabilities for
creating worlds, so is the federation a dynamic, developing political structure that creates
multiple relations between autonomous and equal political communities. In greater detail, I
argue that federalism historically emerges simultaneously as state sovereignty in the work of
Althusius, who writes against Bodin and understands federalism as the art of associating
communities into a collaborating structure through participation with the purpose of living
well together. The federal imaginary is thus in its historical inception in opposition to the
state. Moreover, the core values of federalism are iteration that is equal to the democratic
augmentation of the foundations, and covenanting being equal to promise making. The
federation is thus a suitable form for institutionalizing democracy, because it also has
expelled sovereignty at the expense of plurality and participation, and because it
understands politics through covenanting together, that is, through the constituent power.
The chapter concludes by discussing historical examples of the reconstructed federal
democracy in the council tradition, which Arendt excavates in On Revolution. As such, a
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federal democracy of councils is not a theoretical utopia, but a distinct political form, which
combines participation and representation in a political imaginary against and beyond the
state.
Now it is time to answer the overall research questions. First, democracy is not indifferent to
form; participation does not come into existence regardless of form. Moreover, I understand
the contemporary dissatisfaction with representative democracy as a consequence of form. By
reading the development of state sovereignty in political intellectual history on its own
premises, it is evident that its thinkers envisioned the sovereign state as a political form able
to counter the aspirations for popular participation in politics. This leads to the first of my
two conclusions, already introduced as early as on page 9: Democracy cannot be
institutionalized within the institutions and imaginary of the modern state. In contrast, the
state institutionalizes a minimalist, disciplined representational system with elite
competition and individual freedom, not a participatory democracy that valorizes the
creative world building capabilities of man and envisions politics as an important
experience in human life.
This leads to the other, positive conclusion: Democracy can be institutionalized within a
federation of councils, because this political form is participatory and rests on autonomous,
egalitarian political communities. As importantly, a federation of councils is a dynamic
political structure that permits – even encourages – human beings’ world building capacity
as it normalizes the extraordinary into ordinary politics. A federation of councils sets free
the constituent power of a plural demoi in a multitude of assemblies, associations and
legislative bodies. As the history of the councils and the provided example from Bolivia
show, a federation of councils is not untenable, but is a feasible and distinct political form
that combines participation and representation in new modes of self-government beyond
the state. By providing institutional sites for participation, by incorporating ordinary people
in solving the problems of their communities, democracy can maybe regain its importance
and reputation, and the widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary political life can be
transformed. These are at least the political pearls, which the tradition has to offer.
As touched upon on page 57-58, the thesis offers three main contributions: 1) No other
study on democracy, constituent power and institutional form seeks to explicate the
opposition between democracy and the state through detailed, textual analysis of the
development of state sovereignty. 2) No other study explicitly develops a theory on
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democratic constituent power on the basis of Arendt’s theories of promises, and hereby
recognizes the promise’s opposition to the sovereign command. 3) In showing the
affinities between democracy and federalism lies the most substantive contribution of the
thesis. As other studies on democratic constituent power argue that democracy cannot be
institutionalized, they reproduce the Hobbesian binary schema of political life. By
excavating the historical and conceptual relation between democracy and federalism, by
showing historical examples of federalist democracy and contemporary experimentations,
the thesis provides a potential way out of the contemporary dissatisfaction with political
life.
5.1 Democracy and the Power of the Living
To conclude the thesis, I want to draw attention to a debate between Madison and Thomas
Jefferson in 1789-1790. Jefferson, who also proposed to subdivide the American states into
wards and councils312, which greatly inspired Arendt, proposed Madison an overarching
principle in all political life: The power of the living over the dead. “I suppose to be selfevident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living, that the dead have neither powers
nor rights over it”313. In the same letter, Jefferson translated this principle into the language
of the constituent power: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a
perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living
generation”314. Because power resides in the living, no constitution can be perpetual.
Therefore, with every new generation the political terms of living together must be restated. Customs, traditions, laws and constitutions cannot rule by themselves, they have to
be imbued with the power of the living. As the thesis’ epigraph quoting Marx alluded to,
democracy as the power of the living transforms the law from legal into human existence.
This was precisely what Arendt indicated, when she argued that “All political institutions
are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the
living power of the people ceases to uphold them”315.
Madison responds to this principle of the supreme constituent power of the living by
rehearsing the statist fear of instability: “Would not such a periodical revision engender
pernicious factions that might not otherwise come into existence?” Would it not cause “the
Jefferson, Political Writings, 1999, 203-217.
Ibid., 593.
314 Ibid., 596.
315 Arendt, On Violence, 41.
312
313
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most violent struggles”316? We have heard this objection to constitutional renewals before
by state theorists and minimalist democrats. As political action is unpredictable, it is safer
not to admit the people into politics.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were having the
somewhat same debate in aftermath of the French Revolution. Burke’s entire Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790) was an argument against the power of living and their
deliberate re-organization of the polity. In contrast, in Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), with the
subtitle ‘Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution’, Paine asserts
that no one can possess “the power of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time
… the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and
insolent of all tyrannies”317.
Democratic constituent power is thus the assertion that the living should govern
themselves, that they should be the authors of their own actions and that political
institutions, in order not be the imperium of the dead, ought to be renewed and
reformulated time and again by the living.
316
317
Madison to Jefferson, Jefferson, Political Writings, 606, 607.
Paine, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine, 2003, 138.
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7.0 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a couple of people for help and inspiration in writing this thesis. I
would like to thank my advisor Christian F. Rostbøll for his engagement in the project, for
supporting the idea and for critical and constructive comments along the way.
I am also very grateful to the professors and the fellow students I met during my stay at the
Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research in 2012-1013, where the
radical potentialities of democratic modes of self-government and political theory in
general first entered my mind and inspired me to take up the theme of this thesis.
Furthermore, I am thankful to Nis Langer Primdahl and Rasmus Kibæk Skytte for
spending their time reading the manuscript and providing useful commentaries. Also, I
would like to thank Mette Popp-Madsen, who has once again proofread the entire
manuscript, and Kristoffer Albris for designing the front and back cover.
Master Thesis
Department of Political Science
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Copenhagen
March 2014