Political Liberalism and ‘the People’

Abstract

AbstractChapter 4, ‘Political Liberalism and “the People” ’, aims at filling a lacuna of modern and contemporary political theory, including political liberalism, concerning the nature of the democratic sovereign prior to and at the moment of constituting a polity. After critically engaging Lindahl’s ‘paradox of constituent power’ in Section 1, the Chapter then introduces a ‘political conception of the people’ as possessed of the capacities (reflective of the rational and the reasonable) to act politically and to adopt constitutive rules. Insufficient for solving ‘Rousseau’s riddle’ (how can a people constitute itself through choosing a form of government without already being a people and through which prior act does a population become a people?), the political conception of the people is then supplemented by the distinction of ethnos and demos. In the light of that distinction, the paradoxical aspect of Rousseau’s riddle is eliminated: a people qua ethnos constitutes itself qua demos by specifying an up-to-then generic commitment to make joint commitments. Self-constitution being a textbook exercise of constituent power, hardly ever witnessed, Section 3 distinguishes and reconstructs four typical manifestations of the agency of the people: regime change, secession, the merging of an ethnos into a larger demos, and amending the constitution.