Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
Andreas Kalyvas
Language: English
Pages: 340
ISBN: 0521133416
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders.
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reemerges at the center of Schmitt’s political thought as an anxiety concerning the subterranean survival of the constituent sovereign during ordinary politics, which is also an anxiety about the possibility of retaining some forms and practices of sovereign popular self-rule. And although he acknowledged the normative, superior value of the constitution, as the juridical incarnation of the fundamental constituent decisions, he did not reduce democratic politics to constitutional politics to the
Economics,” p. 44. Weber, ES, p. 902. Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” p. 44. Weber, ES, p. 903. Weber, ES, p. 340. Weber, ES, p. 63. Weber, ES, p. 902 (emphasis added). For one thing, these value systems invest the state with the right to command large numbers of individuals to sacrifice themselves when necessary and to expect that they will comply, even against their personal self-interest or material advantages. This unconditional existential power over
substance; that a rigid adherence in such cases to the former, would render nominal and nugatory the transcendent and precious right of the people to “abolish or alter their government as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness” . . . it is therefore essential that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorized propositions. . . . Had the convention . . . taken the cold and sullen resolution of disappointing its ardent hopes, of sacrificing substance to
the sovereign people. In other words, according to the democratic politics of the extraordinary, the only higher norms that can claim to be valid are those that were created by the decision of all in their capacity as participants in the popular constituent will of the sovereign people during the founding moment of a new constitutional order. This strong emphasis on democratic legitimacy in Schmitt’s theory of the extraordinary becomes more apparent in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, where
to the rarity and brevity of its activities – of its eruption as a singular event – its temporal extension would surely threaten its creative strength. Consequently, for Schmitt it might be better to have a sporadic extraordinary politics, remaining most of the time inactive and invisible, keeping all its instituting power for those historical moments of genuine constitutional transformation, than to have an expansive and tireless constituent politics dissolving within its own limitless and