The Adventures Of The Constituent Power

This book explores the democratic methods by which political communities make their basic law, and the dangers associated with constitution-making.

Constitutional politics has become a major terrain of contemporary struggles. Contestation around designing, replacing, revising, and dramatically re-interpreting constitutions is proliferating worldwide. Starting with Southern Europe in post-Franco Spain, then in the ex-Communist countries in Central Europe, post-apartheid South Africa, and now in the Arab world, constitution making has become a project not only of radical political movements, but of liberals and conservatives as well. Wherever new states or new regimes will emerge in the future, whether through negotiations, revolutionary process, federation, secession, or partition, the making of new constitutions will be a key item on the political agenda. Combining historical comparison, constitutional theory, and political analysis, this volume links together theory and comparative analysis in order to orient actors engaged in constitution making processes all over the world. The book examines two core phenomena: the development of a new, democratic paradigm of constitution making, and the resulting change in the normative discussions of constitutions, their creation, and the source of their legitimacy. After setting out a theoretical framework for understanding these developments, Andrew Arato examines recent constitutional politics in South Africa, Hungary, Turkey, and Latin America and discusses the political stakes in constitution-making. The book concludes by offering a systematic critique of the alternative to the new paradigm, populism and populist constituent politics.

This book examines the relationship between constituent power and the law, and the place of the former in constitutional history, drawing from constitutional theory beyond the Anglo-American sphere, with new material made available for the first time to English readers.

This book explores the surprising similarities in the political ideas of the American and Latin American independence movements.

The achievements of the democratic constitutional order have long been associated with the sovereign nation-state. Civic nationalist assumptions hold that social solidarity and social plurality are compatible, offering a path to guarantees of individual rights, social justice, and tolerance for minority voices. Yet today, challenges to the liberal-democratic sovereign nation-state are proliferating on all levels, from multinational corporations and international institutions to populist nationalisms and revanchist ethnic and religious movements. Many critics see the nation-state itself as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and repression. What other options are available for managing pluralism, fostering self-government, furthering social justice, and defending equality? In this interdisciplinary volume, a group of prominent international scholars considers alternative political formations to the nation-state and their ability to preserve and expand the achievements of democratic constitutionalism in the twenty-first century. The book considers four different principles of organization—federation, subsidiarity, status group legal pluralism, and transnational corporate autonomy—contrasts them with the unitary and centralized nation-state, and inquires into their capacity to deal with deep societal differences. In essays that examine empire, indigenous struggles, corporate institutions, forms of federalism, and the complexities of political secularism, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists remind us that the sovereign nation-state is not inevitable and that multinational and federal states need not privilege a particular group. Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism helps us answer the crucial question of whether any of the alternatives might be better suited to core democratic principles.

This book seeks to develop a new approach to EU legitimacy by reformulating the classical notion of constituent power for the context of European integration and challenging the conventional theoretical assumptions regarding the EU's ultimate source of authority.

Explores the history of the idea of constituent power over five key events, from the French Revolution to the present.

One of the most prominent economic philosophers of the 19th century, on a par with-but espousing quite different thinking than-Karl Marx and Adam Smith explores, in the three-volume National System of Political Economy, a reasoned doctrine of national and pan-national management of trade, a global collaboration between government and business. In Volume 2, he delineates his theory of supportive interconnectedness, discussing everything from the value of the individual's ability to produce wealth to the edge established businesses have over new ones. A close reading of this 1841 classic is an absolute necessity for anyone who hopes to understand world economic history of the last 150 years. German economist and journalist FRIEDRICH LIST (1789-1846) served as professor of administration and politics at the University of T bingen, but was later jailed and later exiled to America for his political views. His is also the author of Outlines of American Political Economy (1827).