Abstract
This chapter discusses the issues from the vantage point of [modern] constitutional republics in order to draw out the interrelation between the circulation of power and the contingency of democratic political forms. It concentrates on Weber's and Castoriadis's respective versions, interpretations and critiques of models of power. The chapter discusses the central themes underlying the studies by Weber and Castoriadis in terms of the central notions of explicit power, the political and politics. It investigates Weber's analysis of medieval city-states terms of competing models of democratic breakthroughs, corporatism, the circulation of power and closure of politics. Castoriadis's study of Plato's Statesman draws out the creation of autonomy, heteronomy and the perpetual conflict between open and closed social and political imaginaries, and the consequences for democratic formations. Rather, and as Castoriadis has noted again and again, bureaucratisation, corporatism and oligarchy, under which he also subsumes representative democracy, downplay varieties of conflict. Keywords: autonomy; bureaucratisation; Castoriadis; democracy; oligarchy; Plato's statesman ; politics; Weber
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