The Popular Constituent Sovereign and the Pure Theory of Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

Schmitt's reflections on modern mass democracy start with an examination of the political consequences following the postmedieval transition from the sovereignty of the king to the sovereignty of the people, from the unitary, physical body of the monarch to the fragmented, dispersed body of the multitude. He explored the political implications of the rise of popular sovereignty and particularly the fact that “the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was lost…[because] the unity that a people represents does not possess this decisionistic character.” In other words, he not only directly addressed the problem of agency and action of a sovereign that is transformed into an impersonal, unorganized multitude. He also sought to illuminate the democratic origins of political power, to rethink the category of sovereignty in a democratic age, and to develop a systematic theory of democratic legitimacy. Pasquale Pasquino has nicely captured this dimension of Schmitt's work, noting that it should also be read as an attempt to “think the democratic form of authority.” Sovereignty and Dictatorship Schmitt pursued his aim by combining Thomas Hobbes's absolutist concept of sovereignty and Emmanuel Sieyes's notion of le pouvoir constituent , that is, the power of a political subject to create a new constitution. In my effort to clarify Schmitt's understanding of extraordinary politics and to reach into his singular insights on popular sovereignty, I bracket for a moment his famous definition, in the opening sentence of Political Theology , according to which the “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”