Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "In this remarkable and original study, Andreas Kalyvas emphasizes the importance of asserting the distinction between extraordinary and normal politics. Central to Kalyvas' endeavor are iconoclastic readings of Weber, Schmitt, and Arendt as theorists of origins. In opposition to Agamben and his followers, Kalyvas reads Carl Schmitt's notion of the exception or the extraordinary as the condition of possibility for popular sovereignty, the moment when the people emerge - become visible - as the constituent power that determines the form of political life. Schmitt's Constitutional Theory, then, serves Kalyvas as the challenge to democratic theory to think 'the people' not just as the origin of the constitution and not just as the dutiful liberal citizen within the constituted order, but as the slumbering yet ever-present sovereign that collectively manifests its legitimate power outside of legal channels in the public life of the community."
-William Rasch, Indiana University