ENGLISH

The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State

Book information

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Year
2011
ISBN
0271037962, 9780271037967
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1528436 bytes)
Edition
1
Pages
232\233
Time added
2018-02-06 12:23:00

Description

Democracy is usually conceived as based on self-rule or rule by the people, and it is this which is taken to ground the legitimacy of the democratic form of government. But who constitutes the people? Democratic political theory has a potentially fatal weakness at its core unless it can answer this question satisfactorily. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo examines the problems the concept of the people raises for liberal democratic theory, constitutional theory, and critical theory. She argues that to solve these problems, the people cannot be conceived as simply a collection of individuals. Rather, the people should be seen as a series of events, an ongoing process unfolding in time. She then offers a new theory of democratic peoplehood, laying the foundations for a new theory of democratic legitimacy.

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