The time of popular sovereignty: Political theology and the democratic state

This dissertation examines traditional theories of popular sovereignty and proposes a new form of democratic legitimization for the state. From Rousseau's Social Contract to Jurgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms these theories face a problem I call the Indeterminacy of Popular Unification (IPU). They argue that the legitimacy of the state emerges from the unified will of the people, but they cannot show that the people are unified at any given time. I examine this problem in the light of the process metaphysics of Henri Bergson and Jose Ortega y Gasset, and argue that when we think of the people as a process, rather than as a mere assemblage of individuals or as a fixed and stable thing, we can conceptualize a new form of democratic legitimization for the state.;Traditional theories of popular sovereignty demand that the unified people be fixed and stable, such that its internal changes do not alter the essential nature of the state that it founds. This demand poses a dilemma if the will of the people legitimizes government: either we accept that the will of the people is a symbolic reference without referent (which functions as a secular equivalent to divine sovereignty, an instance of political theology); or we face the IPU. In both cases we compromise the autonomy of the individual and the legitimacy of the state. My dissertation seeks to avoid both horns of the dilemma by answering the following question: What is a source of democratic legitimacy compatible with the indetermination of the people?;My answer is radical realism---a source that admits of surprising adjustments and innovation. Unlike contractual theories, which offer teleological or mechanistic accounts of state formation and displace the problem of the IPU to another time, radical realism incorporates indeterminacy and change in the present through the experience of time, or duration. However, in radical realism democratic legitimacy still arises from the (changing) people, understood as two distinct, yet interdependent sets of relations. The first set comes from habit and sustains established practices. The second emerges from creative freedom and periodically challenges institutions.