| In the last decades, political theorists, such as Jacques Ranciere, have urged us to distinguish democracy as a political practice from the regimes that claim its name. In their account, democracy and its subject, the people, are irreducible to any determined form, always in excess over their representation and institution. Moreover, many regimes, most explicitly republics, do not solely claim to provide some institutional form to popular power, but claim, under the principle of popular sovereignty, to make the people into the very foundation of the regime. For some theorists, notably Hannah Arendt, this claim is all the more problematic since sovereignty, they argue, is an absolutist concept and incompatible with freedom. In light of these critiques, should political theorists interpret attempts to institutionalize democracy, and especially official references to the sovereign people, as the illusion, domestication, or capture of democracy? While democracy must indeed be distinguished from its symbolic and institutional forms, the story of democracy is also that of the peaceful or violent inscription of popular power in our political institutions and laws and of the experience of empowerment and co-optation that comes with that process of institutionalization. Engaging with contemporary political theory as well as with Rousseau and the French Revolution, I question the wisdom of opposing democracy and regime as antithetical. I illustrate how institutionalized references to the people, including popular sovereignty, can be instrumentalized to legitimize governmental power but also invoked to unsettle this order by affirming the inalienability of the popular will to the constituted power of the republic. This dissertation contributes to both contemporary democratic theory and to 18th-century republicanism scholarship and demonstrates how engaging one with another can be mutually illuminating. |
