Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt

Why is it 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. Kalyvas explores a democratic politics of the extraordinary that integrates the ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘by whom’ a constitutional government is created, in order to enlarge our understanding of democracy, popular sovereignty, and political freedom and to rethink afresh the possibility of constitutional democracy with a radical intent.

• A novel perspective on what drives corruption, which differs from most current literature on this topic • A mixture of aggregate cross-national analysis and survey data from transition countries • Constitutional government, explores ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘by whom’ it is created

Preface: the extraordinary and political theory; Part I. Charismatic Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Power: Max Weber: 1. Revisiting Weber’s concept of the political; 2. Charismatic politics; 3. Disavowing charismatic politics; Part II. The Exception and Constitutional Politics: Carl Schmitt: 4. The popular constituent sovereign and the ‘pure’ theory of democratic legitimacy; 5. Toward a theory of democratic constitutionalism; 6. The extra-institutional sovereign; Part III. Taming the Extraordinary: Hannah Arendt: 7. Extraordinary beginnings I: Arendt’s critique of Schmitt; 8. Extraordinary beginnings II: Arendt’s response to Schmitt; 9. The republic of councils: beyond democracy and liberalism?; Conclusion: a democratic theory of the extraordinary; Bibliography.