Democracy and the politics of the extraordinary
Subtitle: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
By: Andreas Kalyvas.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9780521877688
Subjects: Weber, Max, -- 1864-1920 -- Political and social views; Schmitt, Carl, -- 1888-1985 -- Political and social views; Arendt, Hannah, -- 1906-1975 -- Political and social views; Democracy; Power; Political science -- Philosophy
Description: "Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular founding 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's study is to show why it is important for democratic theorists to rethink the question of democracy's 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Charismatic politics and the symbolic foundations of power : Max Weber; title: Revisiting Weber's concept of the political; title: Charismatic politics; title: Disavowing charismatic politics; title: The exception and constitutional politics : Carl Schmitt; title: The popular constituent sovereign and the 'pure' theory of democratic legitimacy; title: Toward a theory of democratic constitutionalism; title: The extra-institutional sovereign; title: Taming the extraordinary : Hannah Arendt; title: Extraordinary beginnings I : Arendt's critique of Schmitt; title: Extraordinary beginnings II : Arendt's response to Schmitt; title: The republic of councils : beyond democracy and liberalism?; title: A democratic theory of the extraordinary.