Uncovering the neglected theories of the council system in the 20th centuryThis book examines the historical emergence of the council system in Russia and Germany by the end of the First World War, reconstructing the intellectual history of council democracy in 20th century political theory, and providing indepth analysis of council democracy in the political thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Hannah Arendt.PoppMadsen argues that council democracy can productively be interpreted through the prism of constituent power: the formgiving power of the people to decide on their own institutional forms of political coexistence. Whereas other interpreters of constituent power claim an unbridgeable gap between constituent power and constituted power, this book asserts that council democracy discloses a historically grounded way of institutionalising the constituent power. Council democracy, in this interpretation, becomes a way of controlling the constituent power without completely exhausting it, thereby giving the citizenry continual access to the powers of selftransformation, cocreation and constituent freedom.
Uncovering the neglected theories of the council system in the 20th centuryThis book examines the historical emergence of the council system in Russia and Germany by the end of the First World War, reconstructing the intellectual history of council democracy in 20th century political theory, and providing indepth analysis of council democracy in the political thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Hannah Arendt.PoppMadsen argues that council democracy can productively be interpreted through the prism of constituent power: the formgiving power of the people to decide on their own institutional forms of political coexistence. Whereas other interpreters of constituent power claim an unbridgeable gap between constituent power and constituted power, this book asserts that council democracy discloses a historically grounded way of institutionalising the constituent power. Council democracy, in this interpretation, becomes a way of controlling the constituent power without completely exhausting it, thereby giving the citizenry continual access to the powers of selftransformation, cocreation and constituent freedom.
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