In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

The prevailing interpretation of constituent power is taken to be the extra-institutional capacity of a group, typically “the people,” to establish or revise the basic constitutional conditions of a state. Among many contemporary democratic theorists, this is understood as a collective capacity for innovation. This paper excavates an alternative perspective from constituent power’s genealogy. I argue that constituent power is not a creative material power, but is a type of political claim that shapes the collective rights, responsibilities, and identity of (...) “the people.” I do so by recovering Thomas Hobbes’s intervention into debates over constituent power among Scottish Presbyterians during the English Civil War. Though a materialist, Hobbes appreciated the centrality of the imagination to politics, and he argued that constituent power was one such phantasm of the mind. In Leviathan, he showed constituent power not to be a material power, but a world-making fiction that furnished political realities with ornamentation of the imagination, which might provide the beliefs and justifications to serve any number of political ends. More generally, the retrieval of a Hobbesian constituent power provides an important challenge to contemporary theories by demonstrating how partisan constructions of constituent power shape the political options available to groups. (shrink)

Contemporary theorists of constituent power recognize a tension in which the omnipotent novelty of constituent power is necessarily policed by constituted power. Beginning with Arendt’s claim that the categories of constitutional stability and political novelty should be thought together rather than treated as oppositional, this article presents an interpretation of her work that seeks to address this ‘paradox of constitutionalism’. While commentators have come to assert that Arendt repudiates ‘absolutes’ in favour of an account of ‘relative beginnings’, this article demonstrates (...) that Arendt’s argument involves a critical redescription of the absolute, rather than a repudiation. This is significant, for it illuminates the manner in which her account of founding seeks to dismantle the commonplace temporalizations we attribute to our political vocabulary. This is employed to argue that particular stylings of absolutes naturalize the appearance of the new only as temporal ruptures, allowing us to get a handl... (shrink)