Constituent Power and Political Disobedience: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present

William E. Scheuerman (Indiana University, Bloomington)

The idea of constituent (or constitution-making) power, conceived as the popular, extralegal source of legitimate constitutional order, emerged in the revolutionary upheavals of eighteenth-century Europe. Formulated perhaps most impressively by the French revolutionary intellectual Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, the concept was rediscovered --and reformulated-- in 1920s Germany by Carl Schmitt, the reactionary nationalist. By tracing various attempts among Frankfurt School critical theorists (i.e., Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and Jürgen Habermas) to respond critically to both Schmitt’s counterrevolutionary and previous revolutionary ideas of constituent power, we can make better sense of how the Frankfurt School’s political project has evolved since the 1930s. Simultaneously, we gain a critical vantage point for examining attempts among contemporary radical theorists (e.g., Etienne Balibar, Tony Negri) to salvage the idea of constituent power to undergird their own political aims. Building on the Frankfurt School legacy, I argue that constituent power remains at its core a revolutionary concept poorly suited to thinking about the challenges of political change in more-or-less liberal societies. Civil disobedience, conceived as radical-reformist yet post-revolutionary extra-legal protest, transcends classical revolutionary politics and notions of constituent power welded to it. To the extent that it can claim successfully to do so, however, depends in part on whether contemporary liberal societies circumvent authoritarian-populist regressions.