Radical Democracy and Constituent Power

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between constituent power and radical democracy. By engaging with radical democrats such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, and Sheldon Wolin, the chapter provides two arguments. First, it argues that for radical democrats from the 1960s and onwards, democracy as a form of constituent politics replaces revolution and Marxism, in general, as the utopian horizon of politics. Second, the chapter argues that radical democrats often employ a distinction between politics as constituent, creative, and transgressive and politics as elitist, unequal, and representative, giving ultimate priority to the former at the expense of the latter. The vision of democracy brought forward by radical democrats, hence, stresses the people’s ultimate power over its constitution and its externality to all constituted political forms. Democracy, for radical democrats, consequently signifies the free and equal exercise of constituent power.