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The introduction provides the background for a sociological approach to the study of sovereignty, including the study of contested and paradoxical concepts, moments of contestation, and a view on intellectual history and conceptual history as sources of sociological methodologies. The chapter emphasises that basic concepts like sovereignty and democracy appear as rhetorical and polemical resources in constitutional contestation. It accounts for the relevance of such writers as Max Weber, Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Rosanvallon to specify a sociological approach to national and international sovereignty debates.
The chapter traces the concept of sovereignty from its early modern formulations in Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes, to Sieyès, Constant and Guizot. It argues that political and legal philosophy on sovereignty can be read as an ongoing analytical handling with paradoxes that follow from political rationalisation in modern societies.
The chapter addresses philosophically informed insights from Carl Schmitt, Claude Lefort and Pierre Rosanvallon concerning the concept of the political as a site for popular sovereignty. It encircles popular sovereignty as a legitimating conception today. It discusses contemporary political references to ‘the people’ and argues that a sociological approach to sovereignty would benefit from ‘realism’ in recent political theory.
The chapter addresses rhetorical and conceptual methodologies to be applied in empirical studies of constitutional crisis and conflicts concerning popular and national sovereignty. These include terms like ‘clustered and essential contested concepts’, ‘constitutional moments’ and the methodological strategy of constructing constitutional ‘ideal types’. It argues that the essential and analytical element is not the concept itself, but the arguments and responses that it is embedded in.
The chapter addresses ideas developed by Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann related to sovereignty and the state in a framework that highlights a contested constitutional semantics. It demonstrates how sociology enables the ideals of sovereignty to be placed into more general social theories on rationalisation and functional differentiation. It discusses the concept of ‘constitutionalism’, arguing for a sociological version. It goes on to argue that Max Weber provided a concept of sovereignty along with his understanding of the constitutional state. It discusses Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the state, and argues that the sovereignty debate ought to be seen as a legitimating semantics.
The book addresses the concept of sovereignty as a sociological topic. It examines sovereignty as a fundamental and contested concept at the heart of European politics and constitutionalism since early modern times. The history of the concept of sovereignty is a tale of absolute power, and over the years it has referred to God, the king, the people, the nation and the state. It has constantly been at the centre of controversy, revolution and war. Just as central here, in its various versions it has served as a response to incessant paradoxes of power. With an emphasis on the sociology of Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann, The sociology of sovereignty addresses intellectual understandings of the concept since Jean Bodin, and it examines dilemmas of sovereignty in the wake of state expansion, human rights and federalism. A presumption of the book is that, on the one hand, popular sovereignty in European states exists independently of political, military and federalist manoeuvres. On the other hand, it is argued that the concept performs as a semantic formula to handle unavoidable paradoxes of democracy and power. The book marks a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on constitutional democracy and its problems.
This chapter introduces associational anarchism’s mode of organisation in full. In transcending the divide between state and civil-society, democratic participation is extended to the economic and civic realms and is centred on the various self-managing organisations individuals belong to. Self-governance applies both within and between these differentiated formations. It is the organisational contours sketched in Cole’s Guild Socialism Restated (1920) that are primarily drawn from. Particular attention is paid to the functional principle of representation, which breaks down chiefly into a system of economic guilds and formal agencies to represent consumers. While these interrelating economic structures are retained and adapted throughout this book, both the role and the powers of Cole’s communes are heavily revised. The chapter then explains how goods and resources will be allocated democratically. At this point, David Schweickart’s ingenious approach to the planning of new investment is introduced. In order to assimilate his scheme into the guild system, it will be subject to a thorough functional demarcation. From here it is shown that although both planning and market-exchange will continue to have a role, it will not be through the central planning of command socialism or the mixed-economy typical of social democracy. The method of democratic planning and the delineation of the guild market system are both original and are hence unique to associational anarchism. It is these structural arrangements that make up the organisational aspects of freedom as Marxian-autonomy. The chapter concludes by establishing the internal structures the guild cooperatives will need to assume in order to make labour a fulfilling and enriching experience for all associates.
This book presents a new left-libertarian conception of liberty, ‘freedom as Marxian-autonomy’, which is explored above all in terms of its organisational contours. The project brings together in theoretical dialogue Karl Marx’s (1818–83) critique of capitalism, certain ideals adapted from the guild socialist writings of G.D.H. Cole (1889–1959) and the sub-schools of social anarchism. In doing so it contributes towards the healing of a major historical schism in socialist theory. The outcome is a newly formed anarchist constitution, ‘associational anarchism’. In offering something important to the recent outpourings in current anarchist discourse, the book contends that liberty can be attained without passing through the mediation of self-interested employers, career politicians or state planners. The foundational claim is that a condition of freedom requires equal and democratic access to the material means of life, where self-mastery is attained in both the productive and consumptive spheres. Negative (non-coercion) and positive (self-direction, self-development) ideals are combined congenially in a conceptual framework that does not frame them in perpetual contradiction. This specific protection of a set of individual liberties, of which the political liberties are of equal value, effectively challenges the ideological belief that only liberalism safeguards negative liberty. As the book unfolds, an argument is developed that hard market forces must lose their ascendancy in much the same way the socialist state must be stripped of its unaccountable authority. The associational anarchist configuration of social planning with a guild-regulated market system is offered as the necessary corrective.
This short chapter brings together in a few summary paragraphs the new forms of associational anarchism’s hybrid constitution, the kernel of which is a democratic pluralism organised through a specific functional devolution. It is true that certain social anarchist tenets have been modified. This is especially so with regards to a role for a body-politic, an ethic of representation, hierarchical structures, self-legislation and centralisation, together with a weakened commitment to strict economic equality of outcome. The chapter indicates though that the content of associational anarchism’s essential maxims – in particular the new forms of local decision-making, self-governance and the universalisation of creative forms of labour – are still very much anarchist in essence. In order to minimise the powers of the commune to the absolute minimum, a subordinated role for a market mechanism in the field of consumption goods had to be admitted. But the mild guild market system, regulated horizontally through the networks of public agencies – rather than through hard markets forces, plutocrats or intervening states – is constituted through a pluralised egalitarian control over the means of production, where there is neither a capitalist class nor a dominant role for capital. As huge concentrations and centralisations of capital and wealth cannot accumulate, equality of opportunity is more sustainable than it is in systems of untrammelled markets. The chapter concludes by confirming the ways in which the institutional arrangements within and between the guilds and consumer councils complement the twentieth-century anarchist notion of developed selfhood.
This short chapter provides a speculative account of what the realm of freedom in associational anarchism entails. Here desires are not ranked in any order in the sense that no reference is made to the collective or individual higher-self. Where uniform procedures emerge, they will be accommodated within the civic sphere of a functional mode of organisation. This social domain is constituted through the cultural and health councils, which are required to work in union with the corresponding education and health guilds. In the process of stabilising a cooperative and complementary relationship with the civic guilds, the civic councils will assume an additional role insofar as they will also maintain the public arenas through which the physical and spiritual pursuits of local populations, the aim-independent ‘ends in themselves’, will take place. Their method of operation is explained through an inquiry into whether Marx’s communism has any role in liberal freedom, which includes a discussion on the contrast between the values of pluralism and monism. The chapter argues that this book’s redirection of Marx’s critique of capital along an associational anarchist path has profound consequences for life in the realm of freedom, which departs radically from how it turns out wherever the realm of necessity is planned and administered through a centralised authority. Certain conjectures are put forward that suggest the realm of freedom will, within its anarchist-sensitive value-pluralism, engender a very different set of values to those typically endorsed in bourgeois society.