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2 Mediated unity in question: on the relation between law, politics, and other social systems in modern societies The discussion in chapter 1 shows that two premises are often invoked to articulate the theoretical preconditions of modern democratic statehood. Whilst the mediated unity of the governors and the governed is normally taken to be the basis of rational political representation, overarching legal- political form is taken to be the foundation of democratic government and consensual normative integration. The epistemological and sociological critique
3 Functional differentiation and mediated unity in question: looming constitutional conflicts between the de-centralist logic of functional differentiation and the bio-political steering of austerity and global governance It has been seen so far that the theoretical premises informing prevailing accounts of modern statehood and political representation have become susceptible to comprehensive critique and deconstruction. This is not to argue that states no longer exist or have ceased to be important actors in domestic and international politics. In many parts
Populism, neoliberalism, and globalisation are just three of the many terms used to analyse the challenges facing democracies around the world. Critical Theory and Sociological Theory examines those challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have been altered at several key historical intervals since 1945. The author explains why the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood, such as elections, have always been complemented by civic, cultural, educational, socio-economic, and, perhaps most importantly, constitutional institutions mediating between citizens and state authority. Critical theory is rearticulated with a contemporary focus in order to show how the mediations between citizens and statehood are once again rapidly changing. The book looks at the ways in which modern societies have developed mixed constitutions in several senses that go beyond the official separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. In addition to that separation, one also witnesses a complex set of conflicts, agreements, and precarious compromises that are not adequately defined by the existing conceptual vocabulary on the subject. Darrow Schecter shows why a sociological approach to critical theory is urgently needed to address prevailing conceptual deficits and to explain how the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood need to be complemented and updated in new ways today.
1 Reconsidering the theoretical preconditions of modern democratic statehood: on mediated unity and overarching legal-political form This chapter examines two of the central premises underlying most standard explanations of the construction of modern democratic statehood and its preconditions and raises fundamental questions about their continuing relevance. The presuppositions in question must be deconstructed because they offer an inaccurate account of the rights of citizens and the resources of states in the twenty-first century. This preliminary work is
involved are indeed enormous when one considers the obvious limitations of the state for this purpose. To be more precise, it would seem that there are insurmountable problems for the particular form of political statehood that is conventionally conceived in its nationally defined and territorially delimited instantiations, and which frames questions of integration and legitimacy in terms of mediated unity or constituent power.6 It is easy to overlook the fact that there are more than casual affinities, both in historical and theoretical terms, between personalised
if they are completely detached and isolated in a condition of permanent separation. The implication is that the relation between differentiated social systems is characterised by mediation, communication, and a form of dialectics which, it has been shown here, is misdiagnosed when described as the inherently democratic dialectics of mediated unity (this does not mean that they must instead be coded in a quantitatively pared-down, binary fashion). It has also been shown that the dynamics of systemic coup ling, de-coupling, and re-coupling offer a much more
chapter 1 in the discussion linking the concept of mediated unity with the consolidation of the modern nation state, and are then explored in more detail throughout the rest of this book. Chapters 1 and 2 draw out a number of the consequences for our understanding of democracy.9 In consequence it would be mistaken to suppose that modern societies are the passive victims of systemic expansion and periodic dysfunction. The example of Keynesian economic management and the establishment of the welfare state and post-war consensus in Britain, for example, show that post
series of processes that unite, without fusing, and that separate, without permanently isolating. In short, one is trying to explain processes of medi ation without relying on a central mediating foundation in the ways that weak and strong models of mediated unity tend to do. Hence it is noted at various junctures that centralisation does not mean hermetically sealed off, and that it is unlikely that states were ever territorially integral units that only now are being forced to grudgingly cede bits of their sovereignty to the institutions of international governance
state and non-state actors, the result has often been suboptimal: in support of Allawi in Iraq in 2005, trying to mediate unity talks between Hamas and Fatah in 2007, and in support of Hariri and the brief March 14 coalition in 2009. 39 There is no hierarchy in Sunni Islam, and, due to close Saudi security relations with the US, the Al Saud have ended up being targeted by groups such as Al Qaeda, which sees them as illegitimate rulers. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have, along with the US, attempted to leverage Iran
because of humanity’s mediated unity with reason discerned with clarity in Kant’s account of the synthetic quality of knowledge in which subjective factors enter into relation with objective factors. The question of the division between humanity and humanity’s appurtenance to nature, in terms of certain mimetic impulses and a variety of drives and needs that evolve and undergo change in the course of history, is not really