Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth-century French political thought

Political theorists recently focused their attention on the history of the idea of constituent power. This, they claim, shows that the notion of pouvoir constituant expressed the radical and absolute power of the sovereign people. In other words, constituent power pointed at the democratic and irresistible core of popular sovereignty. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of nineteenth-century French political thought offers a different account of constituent power’s history. Relying upon archival resources, I show that in the aftermath of the French Revolution politicians and legal scholars used constituent power to tame the very idea of sovereignty and the powers from it derived. First, during the Restoration constituent power was used to pose a limit to the power of the monarch. Second, throughout the July Monarchy scholars resorted to constituent power to oppose the Parliament's claim to be the sovereign power and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Moreover, they also used it to claim that claim that, even if the people was sovereign, its power was restricted to authorizing the constitution. Third, during the Second Republic, jurists and politicians addressed the people’s sovereign power in terms of constituent and constituted power. While the first was meant to disappear after the constitution’s approval, the second was a second-order power limited by the hierarchy of norms and the rigidity of the constitution.     

Embargoing ‘heretics' in fifteenth-century Central Europe: the case of Hussite Bohemia

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the embargo imposed by the papacy and the Catholic lay powers on all trade and commerce with the Czech Hussites. It posits that this anti-Hussite embargo was simultaneously a means of economic warfare and an expression of the longer tradition of the papal embargo. Based on this twofold understanding, a set of sources is interrogated both from the perspectives of economic and cultural history. To this end a research methodology is employed that differentiates between the instrumental and symbolic dimensions of agency. This allows for a new, holistic view of the anti-Hussite embargo, both as an instrumental means of warfare and as a communicative process. The article thus contributes to political, economic and cultural history as much as to the history of everyday life in fifteenth-century Central Europe. Above all, however, it offers a transferable research methodology for the study of medieval embargoes in general.     

Municipal oaths,political virtues and the centralised state: the adaptation of oaths of office in fifteenth-century Flanders

This essay explores the impact of Burgundian state formation on oaths that were taken by the various participants of Flemish municipal elections. These solemn promises were a powerful means to assert the reliability of the election. In the fifteenth century their use underwent significant changes. For the first time they were fixed in writing. The number of participants that had to swear these oaths increased and new clauses were added. Thus, oaths were employed as political instruments. Both the ruler and the towns used them to bind the participants to the balance of power that had been achieved.     

State reconstruction in Africa: the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought

Studies on post‐conflict reconstruction in Africa have glossed over the need for state transformation as a prerequisite for sustainable peacebuilding in post‐conflict societies. This article fills this gap and discusses the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought for state reconstruction in post‐conflict Africa. It underscores the need for the autochthonous transformation of the state as a central component of peacebuilding and post‐conflict transition in the continent as Ake had suggested. Drawing on Sierra Leone, it theorizes Ake's works on the state in Africa against the backdrop of externally driven state reconstruction projects hinged on hegemonic discourses of ‘nation‐building’ in post‐conflict situations. It presents Ake's corpus as a basis for critiquing ongoing state rehabilitation attempts and urges a return to endogenous initiatives of rebuilding the state from below as a condition for achieving a sustainable democratic reconstruction of the state in post‐conflict Africa.     

Global Governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in ecuador

Questions about the transformation of governance and national identity are being re‐examined in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Scholars are debating the ways in which globalisation is reworking national identities through the shifting of economic governance away from ‘... the territorially defined boundaries of the nation‐state ... [and into] “unbundled” space for which there is not yet a name’ (Gupta, 1998: 321). Much of the work that has examined these questions of national identity and belonging under globalisation have emphasised questions of mobility, memory and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, by contrast, I work with economic migrants within Ecuador to emphasise how contemporary globalisation processes reach inside national territories and work to reconstitute and reinvigorate pre‐existing social hierarchies and spatial identities. I develop these arguments in the context of Ecuador's economic crisis of the last two decades, drawing on in‐depth interviews with migrants to Quito.     

Anti-ism thinkers: The post-May Fourth schism in political thought

Abstract

This article is a continuation of “Advent of the Age of Isms,” which primarily discusses a period teeming with various “isms” (主義 zhuyi). During this time, there were in fact a number of figures who held overtly or covertly opposing attitudes, in both cases giving rise to a phenomenon of fragmentation and asystematicness. Whether consisting of negative responses to the new political theory of “isms,” this “remedy for all ills,” or of piecemeal, asystematic criticism, the phenomenon itself served as a foil to the colossal intellectual forces of the Age of “Ismization.” This article offers a preliminary discussion of this phenomenon.     

Textual context in the history of political thought and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

We can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically.