Constituent Power: A History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781108485432)

From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments - the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s - Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.

Author: Lucia Rubinelli
ISBN-10: 110848543X
ISBN-13: 9781108485432
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/21/2020
Pages: 276
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 7.20w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2021