The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation

Edited by Lisa Disch, Mathijs van de Sande, Nadia Urbinati

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Explores the 'constructivist turn': political representation's reorientation toward the constitutive or mobilising aspects of mass democracy

This volume traces the roots of the constructivist turn in the distinct (and competing) traditions of Continental and Anglo-American Western political thought. Divided into three thematic parts, these 13 newly commissioned essays develop the constructivist turn as a central concept. They advance the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation; constituencies or groups exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented.

Key Features

Offers comparative accounts of the genealogy of the constructivist turn in the rival intellectual traditions of continental democratic theory and Anglo-American deliberative democracy
Features the first English translation of Claude Lefort’s essay 'Democracy and Representation'
Critically examines the political implications of constructivist research for legitimating potentially undemocratic aspects of global politics
Re-examines democratic uprisings that have been dismissed as 'protest movements' from the constructivist position

Contents

1. Introduction: The End of Representative PoliticsLisa Disch

Section OneThe Constructivist Turn: Anglo-American and Continental Intellectual Genealogies

2. Rethinking Representation: Eight Theoretical Issues and a PostscriptDario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren

3. Machiavelli against the Venice Myth: The 16th Century Dialogue on the Nature of Political RepresentationJan Biba

4. Power without Representation is Blind, Representations without Power are EmptyBernard Flynn

5. Two Regimes of the Symbolic: Radical Democracy Between Romanticism and StructuralismWarren Breckman

6. Political Representation: The View From FranceRaf Geenens

7. Democracy and RepresentationClaude Lefort (translated by Greg Conti)

Section TwoThe Constructivist Turn: Normative Challenges

8. Representation as Proposition: Democratic Representation after the Constructivist TurnSamuel Hayat

9. Don Alejandro’s Fantasy: On Representation and Radical DemocracyOliver Marchart

10. Pinning Down RepresentationLasse Thomassen

11. Representative Constructivism’s ConundrumNadia Urbinati

Section ThreeConstructivist Representation: Critique and Reproduction of Power

12. Exploring the Semantics of Constructivist RepresentationAlessandro Mulieri

13. The Improper Politics of RepresentationMark Devenney

14. The Constructivist Paradox: Contemporary Protest Movements and (their) RepresentationMathijs van de Sande.

About the Author

Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and teaches political theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US). Author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Cornell University Press 1994), The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (Columbia University Press 2002), and co-editor (with Mary Hawkesworth) of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford University Press 2016), she works on feminist theory, democratic theory, and environmental political theory

Mathijs van de Sande teaches political philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen. In 2017, he obtained his PhD at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven with a thesis on the prefigurative repertoire of recent assembly movements, such as Occupy Wall Street. His main research interests are radical democratic theory, political representation, activism and social movement theory.

Nadia Urbinati teaches political theory at Columbia University, New York (US). She works on democratic theory, and in particular representative democracy, populism, plebiscitary leadership, post-party representation.