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In democratic theory, the exercise of governing authority is legitimised as a manifestation of collective self-determination. In the history of normative political theory, two distinct but complementary perspectives can be identified: input-oriented legitimisation and output-oriented legitimisation. Input-oriented democratic thought emphasises ‘government by the people’ while the output perspective emphasises ‘government for the people’. Political choices are legitimate if and because they reflect the ‘will of the people’—that is, if they can be derived from the authentic preferences of the members of a community. On the other hand, political choices are legitimate if and because they effectively promote the common welfare of the constituency in question. While both of these dimensions are generally complementary, they differ significantly in their preconditions, and in their implications for the democratic legitimacy of European governance, when each is considered by itself. This chapter focuses on political democracy in a capitalist economy and the political economy of capitalist democracies, as well as the limits of legitimacy in Europe.

This chapter pulls together the main threads of the argument presented in the book and defends this proposed revitalization of legal theory as an adjunct location of democratic politics more generally. After tackling the contested relationship between philosophical pragmatism and political democracy, it defends strong democracy as an institutional complement to the experimentalist bent of pragmatic theorizing. It then rounds out the defense of the political province of democratic legal theory by brief reference to the literary insights of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

This chapter develops the understanding of the spectrality of populism and democracy. It reformulates the perception of populism as an aberration of political democracy and as an antithesis of liberalism, and proposes instead to conceive populism as an internal periphery of democratic politics. The chapter proceeds to develop this idea by identifying three possible modes of the populist phenomenon. The first one looks at populism as a mode of representation virtually indistinguishable from contemporary, media-enhanced modes of representation. The second possibility, populism as a symptom of democratic politics, ups the ante by looking at the tensions that push populism to the edges of democracy without necessarily stepping out of that setting. The third line of inquiry looks at the populist mobilization as a possible underside or nemesis of democracy.

This chapter addresses the macro-level question of how to move the political system as a whole towards a more reflexive level of the governance of problems. It exploits and elaborates the notion of the intelligence of democracy by showing how each of the problem structures has selective affinities with different, but standard, theories of political democracy: Schumpeterian procedural democracy, liberal-pluralist democracy, accommodationist elite-cartel democracy, and deliberative and/or participatory democracy. The day-by-day practice of democracy requires people to tinker with different modes of democratic governance to successfully deal with different problem structures.

This chapter explores the concept of neo-liberalism and its alternatives. Adolf Hilter's accession to power in January 1933 underlined the impotence of the economics profession in the face of the world economic crisis, since the liberal viewpoint was entirely bleak. Although Nazi economic policy was soon run by the apparently ‘respectable’ Hjalmar Schacht, it involved increased cartel regulation in the domestic market and stringent controls over foreign trade. Capitalism and the anarchy of the market were blamed for the depression. The Nazis damaged the German universities by dismissing or forcing staff to leave, and the professional bodies representing staff and the student organizations were also put under Nazi control. The phenomenon of the Third Reich strengthened neo-liberals' aversion to violence, national egoism, and power-worship, and also tended to weaken their fastidious attitude towards the masses and political democracy. Neo-liberal intellectuals continued to seek their ‘middle way’ between laissez-faire and collectivism, operating under adverse circumstances and sometimes in isolation from one another. The aftermath of the Great Depression revealed how unplanned and chaotic Germany's capitalist system was.

For Tocqueville, Protestantism was the historical and cultural source of modern political democracy, He believed that, in social terms, it contributed to the exercise of individual judgment that is political democracy's indispensable complement. Yet his recognition of Protestantism's due did not lead him to accept the sociological axioms or epistemology of such leading Protestant writers as Alexandre Vinet and Benjamin Constant. This chapter considers examples of texts from the two Swiss authors, who, despite being Swiss, influenced the way in which Democracy in America was read because all cultivated French readers were familiar with them. In 1828, Vinet received a French award for an essay on freedom of religion from the Société de la Morale Chrétienne. By contrast, Constant rattled his audience and seemed to confirm that “Coppet liberalism” was a foreign import.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the constitutional history of property rights in America. It explains that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights affirmed the central place of property ownership in U.S. society and that throughout much of U.S. history, federal and state courts championed property rights against legislative abridgment. Americans have consistently assigned a high place to private property and a free-market economy, believing that individual property rights is the fountainhead of personal liberty and political democracy, and that property ownership encourages economic self-sufficiency and political independence.

This chapter addresses the question of what should be the appropriate means for setting penalties in a political democracy. It first defines terms and describes the allocation of power in the punishment-setting process according to the proximity or distance of each element in the decision from democratic oversight. It then addresses three questions about nonpolitical definitions of excessive punishment. The third section of the chapter looks at the range of possible objections to the method of setting penalties in the Three Strikes initiative, and the different remedies that might be used to address each one. Finally, it considers some proposed methods for insulating punishment decisions from any problems of process and substantive bias.

Both Greece and Hong Kong have unified exchange rate regimes. Greece, as a member of the Eurozone, uses the euro as its local monetary unit. Hong Kong, under the linked exchange rate regime, uses a local monetary unit with its currency fully backed by the US dollar at a fixed rate. As a consequence, both economies have surrendered monetary independence to an external monetary authority. Both have committed to not using currency devaluation or revaluation as a policy tool for stabilizing their economies when they are struck by financial and economic shocks. The only way they could regain monetary independence would be, in Greece’s case, exiting the Eurozone and reissuing the drachma, and in Hong Kong’s case, breaking the linked exchange rate and putting in place an alternative monetary arrangement for issuing the Hong Kong dollar. An economy that has joined a unified exchange rate regime will face situations from time to time when the requirements of global economic integration will be in conflict with the requirements of a political democracy.

This chapter examines the performance of the state with regard to the supply of some important public goods, such as internal security, education, and health. It finds the state to be seriously lagging behind the performance of the economy. One consequence of this performance of the state has been the resort by the public to the market for such goods. In the changed context of politics after the passing of the first generation of post-independence leadership, the factors of social diversity and political democracy as presently practised are also, regrettably, responsible for the lag in the state's performance. While the economic arena has seen considerable reform as part of economic liberalization, there has been little reform in the area of governance.

The Constitution of India has provided for a near-successful scheme for holding free and fair elections, considered the very foundation of any successful political democracy. The Parliament, the government, and the judiciary all play a part in the elective process. Part XV of the Constitution is devoted to elections. The election process actually commences with the delimitation of the constituencies by a delimitation commission specially appointed for that purpose. However, the delimitation has finally to be made by the president which means the central government in consultation with the Election Commission of India. Thereafter, the usual and ordinary processes of election such as nomination, withdrawal of nomination, electioneering, actual exercise of franchise, counting of votes, declaration of results and taking of oath, etc., are duly followed. The election petition has ordinarily to be decided within six months from the date of presentation of the petition. Thereafter, there is an appeal to the high court and an appeal to the Supreme Court if special leave is granted.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of objectivity, the presence of which is evidently required for basic justice, honest government, and true knowledge. It differentiates disciplinary objectivity from mechanical objectivity. Mechanical objectivity has been a favorite of positivist philosophers, and it has a powerful appeal to the wider public. A faith in objectivity tends to be associated with political democracy, or at least with systems in which bureaucratic actors are highly vulnerable to outsiders. The appeal of numbers is especially compelling to bureaucratic officials who lack the mandate of a popular election, or divine right. Arbitrariness and bias are the most usual grounds upon which such officials are criticized. A decision made by the numbers (or by explicit rules of some other sort) has at least the appearance of being fair and impersonal. Scientific objectivity thus provides an answer to a moral demand for impartiality and fairness. Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide. Objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little of their own.

Poetic language and literary history mattered to Hannah Arendt in her thinking about community because they told a story about how political worlds, whether bound by nation states or by international laws and treaties, traffic with the worlds we imagine and create. These worlds are not equivalent, but the idea of the world making potential of literature that she inherited from German Romanticism also gave her the means to re-imagine new political terms for humanity at mid-century. What Arendt first described in 1949 as ‘the right to have rights’ had its own poetry. Returning to her work on Rahel Varnhagen, pariah literature, and Bertolt Brecht, this chapter shows how Arendt’s political theory was indebted to her developing understanding of the world-making capacities of poetry and writing in her own period of statelessness.

This concluding chapter argues for a democratic-socialist, internationalist left that seeks not only to smash the state and crush capitalism but to pursue human equality and realize the four freedoms. It would not be a fully “socialist” left in the sense that it would not institute central economic planning; it would be aggressively redistributionist, and it would harbor no illusions about “free” markets. It would therefore establish an egalitarian, closely monitored and regulated market that fosters innovations and promotes policies that bring food, clean water, housing, schooling, and medicine to all, as well as establishing forms of political democracy that extend to every person born: male and female, straight and gay.

This chapter examines the problems in the implementation of the provisions of the Fourth Amendment in novel methods of search and surveillance in the U.S. such as wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping. It analyzes the revolution in accessing, aggregating and analyzing information and its impact on privacy. It explains how technological advancements threaten the privacy, autonomy and personal security that are necessary to sustain individual freedom and political democracy. This chapter also proposes ways by which traditional Fourth Amendment concerns can be respected in an environment that renders privacy vulnerable from different directions.