The Precipice of Hope: a conversation with Hahrie Han The concluding contribution to the volume features a conversation with scholar and activist Hahrie Han. Drawing on Han’s extensive experience as an adviser to popular movements across political divides, the conversation revisits the main questions of the volume: what is popular sovereignty and how can we understand and repurpose this historically important concept today? What is a people and under what conditions can a sense of solidarity across a vast array of social and political differences be build? Last but not least, are the idea and regulative ideal of rule of the people, and the very existence of a people that can govern itself, necessarily fictional, and to what extent is fiction an indispensable dimension of political concepts and norms.

The greatest challenge to liberal democracy today comes from the political ascent of movements that, in the name of democratic equality and popular sovereignty, attack the foundations of the liberal constitutional order. Comparing two influential accounts of these tensions, the chapter interrogates the meaning of popular sovereignty to shed light on the vulnerabilities and strengths of liberal democracy. While Schmitt insisted on differentiating liberalism from democracy to attack liberalism, Tocqueville insisted on the same to advance liberal self-understanding and to guard against modern threats to freedom. If for Schmitt, the difference between democracy and liberalism concerns the meaning of equality, for Tocqueville the crucial question is who and how delimits the popular will. While both saw pluralism as a challenge for constitutional democracy, Tocqueville considered it an indispensable aspect of popular sovereignty. Schmitt, by contrast, rejected the possibility and desirability of a pluralistic democracy.

The end of the twentieth century was once seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal, constitutional democracy, as new waves of democratization swept the world and as nation-states pursued bold plans of economic and institutional integration. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, constitutional democracies, liberal values, and global economic integration were under threat from a rising tide of populist authoritarianism. The distance between these two moments is not so great. In fact, their seemingly divergent moods and tendencies are best understood as distinct manifestations of common tensions that are fundamental to the idea of a sovereign and self-governing people. This introductory chapter argues that the resonance and endurance of popular sovereignty rest on its ambivalences and tensions, its contested status, and even its inherently fictional character. It demonstrates the value of revitalizing the study of popular sovereignty, conceived not as an ideological conviction or a rhetorical device but as a field of enduring questions through which seemingly disparate political phenomena can be understood.