It is commonly assumed that the democratic passage to political modernity coincides with a transfer of sovereignty from the king to the people, from the One to the Many. According to this canonical and highly influential view, the historical birth of modern democracy occurs during the two great eighteenth-century revolutions in North America and France, whereby sovereign power was subtracted from monarchy and illicitly seized by its subjects to be relocated in the people as the ultimate foundation of the newly erected constitutional ‘sister’ republics. By appropriating the king's supreme prerogatives, the people wore his sovereign mantle, sat on his vacant throne, and replaced him as the highest legitimate authority. In this passage, democratic sovereignty marks a reversal that turns upside down the sources of political authority without, however, breaking away from the monarchical paradigm. Thus, with the modern advent of democracy, sovereignty changed hands but essentially it remained the same.

This dominant narrative has some far-reaching historical, theoretical, political and normative implications. Let me briefly mention the most important, which I will address in the following sections of this chapter.

To begin with, democratic modernity is understood in terms of the regal paradigm of power. The conceptual and political structure of popular sovereignty indicates the historical continuity of monarchical rule and its quantitative extension. As Judith Shklar succinctly put it, ‘The word sovereignty has scarcely any meaning at all apart from absolute monarchy.’ One can speak of modern democracy as a post-monarchical regime in so far as the abolition of kingship does not entail the elimination of monarchical sovereignty as such but only the replacement of one carrier/subject of supreme power with another. With popular sovereignty, power changes hands but its essence and logic remain intact.

FROM THE SIXTEENTH century on, since Niccolò Machiavelli's momentous rediscovery, the Roman concept of dictatorship has come to occupy a central place in the modern political vocabulary, contributing substantially to the making of political modernity. Fiercely debated in the constitutional discussions ushered in by the revolutionary movements that spread from the mid-seventeenth century up to the nineteenth, it was reinvented in various political forms throughout the twentieth century and regularly enacted during the most critical periods of modern politics. The enduring presence of dictatorship is testified by its multiple historical trajectories, its nearly global geographical dispersion, its ideological pluralisation and broad political diffusion. The concept itself metastasised, reaching to the extremes of the new political divide between Left and Right, all the while becoming a formative influence on the constitutional state of emergency, as it was formulated in the newly founded liberal republics that came to replace monarchical rule.

Hence, as political modernity resurrected the republican model and sought to renovate it to fit modern conditions, dictatorship was transmitted and transformed into a constitutive attribute of the modern experience of politics. The republican legacy of dictatorship was inexorably linked with the consolidation of the centralised state, its strategies of domination, and its spaces of exception. Moreover, it was complicit with the political forces associated with arbitrary autocratic power that led to the disastrous events of the last century (Duverger, 1961: 111–38). Roman dictatorship is a defining feature of the statist spirit of modern politics that daunts the public and individual liberty of citizens, often regarded as constitutive norms of the modern political imaginary.

The chapter advances three claims. First, it establishes the historical and conceptual co-evolution of republicanism and dictatorship in modern political thought. There is a clear correlation between dictatorship and modern republicanism. This genealogical exercise in conceptual history demonstrates that republicanism and dictatorship are coeval. To put it more forcefully, dictatorship is constitutive of republicanism and provides its condition of possibility, in the sense that the latter rests on the former.

Second, the question of dictatorship allows for a critical re- evaluation of modern republicanism as a whole.

Schmitt's reflections on modern mass democracy start with an examination of the political consequences following the postmedieval transition from the sovereignty of the king to the sovereignty of the people, from the unitary, physical body of the monarch to the fragmented, dispersed body of the multitude. He explored the political implications of the rise of popular sovereignty and particularly the fact that “the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was lost…[because] the unity that a people represents does not possess this decisionistic character.” In other words, he not only directly addressed the problem of agency and action of a sovereign that is transformed into an impersonal, unorganized multitude. He also sought to illuminate the democratic origins of political power, to rethink the category of sovereignty in a democratic age, and to develop a systematic theory of democratic legitimacy. Pasquale Pasquino has nicely captured this dimension of Schmitt's work, noting that it should also be read as an attempt to “think the democratic form of authority.”

Sovereignty and Dictatorship

Schmitt pursued his aim by combining Thomas Hobbes's absolutist concept of sovereignty and Emmanuel Sieyès's notion of le pouvoir constituent, that is, the power of a political subject to create a new constitution. In my effort to clarify Schmitt's understanding of extraordinary politics and to reach into his singular insights on popular sovereignty, I bracket for a moment his famous definition, in the opening sentence of Political Theology, according to which the “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

One of the most frequent objections against Arendt's political theory, shared by friends and critics alike, is her alleged neglect of normal, constituted politics. Margaret Canovan, one of the first to articulate this objection, complains that “it is unfortunate that the same concern for rare events that gave her the unparalleled insight into extraordinary politics should have led her to overlook normal politics altogether.” Honig reiterates this criticism: “Lodged in the same opposition of ordinary versus extraordinary discourse as Austin's, Arendt's account reverses Austin's valuation and privileges not the ordinary but the extraordinary, celebrating the latter's exceptional and rule-resistant character.…Indeed, Arendt's exclusion of the ordinary from her account of action leaves her open to the same sort of criticism Derrida levels at Austin for excluding the extraordinary from his.” Similarly, for Kateb, “Arendt's talents are best engaged by what is extraordinary, not by the normal.”

These criticisms raise a crucial issue regarding Arendt's theory. A comprehensive theory of the extraordinary, unlike Weber's but like Schmitt's, must take into account not only the first moment of the original founding but also the second one, that of the stabilization and conservation of the constituent compact. A purported inability to incorporate the second moment into a broader theory of extraordinary politics could take Arendt directly back to the limitations and aporias of Weber's theory of charismatic legitimacy, leaving us with a radical but also ephemeral, and thus impotent, instituting power. Is this what happened?

At a challenging time marked by global transformations and political uncertainty, and at a moment when modern liberalism has discredited one enemy and is embattled with another, its history, character, and prospects have become ever more urgent. The relationship between republicanism and liberalism, which emerged as a central issue for historians of modern political thought some decades ago, presently can aid such a consideration.

At first, this subject defined an important axis of debate among political historians, especially as they discovered republicanism as an alternative to the liberal tradition in colonial America and the early republic. Studies of the links joining liberalism to an older republicanism then migrated to political theory and to comparative, cross-national investigations. Animated by strong normative motivations, these works have taken what is, by now, a familiar form, where one or the other is endorsed as the superior doctrine and as a better guide to contemporary politics and society. Speaking directly to the standing and possibilities of liberalism today, such discussions consider a range of issues that include tensions joining virtue and self-interest, the common and the personal, sovereignty and representation, authority and freedom, law and ethics.

We contribute to this ongoing conversation by way of a historical and textual strategy. In coming to terms with liberal beginnings, we examine the association – or is it a bond? – connecting liberalism and republicanism. We revisit the origins and development of liberal thought to think about how it ascended, despite many challenges, to today's leading position.

Recent studies in the history of modern political thought increasingly have been turning to the writings of Germaine de Staël. Intriguingly, this revival of interest in a body of thought long neglected by students of political ideas has been marked by a stark dualism. For some, she helps reconsider the character of republicanism. For others, her work clarifies the birth of continental, especially French, liberalism. Each version claims Staël as one of its canonical or foundational figures.

How might we come to terms with such different appraisals? Although her texts are both republican and liberal, they appear so not at the same time but in a sequence characterized by an internal trajectory, a movement from an originally republican to, ultimately, a decidedly liberal stance. First a republican, she increasingly distanced herself from this tradition to become a liberal. It is this shift we seek to understand. The challenge is to appreciate when, why, and how she said farewell to republicanism and embraced liberalism. We do so by identifying a moment of inflection in Staël's orientation.

Unlike others who ask us to choose between a republican or a liberal Staël, Lucien Jaume and Marcel Gauchet also focus on her intellectual transition and political transformation. Our analysis, though, differs from theirs. Jaume's account attributes changes in Staël's thought to both biographical and theoretical causes. He identifies her disenchantment with Bonaparte, whose coup d'état revealed immanent authoritarian and despotic possibilities in the newborn republic.

“Schmitt,” Stephen Holmes writes, “subscribed to the myth of a fundamental opposition between constitutional limitations and democratic government.…Schmitt's democratic mysticism, not to mention its practical consequences, suffices to discredit this entire approach. It is meaningless to speak about popular government apart from some sort of legal framework which enables the electorate to have a coherent will.” According to this line of interpretation, Schmitt sought to replace constitutionalism and a stable legal system with an immutable, boundless sovereign constituent power, often incarnated in a dictatorial president, ruling by arbitrary executive decrees and administrative orders. Schmitt's critique of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and of normative legal formalism, so this argument goes, is part of a broader, more ambitious attempt to abolish constitutionalism. Schmitt's appeal to a fictional constituent subject is seen as a pretext for the establishment of an executive dictatorship. Not only did he abhor liberalism; he also sought to undermine and destroy the idea of the constitution as government under law in order to replace it with a permanent state of exception and a normless emergency.

As I try to show in this chapter, these charges lose considerable force and cannot be consistently sustained once we take into consideration two crucial aspects of Schmitt's theory. The first is his stark, clear-cut distinction between the people in an extraconstitutional outside and the people within the constitution, or, to put it in more general terms, between the constituent people and the constituted people.

Reading Benjamin Constant provides a privileged access to the unfolding and gradual crystallization of modern continental liberal constitutionalism within and against a republican background. His experience parallels Germaine de Staël's, but because Constant was a more explicitly reflective and systematic political thinker, we can see this process develop in a more lucid manner. With Constant as our guide, we trace another political pathway for the emergence of postrevolutionary French liberalism. As we have seen, with the king deposed, monarchy's main doctrinal antagonist, republicanism, failed to fill the vacuum of authority and neutrality at the center of the state. This incapacity impelled a young generation of republicans, notably including Staël and Constant, to question their initial commitments and search for more effective political solutions. Encountering theories of rights, they produced a body of thought that gradually broke, though not completely, with its republican past, to become an independent and distinctive political doctrine.

Their liberalism faced two strong adversaries, each also competing to replace the deposed king. The political spectrum polarized between counterrevolutionaries and radical republicans. Satisfied with neither position, the generation of new liberals understood that substitution for the monarch demanded new instruments that could wear a magisterial mantle of neutrality. To this end, they designed a strategy of transcendence to supersede the radical and conservative extremes. They did so by raising the level of abstraction to constitute an impartial and objective point of view from which neutrality, detached from the person of the king, could reappear in the formal and procedural activities of the state's institutional ensemble.

Arendt's critique of absolute beginnings is both ingenious and extremely suggestive in clarifying the perplexities of a pure theory of political foundings. It is not itself, however, free from its own ambiguities. She acknowledged that the problem of arbitrariness is not exclusively confined to total breaks. This problem haunts all extraordinary politics, “because beginning's very nature is to carry in itself an element of complete arbitrariness.” Freedom's futile character, what she called “the abyss of freedom,” is inscribed in the very nature of the act to constitute. Even if one dispenses with the eschatological myth of a full rupture, one is still confronted with the unavoidable arbitrariness inherent in all extraordinary projects. Freedom, for Arendt, has its own perils: “The frightening arbitrariness with which we are confronted whenever we decide to embark upon this type of action, which is the exact counterpart of consistent logical processes, is more obvious in the political than in the natural realm.”

This means that extraordinary politics – absolute or relative – not only is arbitrary, boundless, and unpredictable; it is also deeply unstable and fragile. As she admitted, “the capacity to act is the most dangerous of all human abilities and possibilities.” Even if we dispense with the theological fantasy of an eschatological break, we are still confronted with the problem of arbitrariness. Free action can have perverse effects because it is by definition groundless and indeterminate.

A thinker associated with the republican tradition in the eighteenth century, Adam Ferguson, sometimes labeled a “Machiavellian moralist” or “the last ‘neo-Roman,’” stands out for systematically grappling with the challenge of preserving republican government despite the emergence of modern commercial society. This engagement, understood as an attempt to make republicanism fit for new conditions, has been at the center of important scholarship on Ferguson initiated by J. G. A. Pocock and carried forward by the Cambridge School. It powerfully portrays him as having “modernised republicanism.” This orientation has displaced an older interpretation, famously identified with Friedrich Hayek, which had characterized Ferguson, like Adam Smith, as an early liberal, devoted to free markets, spontaneous orders, and limited governments.

We offer an angular reading. Ferguson, in fact, did struggle to renovate and update republican ideas and values. In so doing, he sought to fashion a politics suitable for what he characterized as a new age of separations. He did not succeed. We will see how each of the three principal solutions he offered, ranging from primarily republican to increasingly liberal, failed to persuasively reconcile virtue and commerce. Yet, in emplacing pluralism, conflict, and sentiments, as well as the role of institutions and laws, at the center of his thinking, Ferguson did more than recast classical republicanism. In highlighting and deploying these features of politics, he pioneered what we can recognize as a distinctive kind of liberalism – not exclusively the economic liberalism sometimes attributed to him, but primarily a political liberalism best understood as agonistic.

Weber's critique of liberalism and Marxism is informed by an ambition to salvage the political from the tight grip of economic reductionism, instrumental rationality, and the normal politics of interest and utilitarian calculations. Although he never systematically spelled out this alternative wider concept of the political, he did claim that substantive values and symbolic meanings are more constitutive to the formation of political identities and to the shaping of collective action than interests are. He also argued that these values and meanings are themselves the outcome of prior symbolic struggles among charismatic movements and institutionalized organizations for the control of culture and the creation of beliefs and convictions that will directly influence the legitimate foundations of political authority – that is, the very sources of the exercise of political power. In what follows, I focus on these prior charismatic struggles over the control of symbolic power. This emphasis on charismatic politics might help revisit and further explore Weber's famous claim that although, during normal times, “material and ideal interests directly govern men's conduct,” in extraordinary moments “the world images that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” My aim is to uncover and reconstruct the political, conflictual processes whereby a worldview becomes institutionalized after emerging victorious from a struggle with its rivals.