Between Constituent Power and Political Form: Toward a Theory of Council Democracy

• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720925435
• Author: Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720925435

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(1) 54 –82

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720925435

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Article

Between Constituent

Power and Political

Form: Toward a Theory

of Council Democracy

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, PhD, Postdoc1

Abstract

This essay goes beyond the dominant conception of constituent power

developed by Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt by excavating an

alternative through the practices of twentieth-century workers’ councils

and the interpretations of council democracy by Cornelius Castoriadis and

Hannah Arendt. Interpreters of the constituent power often agree on its

fundamentally antagonistic relation to constituted power, hereby making

constituent politics a momentary experience, which cannot be sustained

in constituted politics. Council democracy, instead, discloses a modality

of politics, which bridges the gap between constituent power and political

form in order to provide institutional means through which the spirit of

revolution can survive the founding moment. With this alternative concept

of council democratic constituent power, this essay contributes to radical

democratic theory by stipulating ways in which institutions can be rethought

radically democratic as a way in which constituent power (creativity, novelty,

freedom) can be institutionally approximated and continually reexperienced.

Keywords

constituent power, council democracy, radical democracy, Hannah Arendt,

Cornelius Castoriadis

1Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School,

Frederiksberg, Denmark

Corresponding Author:

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, PhD, Postdoc, Department of Management, Politics and

Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18B, Frederiksberg, 2000,

Denmark.

Email: bap.mpp@cbs.dk

925435PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720925435Political TheoryPopp-Madsen

research-article2020

Popp-Madsen 55

Introduction

Theories of constituent power often point to its paradoxical nature. While

constituent power is the highest power of the polity and designates the peo-

ple’s power to freely create their own constitutional forms, constituent power

exists only outside the constituted order. Although constituent power is the

foundation of legality, law must at the same time appropriate it, as they can-

not coexist.1 Moreover, constituent power is enacted in the name of the peo-

ple, although the legitimate subject of this power comes only after the very

act of constituting.2 Constituent power, then, while being the source of con-

stitutional forms, procedural norms, and positive law, is itself formless,

normless, and lawless. Despite constituent power being the ultimate founda-

tion for ordinary politics, it is itself an extraordinary power. This dominant

understanding of constituent power derives from two of its most influential

interpreters, Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt. In the famous pamphlet

“What is the Third Estate?“ (1789), Sieyès describes the constituent power as

above constituted politics, as “the nation exists prior to everything; it is the

origin of everything. Its will is always legal. It is law itself.”3 Sieyès uses a

famous metaphor to describe the formlessness of constituent power, as it

“never leaves the state of nature,” because it “is independent of all forms . . .

it is the source and supreme master of all positive laws.”4 Schmitt similarly

stressed the formless nature of constituent power, as this power can “change

its forms and give itself continually new forms of political existence. It has

the complete freedom of political self-determination. It can be the ‘formless

formative capacity.’”5 The result of this dominant image of constituent power

is that an unbridgeable gap between constituent power and political form is

created that depicts the two as fundamentally oppositional.

In this essay, I develop an alternative to the Sieyèsian-Schmittian conception

of constituent power by turning to the historical experiences of workers’ coun-

cils in the twentieth century and the interpretations of council democracy by

twentieth-century political thinkers, predominantly Cornelius Castoriadis and

Hannah Arendt. It is a principal concern for democratic politics, I argue, to con-

ceptualize ways in which constituent power can be institutionalized so that its

relation to freedom, creativity, and emancipation remains intact while its arbi-

trariness, groundlessness, and formlessness is held in check. The historical

experiences of worker’s councils in early twentieth century provide an opportu-

nity for thinking democracy precisely at this intersection of constituent power

and political form. As such, the councils played a key role in twentieth-century

politics. The self-governing neighborhoods of the Paris Commune of 1871; the

strike movement of revolutionary St. Petersburg in the failed Russian Revolution

of 1905; the delegates from army regiments and factories of Petrograd during

the Russian Revolution(s) of 1917; the German workers’ and sailors’ councils