Constituent Power and Reflexive Identity: Towards an Ontology of Collective Selfhood
Constituent Power and Reflexive Identity: Towards an Ontology of Collective Selfhood
This chapter analyses the nature of collective identity implicit in the notion of a political community. Taking the debate between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the competing claims to priority of the legal-normative and the political as exemplary of influential and opposing positions in constitutional theory, it argues (against both) that collective identity is reflexive identity, that self-constitution is constitution both by (political) and of (legal-normative) a collective self, and that the paradoxical relation of constituent power and constitutional form — of democracy and legality — is in a certain sense specious. The chapter sets a frame for addressing the arguments of the papers that follow.
Keywords: collective identity, reflexivity, self-constitution, Kelsen, Schmitt
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