Abstract

Representation goes to the heart of democratic lawmaking. Typically, the constitutional doctrine and political and legal theory contrast it to direct democracy, i.e. citizen participation. At the core of this contrast lies the assumption that the people can be directly present in the political arena but that this is only viable for small communities, the members of which can meet face to face when taking decisions.  As such, representative democracy is viewed as a second-best institutionalization of the general principle of democracy, namely, collective self-legislation. 

My talk will debunk this view, arguing that two different meanings of peoplehood are at work in democratic representation: the people as unity and as a plurality of participants: a plural subject. The people, as a unity, is necessarily represented and, as such, irrevocably absent rather than present: We cannot say "we." This entails that direct democracy is a specific institutionalization of democratic representation. Moreover, because representation cannot include without excluding interests when claiming what constitutes "us" as a unity, democracy is never only the institutionalization of representation in all its variegate forms; it is also always the institutionalization of channels to contest representational claims--including contestation by public interest litigation on behalf of past and future generations as well as of other-than-human beings. Climate litigation is part and parcel of political representation.

Speaker

Hans Lindahl holds the chair of legal philosophy at Tilburg University, and a chair of global law at the Law Department of Queen Mary University of London. His current research explores how the challenges raised by the Anthropocene demand reconsidering key features of the ways in which modern legal and political philosophy have conceptualized legal order. This project draws on and radicalizes his earlier research on issues germane to globalization processes, such as the concept of legal order in a global setting; a politics of boundary-setting alternative to both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism; transformations of legal authority and political representation.