The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy

A Study on the Political Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-367-64453-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 220 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 326 g

Reihe: Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and often complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar era, German-speaking, scholarly and political controversies on the problem(s) of modern democracy.

A discussion of Weber’s ambivalent diagnosis of modernity and his elitist views on democracy, as they were elaborated especially in the 1910s, sets the groundwork for the study. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s interwar political thought is interpreted as a form of neo-authoritarian populism, whereas Kelsen evinces robust, though not entirely unproblematic, pluralist consequences. In the conclusion, the author draws on Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy to sketch a potentially more fruitful way than can be gleaned from the interwar German discussions of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist faces of modern democracy.

The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, intellectual historians, theoretically oriented political scientists, and legal scholars working in the subfields of constitutional law and legal theory.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315157566, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Magalhães, Pedro T.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Arbeit/Sozialpädagogik
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction 1. Max Weber’s Diagnosis of Modernity and the Ambivalence of Modern Democracy 2. The Neo-Authoritarian Populism of Carl Schmitt 3. Science, Relativism and Pluralism: Hans Kelsen’s Conception of Modern Democracy Elitism, Populism and Pluralism: A Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Pedro T. Magalhães has a PhD in Political Science awarded by NOVA University Lisbon, where he taught as a Guest Assistant Professor until 2018. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (Eurostorie), hosted by the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. His main research interests are in the fields of democratic theory, modern political ideologies and twentieth-century intellectual history.