Acceso usuarios
Andreas Kalyvas
Hoy da el concepto de soberana es seriamente desafiado. Las crticas contemporneasa la soberana se han centrado en sus atributos jerrquicos, unitarios, discrecionales y arbitrarios.Desde esa perspectiva, el poder soberano es tratado como anacrnico y peligroso,la causa de muchos de los males que han marcado la poltica moderna. Este artculobusca defender la nocin y la prctica de la soberana como un concepto inherentemente democrtico. El argumento se fundamenta en la observacin histrica de que la idea desoberana como mandato supremo corresponde slo a una definicin entre muchas quehan sido propuestas en la larga historia del trmino. Una definicin alternativa de soberanapuede vislumbrarse en los escritos de diversos constitucionalistas y pensadores polticosmodernos, para quienes la soberana no era entendida como el mximo poder coercitivode mando, sino como un poder para fundar, para postular, para constituir: un poderconstituyente. Esta conceptualizacin alternativa del soberano como poder constituyentees lo que este artculo recupera como una forma ms atractiva y relevante de soberanapopular ms a tono con las promesas emancipadoras e igualitarias de una teora normativade la democracia.
The concept of sovereignty is today seriously challenged. Contemporary critics of sovereigntyhave focused on its hierarchical, unitary, discretionary, and arbitrary attributes.Hence, sovereign power is treated as anachronistic and dangerous, the cause of the manywrongs that have marked modern politics. This paper seeks to defend the notion and practiceof sovereignty as inherently democratic. The argument begins with and relies on thehistorical observation that the idea of sovereignty as supreme command corresponds tomerely one definition among several to be proposed and acted on in the long history ofthis term. An alternative definition can be traced to the writings of several modern politicaland constitutional thinkers, for whom sovereignty was understood not as the ultimatecoercive power of command but instead as the power to found, to posit, to constitute, thatis, as a constituting power. It is this alternative conceptualization of the sovereign as constituentpower that this article excavates and recovers as a more attractive and relevantform of popular sovereignty, more attuned to the emancipatory and egalitarian promisesof a normative theory of democracy.
