The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State

Chapter Six: Creative Freedom and the People as Process

6 Creative Freedom and the People as Process As I have argued throughout this book, you cannot legitimize the state by relying on the unified will of a people. The people and its will never unify: the people conceived as a collection of individuals is always indeterminate. This indeterminacy is clear in the unified-will legitimizations of democracy , since these attempts to legitimize democracy produce a vicious circle between the unified people that should create institutions, and the legitimate institutions that bring the people about. But indeterminacy also plagues the unified-will theory’s very conception of the people because unless you find an original unification, you cannot determine the people’s boundaries or understand its continuity in time. This raises the following question: could you dissolve the logical problems surrounding democratic legitimization if you had a more accurate conception of the people? As I argued in the previous chapter, conceiving of the people as a process promises to do just that. Intuitively, it makes sense to appeal to process in order to dissolve the vicious circle between citizens and institutions. The circularity dissolves as soon as you consider that the people evolves over time. After all, a chicken-and-egg problem disappears when you bring time to bear on it, and indeed, even the chicken-and-egg problem vanishes entirely. No one expects to find an original chicken or an original egg in the process of the evolution of species because the two terms dissolve into the organic forms that preceded them. But let us not take this analogy too far. In the case of the real chicken-and-egg problem, we have a coherent evolutionary theory at our disposal. In our case, by contrast, there is no processual theory of the democratic people ready at hand. CREATIVE FREEDOM AND THE PEOPLE AS PROCESS ● 137 This all suggests that we need a processual theory of peoplehood. In chapter 4, I looked to Habermas’s theory of dynamic constitutionalism for a solution to the indeterminacy problem, but I found that his theory fails in this regard. Habermas’s dynamic view still relies on popular unification, albeit displaced in historical time. Dynamic constitutionalism, like most other versions of liberal democratic theory, relies either on images of a people unified by cultural traits emerging from a misty past, or on the promise of a universally agreed-on democracy to come at an unspecified moment in the future. These images of the past and visions of the future still demand a moment of popular unification. In chapter 5, I examined Ackerman’s view of the people as an institutionalized process occurring between ordinary citizens and governing elites. This view of the people as process does solve the problem of a static origin in the constitutional state. But it also introduces a sharp duality between change and stability, wherein each moment of higher lawmaking is made equivalent to a new beginning. As a result, this view reintroduces all the difficulties of popular unification. In this chapter I propose a different, full-blooded theory of the people as process. A people, according to this theory, is an unfolding series of events coordinated by the practices of constituting, governing, and changing a set of institutions. These institutions are the highest authority for all those individuals intensely affected by these events and these institutions. Within this process, there exists what I call ‘‘creative freedom’’: the aim that partly coordinates the becoming of such a people. I then argue that this definition of the people as process can help us individuate different peoples. In the next chapter, I show that this conception of the people can solve the problem of how to legitimize the state democratically as the people’s composition changes. I develop my argument for this theory of the people as process in two parts. In the first part, I examine the nature of processes and explain how process philosophy can help us develop a theory of peoplehood. To do this I develop the insights of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Nicholas Rescher. I argue that a process is a series of events unfolding in coordination, where this coordination is a self-creative aim. I call the self-creative aim that coordinates events in specific types of processes , such as persons and peoples, creative freedom. In the second part, I present my theory of the people as process, describing the main constituents...