Compromise and Disagreement in Contemporary Political Theory by Christian Rostboll & Theresa Scavenius

Author:Christian Rostboll & Theresa Scavenius [Rostboll, Christian & Scavenius, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138230620
Google: KWWXAQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34498523
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Both in his political and in his legal writings, in ways that are reminiscent of Weber, Kelsen develops a systematic critique of such fictions (e.g., the personification of the state, the ontology of “the People” and its general will, and the utopia of popular sovereignty through the parliament); these fictions are feigned precisely because they obfuscate the mechanics of representative democracy and, as such, serve the goal of its critics.

Constructive ideals, on the contrary, acknowledge the shortcomings of the social world we inhabit, but interact with it promisingly; they work as yardsticks for the incremental improvement of present contingencies and foster a mindset that interprets the gap between ideals and reality as progressively reducible. Kelsen captures the role of constructive ideals, that is, ideals operating within, rather than against, democracy, through his vision of political institutions.

Democratic societies need institutions to pursue freedom and equality—the “primary” and “secondary” principles of democracy, respectively (Kelsen [1929] 2013, 95)—but institutions are not a “direct and frictionless realization of ideals” (De Angelis 2009, 527). The interplay between the two is at the core of Kelsen’s democratic theory: ideals represent the raison d’être of institutions, but also allow us to critically assess whether, and to what extent, the way institutions are corresponds to the way they ought to be.

For Kelsen, parties are one important, if not the most important, example of such institutions. They enable individuals to translate their pre-social understanding of freedom (i.e., absolute lack of constraints) into the principle of political self-determination. They also constitute a fundamental part of his theory of democracy, in general, and of political compromise, in particular: “[…] if the will of society is not to be the expression of the interests of one group alone,” we read in The Essence and Value of Democracy, “that will must be the result of a compromise between opposing interests. The division of the People into political parties, in truth, establishes the organizational preconditions for the achievement of such compromises” (Kelsen [1929] 2013, 40; emphasis added).

Therefore, to understand how the politics of compromise operates inside the legislative (the only legitimate sphere of party influence), we first need to elucidate its premises and explain how Kelsen progressively deduces the necessity of parties in representative democracy.

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