Kolja Möller

Drawing on Arnold Schönberg's seminal opera "Moses and Aron", the comment focuses on the role of holistic politics in Andrew Arato's and Jean L. Cohen's "Populism and Civil Society". It argues that their anti-populist stance is too quick in dismissing a politics which is driven by representing and reconstituting the whole of the social order. Against this backdrop, a rejuvenation of the political left may not consist in a rejection of holism as such but in a popular politics which relies on functional equivalences.

The article analyzes the so-called “new right“ which has broadened its influence during the last years. It argues that it pursues a populist mode of mobilization by the claim to embody a national variant of popular sovereignty within the communicative self-reference of the political system. This comes along with a broad range for political manouevering: On the one hand, these movements stage themselves as “democratic” resistance and freedom-fighters, on the other hand they display neo-fascist tendencies. The article elucidates this interplay by inquiring into original interviews and speeches as well as contemporary theories of the political right. Drawing on the recent social conflicts around the pandemic in 2020, it is argued that an authoritarian liberalism, which is reminiscent of the US Tea Party, could be the starting point for future mobilizations of the “new right” in Europe.

This article scrutinizes the relation of populist forms of politics and constitutionalism. It argues that populism is a constant concomitant of the differentiation of the political system and its structural coupling with the legal system in the constitution: It invokes the constituent power of the people – popular sovereignty – and turns it against the »elites« from within the political system. Further, the article analyzes how authoritarian
types of populism are on the rise in our contemporary world and how they affect not only the public sphere but also constitutional and legal institutions. Against this backdrop, the critique of authoritarian populism has to be reformulated: Instead of drawing on an external critique of populism as such, which is likely to fall prey of repressing constituent power, it seems more apt to investigate into forms of communication which adequately re-specify its oppositional moment for our globalized world.

This article reconstructs Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer's theoretical reflections on the democratic republic. It demonstrates how Bauer proceeds from the irreducible conflict around the exercise of rule as his point of departure, but also pays due attention to the impact existing legal and political forms have on scopes of articulation for antagonistic conflict. He elaborates a cycle of three stages through which the democratic republic passes: proletarian democracy, the people's republic, and an innovative conceptualization of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a backdrop for the stabilization and defence of democratic institutions. Bauer's reflections refine central concepts of political Marxism 2 and relate them to democratic theory. Drawing loosely on Polybius' cycle of constitutions, Bauer can be viewed as a 'Red Polybius'. He soberly analyses the different stages of the republic and reveals how they are connected to one another. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that Bauer's work provides ample resources for theorizing the mutual interrelations and interrelatedness of social conflict and political form.

This article engages with the concept of constituent power and its viability in times of transnational constitutionalism. After discussing systems-theoretical, procedural and sovereignist approaches, it argues that constituent power in transnational contexts has to be reframed as negative device and countervailing power. The article resurrects a line of constitutional thought which can be traced back to Machiavelli and the young Karl Marx. Here, constituent power is primarily a matter of revocatory scenarios which open up avenues for a re-negotiation of existing orders. In our contemporary world, the question resurfaces what kind of legal and political communications articulate such revocatory scenarios and exert destituent effects on existing hegemonies within transnational constitutionalism.

This article argues that the passage to world society proliferates a structural transformation of constitutionalism. It is argued that its postdemocratic character is mainly rooted in a process where substantial policy objectives (most notably free-trade, investment protection and austerity programs) are constituationalized on a higher-ranking level. While the first part of the article elaborates this diagnosis by combining systems-theoretical and post-marxist insights, the second part turns to a critique of contemporary theories about transnational constitutionalism. It reveals the short-comings of cosmopolitan, societal and popular-sovereignty approaches in overcoming these postdemocratic structures. Finally, it is argued that – in the light of such a new constitutionalism – the notion of constituent power must be replaced by the figure of a destituent power which attempts to free the constitution as a form from the selective policy objectives.

In der Beschäftigungsstrategie der EU kommt die Methode der offenen Koordinierung (MOK) zur Anwendung, die in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zu einem bedeutenden Kristallisationspunkt für dezentrales Netzwerk-Regieren erhoben wird. Mit Michel Foucaults Gouvernementalitätsanalyse erscheint die MOK allerdings weniger ein innovatives Governance-Tool als eine gouvernementale Machtökonomie zu repräsentieren. Die MOK installiert ein Wahrheitsregime, das beschäftigungspolitische Ansätze privilegiert, die auf „aktivierende Arbeitsmarktpolitik“ setzen. Die Gouvernementalitätsanalyse beleuchtet die europäische Beschäftigungsstrategie unter explizit machtanalytischen Gesichtspunkten. The open method of coordination (OMC) which is applied in the European employment strategy by the EU is stylized in the academic literature as a focal point for decentralized modes of governance. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality the OMC doesn’t seem to represent an innovative governance tool but a governmental “economy of power”. The OMC installs a regime of truth which privileges only labour market regulations that rely on activation policies. The analysis of governmentality elucidates the European employment strategy from the standpoint of Foucauldian power analytics.

This article investigates left populisms which aim at mobilising an inclusive notion of popular sovereignty ‘from below’ against the ‘elite’ above. Instead of engaging with current controversies between advocates and critics of left populism, it conducts a reconstruction of how central intellectual figures of European Social Democracy in the 19th century – such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eduard Bernstein – drew conclusions from the struggles around popular sovereignty and reflected on populist approaches to politics. It is argued that we can identify an innovative intellectual trajectory from that time, which revolved around the question of whether a politics that is centred on the ‘popular will’ is able to incite social transformation and collective learning processes or, to the contrary, thwarts them. Beginning with an investigation of Marx’s and Engels’ critique of popular insurrections in the 1840s and 50s, this article demonstrates that European Social Democracy returned to people- centred approaches from the 1870s onwards. Most notably, Rosa Luxemburg introduced an important intellectual advance: her conception of a popular movement (Volksbewegung) which she elaborated around the 1900s was meant to overcome the Jacobin flaws of left populisms, paving the way for a transformative populism. Finally, this article argues that European Social Democracy’s trajectory can be seen as a learning cycle itself with regard to potentials and pitfalls of left populisms. Contemporary controversies should be sensitive to these insights and thus engage in more context-dependent inquiries.

The contribution addresses the question whether a transnational populism, whose constituency moves beyond the national people, is already observable and whether it qualifies as a timely political strategy. In the initial part, it is argued that transnational populism should
not be conceived of as a free-standing type of discursive entrepreneurship, but rather a dynamic which already operates from within the co-evolution of the political system and its constitutionalisation in international contexts, such as the United Nations or the European Union. Against this backdrop, distinctions between rooted, transformative and full-blown transnational populism can be drawn. In the following parts, the contribution reconstructs
these varieties in two paradigmatic cases: The first case is the strive of the non-aligned alliance of developing countries from the global south for a New International Economic Order in the UN of the 1960s and 1970s. The second case is the rise of anti-austerity populism
as a reaction to the Euro-Crisis in the 2010s. As it is finally demonstrated, transnational populisms remain entangled in a basic antinomy: On the one hand, it is possible to address crucial social divisions by invoking a transnational people. On the other hand, the political system in the international sphere is – up until now – constitutionalised in a way that
privileges nationalist invocations and, thereby, makes it difficult to pursue transnational politics.

This article outlines a critical systems theory approach to the study of populism by arguing that populism is an avenue of contestation which assumes a distinct role and function in the existing constitution of the political system. Most notably, it is characterised by the reentry of a popular sovereignty dimension within regular political procedures. By taking up a critical systems theory perspective, it becomes possible to more precisely distinguish populism from other forms of politics, such as oppositional politics, social movement politics, or procedural constitutional politics. Further, populism's oscillation between democratic and authoritarian dynamics can be elucidated as an inversion which operates from within its political form. Finally, it is argued that the critical systems theory approach provides a more nuanced understanding of populism's inherent problems and, consequently, moves beyond a blunt defence or rejection of populism as such.

The article scrutinizes the negative and contestatory characteristics of populism. It is argued that populist forms of politics must be observed as a reaction to the concentration of power in constituted organs and social elites. Populisms assume a specific role und function in the political system by setting in motion a counter-cycle to the on-going self-empowerment from „above“. From this perspective, however, it is possible to establish a more robust distinction between democratic and authoritarian forms of populism. This distinction is not only a matter of substantive political demands, but also of reflexivity, i.e. how populisms cast their respective social basis: their „people“.

This article investigates the relationship between popular sovereignty, populism, and deliberative democracy. My main thesis is that populisms resurrect the polemical dimension of popular sovereignty by turning " the people " against the " power bloc " or the " elite " , and that it is crucial that this terrain not be ceded to authoritarian distortions of this basic contestatory grammar. Furthermore, I contend that populist forms of politics are compatible with a procedural and deliberative conception of democracy. I first engage with the assumption that populism and a procedural model of democracy are incompatible, demonstrating that this assumption relies on a conservative bias which ties the exercising of communicative power to a " duty of civility " (Rawls). I then engage with radical-democratic reconstructions of the procedural notion of popular sovereignty which emphasize the unleashing and diversification of peoplehood in communication circuits and the mutual permeability of constitutional politics, parliamentary legislation, and the public sphere. Thirdly, I conclude that populisms are an essential part of communicative power in modern democracies and part of its dialectical structure.

Critical systems theory approaches are built upon an aporetic mode of critique: On the one hand, they critizise law's self-reference as a potentially destructive force, which colonizes other societal structures. But on the other hand, they invoke the figure of autonomous law as a normative standard in order to reject the dominance of the capitalist economic system, state bureaucracy or other social systems. In the first step, I show that this aporia was originally unfolded by the kritische Rechtsstaatslehre of the early Frankfurt School. In the second step, it will be demonstrated how critical systems theory approaches iterate this aporia by introducing a critical twist in the Luhmannian theory of law. And in the third step, I scrutinize the arising normative strategies (responsiveness, transcending the law, aesthetization of law). Finally, I highlight that it seems worth enduring such a mode of critique and not collapsing it into an a priori law-defending or law-rejecting perspective. However, critical systems theory needs to be more sensitive to relations of power and social antagonisms when it comes to an examination of the legal form.