Few historians would associate Nicole Loraux with the great Marxist historians who wrote on classical antiquity. Nevertheless, Loraux implicitly presented herself as such, when, in 1981 and, again, in 1993, she made ideology and the imaginary central notions in her work on the funeral oration. This chapter investigates the complex uses of these two ‘re-invented’ notions in The Invention of Athens. In particular, it situates the career of Nicole Loraux within her rich intellectual milieu and teases out how she broke from it. This encompassed Classical Studies because The Invention of Athens, by moving the object of study to the imaginary, was clearly responding to some Marxist readings of antiquity, such as those of Moses Finley and the Italian School. But this milieu also included the French intellectual scene because Loraux, in fact, was always engaged in a dialogue with philosophers and anthropologists, such as Louis Althusser, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres.

This chapter is about the broad wave of support which the repression of Poland’s Solidarity trade union in December 1981 triggeredin France. It explains this outpouring of sympathy and political support by focusing on an alliance of intellectuals, including philosophers Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort, and the trade union CFDT and reconstructs the human rights language of these groups. This chapter demonstrates that French solidarité avec Solidarnosc was the culmination of almost a decade of French fascination with dissident activism in the Soviet bloc, a development in the course of which French intellectuals came to endorse the dissidents' focus on human rights. This chapter also shows that what seemed like a fascination with events in Eastern Europe was, in fact, enmeshed in intellectual and political debates on the French Left. Endorsing the dissidents' struggle allowed members of France's non-Communist and anti-etatist French Left to set themselves off from the two dominant forces in French Left-wing politics: the Communist party and the Socialists. In analyzing these debates, this chapter reconstructs the French Left's specific human rights language which did not focus on individual liberty but aimed at empowering people to join forces and shape their collective affairs through social self-organization.

This chapter examines the constitution-making processes in the history of the Turkish Republic to provide an alternative explanation for the authoritarian foundations of Turkish constitutions different from the established explanations based on the center-periphery dichotomy or military tutelage argument. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s theory of modern democracy, the chapter argues that the dominant constitution-making practice in Turkey has been the hegemonic-totalitarian logic, which causes the performative closing of the empty place of power by one actor that claims to exclusively represent the people’s will. This embodiment claim constitutes the authoritarian foundation of Turkish constitutions. These embodiment claims were made by the Republican Peopleʼs Party for the 1924 Constitution, by the military following a coup for the 1961 and 1982 Constitutions, and by the Justice and Development Party as a populist actor holding the parliamentary majority in the 2007, 2010, and 2017 amendment processes. The Constitutional Conciliation Commission ‘Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu, AUK’ could have achieved a democratic departure from the path-dependent authoritarian constitution-making approach.

This chapter considers Raymond Aron’s role in the ‘liberal moment’ of the 1970s and 1980s, when a significant broadening of interest in liberalism occurred among French intellectuals. It begins by considering the significance of intellectual anti-totalitarianism in these years. Rather than reducing late twentieth-century French intellectual anti-totalitarianism to anti-communist politics, the chapter shows how French intellectuals’ preoccupations with the problem of totalitarianism informed significant innovations in historiography and political theory. It also shows how the notion of ‘the political’ entered into widespread use among intellectuals in these years and considers Aron’s influence on this development. On the broadening of interest in liberalism the chapter argues for the existence of two main strands to the French liberal moment: one associated with Aron that emerged in hostile opposition to the events of May ’68 and another associated with Claude Lefort that viewed the events and legacy of 1968 in an altogether more positive light.

One of Marx’s central and most enduring insights, as concisely expressed in the 1859 preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, concerns the transformative effects of economic change. As the material forces of production develop, they sooner or later enter into conflict with the existent relations of production and with the political and juridical patterns, the so-called superstructure, in which these relations are expressed. The inevitable consequence, according to Marx, is a period of transformation in which society’s superstructure, including its moral, aesthetic, and philosophical forms, is revolutionalized so as to adapt it to the new material circumstances.

Popular constituent power, once a concept closely associated with radical critiques of liberal constitutionalism on the left and the right, and with the investigations of such “Continental” topics as political theology, insurgent partisanship, and the sovereign state of exception, has recently become a key concern of Anglo-American democratic and constitutional theorists. As the concept has moved to the center of scholarly debates, it has also become more respectable, the subject of increasingly elaborate attempts to bring it within the fold of liberal constitutionalism itself: popular constituent power has become an important test of liberal constitutionalism’s democratic capaciousness. This has had significant consequences for how its central concept – the constituent people – has been theorized. “As an actor,” Andrew Arato writes, “the people are fictional unless they are redefined in legal terms as the collectivity of citizens or the electorate in which case they become an entity produced by law, rather than the ultimate source of law.” Viewing the people first and foremost as a legal entity rather than exploring their “fictional” status as “an actor” has been a hallmark of much of the recent scholarship on the popular constituent power.

“Sovereignty” was not always there. What is called “sovereignty” today emerged under certain historical conditions at a certain time and in a certain place, and it can disappear or lose its meaning if the conditions change. Some authors assume that this has already happened so that we find ourselves in a post-sovereign era. The best way to ascertain whether they are right seems to be a reconstruction of the conditions under which sovereignty originally emerged, followed by an analysis as to whether the conditions have changed in the meantime, and, if so, how the changes affect sovereignty. Without such a historical assessment it is difficult to understand the present situation.