Andrew Arato

The Essential Frankfurt school reader

The Frankfurt School of philosophers, aestheticians, sociologists, and political scientists (including Theodore W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse) represents one of the most interesting and unique intellectual events of the twentieth century. Editors Arato and Gebhardt offer major introductions to the three sections that comprise the Reader, in which they seek to place to historical development of the Schools thought and to deonstrate its complexity, while investigating its influence on various disciplines. Paul Piccone has written the General Introduction.>

Representação, soberania popular, e accountability

Sao examinados cinco conjuntos normativos de demandas que tem a chance de reduzir o imenso hiato entre os representados e os representantes nas democracias modernas. Como um desses conjuntos, a accountability e mais facilmente entendida em relacao aos outros.

Civil Society And Social Theory

Social movements in the East and the West, the North and the South have come to rely on various interesting, albeit eclectic syntheses inherited from the history of the concept of civil society. They presuppose (in different corn-binations) something like the Gramscian tripartite framework of civil society, state and economy, while preserving key aspects of the Marxian critique of bourgeois society. But they have also integrated liberal claims on behalf of individual riglxic, the stress of Hegel, Tocqueville and others on societal plurality, the emphasis of Durkheiin on the component of social solidarity, and the defense of the public sphere and political participation stressed by Habermas and Arendt.2

Conventions, Constituent Assemblies, and Round Tables: Models, Principles and Elements of Democratic Constitution-Making

The article presents the Round Table form, elsewhere post-sovereign multi-stage constitution making as an independent democratic type superior to the alternatives. It locates the form along with Convention and Constituent Assembly both in a comprehensive typology based on models of regime transformation, as well as historically. After making a set of normative arguments comparing the three forms, focusing on the issue legitimation, I make a case for the synthetic nature of the Round Table in relation to the two important democratic predecessors. Finally, I reluctantly admit the path-determined nature of the Round Table that strictly speaking seems relevant only 1) in the transitions from dictatorships, if 2) new forces do not have the power to accomplish revolutionary change. Nevertheless, I argue that the principles of the Round Table (inclusion, consensus, publicity, legality and veil of ignorance) are relevant to other paths, from the point of view of their legitimation. I further claim with reference to Iraq, Turkey and the European Union that elements of the Round Table can be adopted even under conditions of revolutionary change, as well as constitutional reform.

Crisis and Reform in Eastern Europe

Communism in Eastern Europe is in crisis. Its dimensions are social and economic; its manifestation is political. This volume, a collection of essays by leading authorities, describes the symptoms of the crisis, diagnoses the causes of the malady, and offers alternative scenarios for therapy. A unique dimension of this collection is its avoidance of one-dimensional explanations. The contributors approach the subject from very different angles, and start from very distinct sociopolitical premises. The volume includes original accounts of unexplored aspects of East European communism as well as classic interpretations of the economic crisis and social stagnation that characterize the area. Contributions not only examine the sociopolitical behavior of the ruling apparatus, but also analyze its strategies, political culture, and the opposition. Both the professional and the general reader seeking more information about Eastern Europe will find this volume an extensive, in-depth portrait of the current situation in what many observers predict may develop into the major area of tension in post-World War II Europe.

Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism

The failure of classical Marxist social theory is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the face of the bureaucratic centralist societies that use Marxism as their “science” of legitimation. The project of a critical social theory demands the immanent critique of all Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to theorize this new social formation, but this is as yet an unfulfilled task. For now, only some hypotheses are possible regarding the failure of the whole set of approaches, and these are best organized around five fundamental components of the classical theory. 1. The concept of critique. A genuine immanent critique of Soviet Marxism, attempted most notably by Marcuse had to fail according to the basic premises of critical theory itself.

Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981-82

Support for the Polish democratic movement should have been easy for all those supposedly opposed to the totalitarian status quo in Eastern Europe. All Marxists should have been convinced by the overwhelming working class character of the Polish opposition (one of the rare proletarian revolutions in history). Remnants of the libertarian New Left should have seen its stress on an alternative public sphere and on direct democracy as one of the few authentic continuations of their own efforts. New Western social movements should have been very sympathetic to the rebuilding of whole domains of autonomy and the democratic utilization of counter-expertise.

Democratic Constitution-Making and Unfreezing the Turkish Process

This short article will seek to explore the causes, and possible solutions, of what seems to be the current freezing of the Turkish constitution-making process that has had some dramatic successes in the 1990s and early 2000s. I make the strong claim that democratic legitimacy or constituent authority should not be reduced either to any mode of power, even popular power, or to mere legality. It is these types of reduction that I find especially troubling in recent Turkish constitutional struggles, where the legal claims of two powers — the government-controlled legislative and the judicial branches — to structure the constitution are not backed by sufficient political legitimacy. In effect these two powers that claim their constituent authorization, rather implausibly in my view, from either the democratic electorate or from an original constituent power, because of their conflict threaten to freeze the constitution-making process that very much needs to be continued and concluded. I end the article by making a suggestion for one possible constitution-making procedure that would be both legitimate and legal.

Learning from Success, Learning from Failure: South Africa, Hungary, Turkey and Egypt

The article has several theses. First we propose that there is a new method of constitution-making today, the two-stage, post-sovereign one perfected in South Africa. Second, we admit the path-dependent nature, and difficult pre-conditions, of this method. Third, we maintain that even when the full method is unlikely in a given context, its legitimating principles nevertheless can play a role through international dissemination. We explore that possibility in the context of the projected comprehensive reform of Turkey, and the constitutional revolution in Egypt. It is our belief that in these contexts one can learn both from successes of the new method and also from its failures typified by the Hungarian case that we briefly present. We are unfortunately not optimistic about the success of the new method especially where actors maintain their strong belief in the constituent power of the popular sovereign. This is likely to be the case in revolutions, but can happen in reform or even during the last state of the post-sovereign method itself.

Post-sovereign constitution-making in Hungary : after success, partial failure, and now what?

Abstract This article reconstructs a model of ‘post-sovereign constitution-making’, namely, a multi-stage, democratic model with round table or multi-party negotiations as its centre piece, involving two constitutions with free elections in between, and overall enforcement through a Constitutional Court. This is the model that was more or less perfected in South Africa in the 1990s. In comparison, Hungary, the empirical object of the study, is seen as an imperfect realisation, because the final stage, not provided for in the interim Constitution, was not completed in a democratic process. The author thus sees the role of the Hungarian Constitutional Court as compensatory, and inevitably weakening, given the weak legitimating background provided by an incomplete process. A case in point is the jurisprudence of constitutional amendments. In light of the inherited amendment rule, the Constitution of the regime change could only be reliably protected if the Hungarian Constitutional Court adopted one or another version of amendment review, in the path of the Indian ‘basic structure’ doctrine. The article tries to show that a fourfifths rule concerning constitutional replacement, adopted during an unsuccessful effort at constitution-making, could be a textual support for such a review. Subsequent to the conclusion of this research, the new right-wing Hungarian Parliament abolished the fourfifths rule, by using the two-thirds amending rule. This, in the author’s view, is prima facie unconstitutional.