The Sovereignty of the Demos as ‘True Democracy’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on democracy–and ‘true democracy’ in particular—as the ‘self-determination of the people’ and the ‘solved riddle of all constitutions’. In this sense, sovereignty of the demos is presented as the (self-)legislative process par excellence, through which the Marx of democracy moved towards the ‘land’ of communism as the ‘riddle of history solved’. Dealing with the sovereignty of the demos as the nucleus of ‘true democracy’ and raising issues such as Marx’s critique of bureaucracy and the Marxian conception of ‘universal suffrage’, in this part of the book I aim at a further elaboration of ‘true democracy’ as a pre-communist version of a society without a (political) state.