Andrew Arato

This book focuses on Andrew Arato’s democratic theory and its relevance to contemporary issues such as processes of democratization, civil society, constitution-making, and the modern Executive. Andrew Arato is -both globally and disciplinarily- a prominent thinker in the fields of democratic theory, constitutional law, and comparative politics, influencing several generations of scholars. This is the first volume to systematically address his democratic theory. Including contributions from leading scholars such as Dick Howard, Ulrich Preuss, Hubertus Buchstein, Janos Kis, Uri Ram, Leonardo Avritzer, Carlos de la Torre, and Nicolás Lynch, this book is organized around three major areas of Arato´s influence on contemporary political and social thought. The first section offers a comprehensive view of Arato’s scholarship from his early work on critical theory and Western Marxism to his current research on constitution-making and its application. The second section shifts its focus from the previous, comprehensive approach, to a much more specific one: Arato´s widespread influence on the study of civil society in democratization processes in Latin America. The third section includes a previously unpublished work, ‘A conceptual history of dictatorship (and its rivals,)’ one of the few systematic interrogations on the meaning of a political form of fundamental relevance in the contemporary world. Critical Theory and Democracy will be of interest to critical and social theorists, and all Arato scholars.

How is it possible, that after the exhilarating start of democratic transitions in the late 1980s and 1990s, today authoritarian–populist options seem to be emerging in many new, as well as old democracies? Why does populism, that in most of its historical varieties has been anti-institutional and anti-procedural, turn to constitution making and constitutional rhetorics as one of its main arenas of contestation? The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start with what I mean by ‘populism’. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provides the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits according to me have been intensified in many of the new democracies. I continue by stressing populisms own deficits as the reason for turning to the constituent power. I end with a consideration of what liberal democrats can do to address the causes of the populist temptation.

The article is an exposition of lukacs' famous 'verdinglichung' chapter of "history and class consciousness." after a brief discussion of the historical roots of the concept of 'thingification', i try to follow the dialectic of the concept from two starting points: first, from that of lukacs' rediscovery of the subject-object dialectic in german classical philosophy and in marx, and second, from that of lukacs' 'critique' of sociology, of the categories of max weber, of the immediately given world of bourgeois society. the article culminates with a distinction between philosophy of praxis and dialectical social theory, and with a proposal toward a social theory

Spurred by recent governmental transitions from dictatorships to democratic institutions, this highly original work argues that negotiated civil society-oriented transitions have an affinity for a distinctive method of constitution making— one that accomplishes the radical change of institutions through legal continuity. Arato presents a compelling argument that this is the preferred method for rapidly establishing viable democratic institutions, and he contrasts the negotiated model with radical revolutionary change. This exceptionally engaging work will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, constitutional law, and East European studies

Thirty or even fifty years ago, the apology on the Left for the Soviet Union was direct. Today no one can read what the Webbs wrote in the '30s or what Sartre wrote in the early ‘50s without laughing, though we should recall the seriousness of the crimes they managed to represent — and, for the relevant audience, successfully. We have come a long way from all that, or so it seems. Actually, left-wing writing these days on the whole is still apologetic — even if in indirect forms. Of the two major types of exercises in mystification, the one postulates an essential parallelism between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as forms of domination, as centers of imperial systems, in one recent version as “exterminist” social formations