Anthony Lawrence Borja

Recent pluralist accounts of the People and popular sovereignty, defining it as either a performance or a process, are divorced from the realities of mass disempowerment. By shifting emphasis from who to what, these notions of the People, though seemingly unconcerned with the problem of positing this entity as a collective agent, have actually posited the politically active as the concrete subject of the People. Consequently, I argue that these recent theories exclude the reality of mass disempowerment within contemporary democracies by marginalizing agency, presupposing empowerment, and assuming the resonance of the various representations of the People. Simply put, they suffer from an activist-centric bias that renders the politically alienated, disempowered, and inactive as irrelevant entities, a nameless shadow lurking behind analyses of popular power. Hence, my task is to clear the ground for a more comprehensive theory of the People and Popular Sovereignty by exposing the roots, limits, and costs of this activist-centric bias.

The issue of statecraft is central to the works of Machiavelli, and his primary contribution to contemporary practice and theorizing is an exposition of the inevitable complexities behind this human endeavor. States rise and fall because of failures in leadership tied with the moving contours of the political arena itself. Key to Machiavelli’s analysis of statecraft is the internal relations between Virtù and Fortuna. I intend to show that Machiavelli’s contribution to the modern notion of state-building is not only an exposition of the innards of court politics, but also a development of the classical notion of virtù-Fortuna into a vital component that gave statecraft and, to an extent, politics in general its spirit of eternal motion. Machiavelli paved the way for a modern notion of statecraft by exposing the primary problem that gives it meaning through its inherent irresolvability—statecraft as determined by the convergence of virtù as a conscious effort with the basket of constantly moving objective factors we call Fortuna. Specifically, I argue that virtù and its dimensions seek to penetrate Fortuna and expose its concrete components, hence, making these factors recognizable, understandable, predictable, and eventually, vulnerable to acts of establishing and sustaining control.

The beating heart of democratic politics is a set of paradoxes revolving around the issues of popular identity and sovereignty. Populist ideology appeals to the sovereign people, consequently engaging the democratic paradox in a manner akin to either moving an immoveable object or catching something in constant flux. Marginal consideration has been given by scholars to populism’s relationship with the democratic paradox, with current notions of the former seeing it more as a result of the latter. Thus, by recasting the democratic paradox as a question and analysing its relationship with populist ideology, this article seeks to clarify the supposedly ambiguous relationship between populism and democracy. In analysing the transformative processes within populism by using early Peronism and Italian Fascism as case studies, it argues that as the ideological embodiment of the democratic paradox populist ideology preserves and expresses the paradox in the public sphere.