Rousseau and Carl Schmitt: methodological affinities in the genesis of the concept of popular sovereignty and democratic ideas

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate the common methodological origin of Rousseau’s and Carl Schmitt’s concept of popular sovereignty, understood as the political authority whose legitimacy rests on a genuinely substantive democratic principle. First of all, it will try to prove how their works are the expression of a common reaction to the formalism of liberal dogmatics that methodologically identifies formal legality with political legitimacy. Thus, Rousseau criticises a statement of natural law from Locke that legitimises social and political inequality and justifies the bourgeois rule of property owners. Schmitt defies legal positivism, whose normativism would have obscured the true sociological value of power and sovereignty. Secondly, once addressed the critique of the political representations that deny the substantive character of the sovereign people, the article studies the way in which both authors formulate an alternative methodological proposal. Special attention will be paid to the way the Schmittian elaboration, in the context of the crisis of liberalism, incorporates a reinterpretation of Rousseau’s critique.