ABSTRACT
On first glance, the people’s illiberal potential depends on the general availability of illiberal representations of popular sovereignty, the facility with which such representations can be instrumentalized for illiberal purposes, and on their capacity to cause damage to liberal democracy. What counts as liberal – as well as democratic, majoritarian, and popular – hinges not only on the theoretical conceptions of popular sovereignty and liberal democracy, but also on the preconceptions that those adjectives tend to evoke when conjoined with other, less theoretically prominent, but nonetheless practically consequential notions. No such possibility is recognized by those who, in using those notions, also uncritically rely on geological, medicinal, and astronomical metaphors of “decay,” “regression,” or “disfiguration” to articulate the nature of the threat that illiberal “abuses” of popular sovereignty pose to liberal democracy. With this in mind, this chapter suggests that it might be better to confront the issue of the people’s (il)liberal potential in a more panoramic perspective: not on the basis of pre-existing notions of what (or who) counts as liberal (or democratic) but by asking how “the people,” however defined, might appear in the imaginations of liberals and illiberals alike.
