ABSTRACT
The theoretical trench warfare about the meaning of 'the people'—its sovereignty, ultimate authority, constituent power, and the right to self-determination—rages on. From the ideological point of view, three classes of conjurers—radical democrats, liberal democrats, and deliberative democrats—exert an inordinate influence over the visions of 'the people' within a wider Eurocentric social imaginary, on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter explores the implications of that which unites them: their role in the hope-, purpose-, anxiety-, and desire-management of all those who invest their expectations in the vocabulary of peoplehood in the struggles on the ground. The radical-democratic conjuration of peoplehood is essentially Schmittian. 'The people' that emerges from such Schmittian imagination is not just a collective self-governing body, but also a god-like sovereign, who appears on the scene, and constitutes a constitutional order ex nihilo.
