ABSTRACT
The works of Max Weber and Cornelius Castoriadis offer an analysis of political modernity that highlights conflicting models of power and the political, and, more importantly, the fragility of democratic forms of politics. Weber’s The City and Castoriadis’s study On Plato’s Statesman both elucidate a continual confrontation and conflict between at least three different models of power that have been bequeathed to modernity – the royal or stately-sovereign, the oligarchic and the democratic. By way of an examination of Weber’s study on medieval city states and the model of Athenian democracy drawn on by Castoriadis, this chapter will discuss these issues from the vantage point of [modern] constitutional republics in order to draw out the interrelation between the circulation of power and the contingency of democratic political forms. In Castoriadis’s terms the first two models of the royal-sovereign and the
oligarchic are heteronomous, while the democratic is more or less synonymous with what he terms second-order autonomy.1 In contrast, Weber equates the royal-sovereign form with patrimonialism, but it could also be seen as encompassing the modern bureaucratic state because the principle of rulership over subjects occurs in formal legally rational terms and is also equivalent to legitimate domination. The oligarchic and the democratic, for Weber, are forms of non-legitimate domination when they are found outside the realm of the state, that is, for example, in the polois of Greek antiquity and the Renaissance cities. This chapter will concentrate on Weber’s and Castoriadis’s respective versions, interpretations and critiques of these models, especially if cities rather than states are taken as paradigm cases for an analysis of not only the past but also the present.2 Moreover, these two studies indicate that autonomy and democracy are fragile ‘regimes’ (Castoriadis), that is, their creation, success and longevity are indeterminate and contingent and there is no guarantee of their perpetuation. In order to draw out these themes, then, this chapter proceeds in three
parts: first, the central themes underlying the studies by Weber and Castoriadis will be discussed in terms of the central notions of explicit power, the political and politics. Second, Weber’s analysis of medieval city states will be
investigated in terms of competing models of democratic breakthroughs, corporatism, the circulation of power and the closure of politics; and finally, Castoriadis’s study of Plato’s Statesman will draw out the creation of autonomy, heteronomy and the perpetual conflict between open and closed social and political imaginaries, and the consequences for democratic formations.
