Law, Democracy and the Crisis of Foundation

This book addresses the crisis of the juridical-political foundation within contemporary democracies. Although modernity is the age of foundation, it is marked by what Carl Schmitt referred to as a peculiar ‘dialectic of presence and absence’ – and this is true even for those theories that seem to be the greatest supporters of the necessity of some kind of foundation, such as the Hobbesian commonwealth. This instability of foundation is inherent in the concept of ‘political representation’, whic