Defending what is yet to come: Towards a critical theory of democratic defense

Certainty about the robustness of democracy has given way to a widely diagnosed crisis of democracy. There are increasing calls to defend democratic institutions against those who seek their formally democratic abolishment. But safeguarding democracy, it is argued, paradoxically requires restraining democratic transformation. This dissertation argues that this ‘democratic paradox’ is misconceived. Radical transformation and institutional preservation are not mutually exclusive. Fears of democratic self-abolishment should give way to a normative theory of institutional preservation that remains compatible with radical transformation. This claim is sustained in three steps. Firstly, the history of militant democracy is reconstructed from the interbellum onward. The dissertation redescribes militant democracy (Schmitt, Loewenstein, Popper) as institutionally conservative and normatively aporetic. Its contemporary exponents contradictorily commit to democratic transformation while structurally imposing on it institutional limits. Secondly, it is argued that procedural and radical democratic thought (Kelsen, Urbinati, Mouffe, Rancière), despite divergent preferences for institutional transformation or preservation, do not overcome the democratic paradox. Reproducing the antagonism between institutional preservation and radical change, they inherit militant democracy’s aporia. Thirdly, early Critical Theory is developed as an alternative. Its trajectory from immanent to negative critique carries unheeded conceptual resources that contest the presumed antagonism between radical transformation and institutional preservation. The dissertation develops two connected conceptual claims accordingly: (1) the residual normativity of existing institutions lies in their capacity for self-abolishment (which enables radical change); (2) the outcomes of radical transformation are normatively undecidable (it may produce liberation or catastrophe). These propositions give way to a negative institutionalism that reconstructs and defends only the institutionalized potential for
self-abolishment. It thereby overcomes the opposition between institution and radical change.