The Time of Popular Sovereignty

“‘The people’ is both a perennial feature and an enduring problem in our understanding of democracy. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo clears away centuries of conceptual clutter, showing a keen awareness of the paradoxes that plague this project. Her solution is refreshing: stop thinking of a democratic people as a goal to be achieved, and start thinking of it as an ongoing process. Her dynamic view of democracy charts exciting terrain in democratic theory and moves our thinking in provocative new directions.”

—Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine

“If the paradox of political founding is an enduring one, we would do well to look for alternative formulations that do not pretend to resolve it but that show us what politics can be in the light of its ineliminability. Paulina Ochoa Espejo does precisely this by conceiving the democratic people as a process rather than an association, its members as relational events rather than discrete individuals, interacting and changing creatively through time. Mainstream democratic theorists will be compelled to engage with this work, which shows effectively how their pretensions to legitimate democratic practices continue to rely on fictions they claim to have moved beyond.”

—Nathan Widder, University of London

“In this unusual and original work, Paulina Ochoa Espejo analyzes a foundational concept of all modern political thought: the people. She brings aesthetic as well as metaphysical theories of process to bear on this concept, resulting in some astonishing observations about temporality and ‘the people.'”

—Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

“How can ‘the people’ govern when they are always changing and most of them never meet? By depicting ‘the people’ as ever in process, Paulina Ochoa Espejo provides fresh answers to some of the most perplexing problems of modern democratic theory. An important and stimulating contribution.”

—Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania