Council democracy in local elections? A case of constitutio libertatis in Commercy, France
(2022) Council democracy as an alternative to representative democracy — Location: University of Aberdeen (23.June.2022)
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- Abstract
- This article proposes to analyse the experimentation of direct democracy that took place in Commercy, a small sub-prefecture of the Meuse region in the French Grand-Est. The case analysis begins with the birth of the Yellow Vests movement, and continues through to the project of presenting a citizens’ list for the municipal elections in order to give power to the citizens’ assembly. Developed in the early days of the movement in the form of assemblies operating in direct democracy, this experiment is partly inspired by Murray Bookchin's communalist theory. Communalism, also known as libertarian municipalism, proposes that public power be exercised by local popular assemblies open to the population of the municipality, which would deliberate and decide on a face-to-face basis. For matters beyond the boundaries of the municipality, these municipalities would organise themselves into a confederation, that is a network of councils of recallable delegates, mandated imperatively by their respective assemblies, to administer the policies decided by those assemblies (Bookchin, 2015; Cossart, Sauvêtre, 2020). This question of whether public power should be exercised by a class of professional rulers, or by the assembled people, to which communalism answers with the latter, has run through political theory since ancient times. The same answer as communalism is also proposed by Arendt’s vision of council democracy and her account of the lost treasures of revolution. She analyses how modern revolutions failed to realise “constitutio libertatis” — the attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people as free and equal citizens would take their common concerns into their own hands. While studying the historical and conceptual differences between communalism and council democracy deserves further research, this paper limits itself to focus on how an experiment in the field asks and answers questions that both strands of political theory will encounter: that of the constituent paradox.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2022). Council democracy in local elections? A case of constitutio libertatis in Commercy, France. Council democracy as an alternative to representative democracy, University of Aberdeen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/240115