Lefort and Rancière on democracy and sovereignty

1) Mythologies of the demos

Lefort’s democratic theory is based on an ontological distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, which explains the forms of society. ‘Politics’ is the political–social order. It includes regimes and constitutions, institutional and individual practices, enforcement, etc. As such, it constitutes the empirical field of study covered by political science. As for ‘the political’, which is the object of political philosophy, it is the symbolic level on which a society conceives itself and gives itself legitimacy (Lefort 1986, 282). Therefore, collective existence has two dimensions, one concrete and the other symbolic: ‘There are two poles of experience and two poles of knowledge, and the gap is irreducible’ (Lefort 2000, 138). ² Transformations of societies manifest not only as successions of institutions, events and human relations, but also as successions of symbolizations that give meaning and authority to those institutions: ‘The fact that something like politics should have been circumscribed within social life at a given time has in itself a political meaning, and a meaning which is not particular, but general. This even raises the question…of the essence of what was once termed the “city”. The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured’ (Lefort 1988, 11). The political is the constitutive condition of politics in a double movement of apparition and concealment: Being the imagination of its mode of institution, it is the essence of a society, which allows that society to exist but is not consciously acknowledged in political practices.

Rancière proposes another distinction, which is based on three elements rather than two: police, politics and the political. At first sight (only), ‘police’ seems to correspond to what Lefort calls ‘politics’. It consists of government, the creation of consent, the institution of hierarchies, the distribution of shares, places and functions. ³ ‘Politics’, on the other hand, is the disruption of ‘police’ – an array of processes that are heterogeneous to it. Politics ‘consists of a set of practices guided by the supposition that everyone is equal and by the attempt to verify that supposition. The proper name for this set of practices remains emancipation’ (Rancière 1992, 58). Police always denies the demands of those who challenge the organization of things, and, hence, it ‘wrongs’ their claim to equality. As a result, politics is an interruption that reveals and deploys a wrong or a fundamental dispute (Rancière 1999, 13). Politics, however, is not merely the rise of the underprivileged against the privileged, but the entrance of the underprivileged into discourse, and the beginning of their visibility: ‘Politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity’ (Rancière 1999, 11). It reveals subjects as part of the sovereign people even if their sovereignty is refused them (Rancière 1999, 41). As such, emancipation is a mode of agency and subjectivization against the identity conferred by the consensus, by the police. It is a disidentification, which Chambers calls a ‘queering of the political order’, a ‘commitment to a marginality that cannot merely be included within the dominant frame of the current police order’ (Chambers 2013, 165-168). As a result, the distinction between police and politics is not ontological. As Rancière emphasizes, ‘the opposition between politics and police goes along with the statement that politics has no “proper” object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of police… politics does not stem from a place outside of the police… (because) there is no place outside of the police’ (Rancière 2011b, 5-6). The distinction between police and politics is aesthetic, by which Rancière means that politics is an experience of configuration or reconfiguration of a specific world, rather than a struggle for power (Rancière 2011b, 7). The field of the aesthetic experience of encounter and confusion between police and politics, namely, between the ‘order of domination and the disorder of revolt’, is called ‘the political’ (Rancière 1999, 12).

Lefort’s and Rancière’s understandings of ‘the political’ are based on philosophical stories or mythologies that explain the meaning of democracy as ‘power of the people’. For both, one of these philosophical mythologies derives from Plato’s conception of democracy as anarchic. ⁴ In Laws (690), Plato enumerates six different ‘titles to government [arkhein] and obedience’: of parents over children; of the high-born over the lowly; of elders over the young; of owners over slaves; of the strong over the weak; and of wise men over the ignorant. ⁵ To this list of legitimate forms of authority or rule (arkhê), however, he adds a seventh: that granted ‘by the favor of heaven and fortune’: ‘We bring our men to a casting of lots and call it the most equitable of arrangements that he who has the chance of the lot should rule, and he who misses it retire into the ranks of subjects’ (Plato 1989, 1285). In other words, democracy (where the ruler is chosen by the casting of lots, as was usual in ancient Athens) is the government of those who have no entitlement to govern. By definition, ‘the people’, in whom power rests, consists of those who have no legitimate authority over others. ⁶

Rancière comments: ‘So, democracy is… the state of exception… in which there is no principle for the dividing up of roles… Democracy is the specific situation in which it is the absence of entitlement that entitles one to exercise the arkhê… In this logic the specificity of the arkhê… is destroyed’ (Rancière 2010, 31). What is seen by Plato as nonsense (the fact that a ruler should be unqualified to rule), as ‘inherent vice’ (Rancière 1999, 62), and as a system opposed to any well-organized governance, is seen by Rancière as the very performance of politics: ‘Democracy is not a political regime. As a rupture in the logic of the arkhê, that is, of the anticipation of ruling in its disposition, it is the very regime of politics itself’, namely, the interruption of the current order of things (Rancière 2010, 31). Rancière, therefore, uses Plato’s definition of democracy to argue that democracy is ‘the institution of politics as such’ (Rancière 2010, 50). For Lefort, it is ‘the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy’ (Lefort 1988, 16). Lefort emphasizes that, for Plato, democracy is a situation of pure freedom in which all legitimate sources of authority (the authority of parents over children, etc.) are challenged. Accordingly, democracy is instituted by a ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’ (Lefort 1988, 19), which gives legitimacy to a ‘debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end’ (Lefort 1988, 39).

To this understanding of the anarchic essence of democracy, which is based on a conception of the people as unqualified and undetermined, Lefort adds a story of the emergence of modern democracies based on a connection between the concept of power and that of the ‘political body’ inherited from Ernst Kantorowicz’s medieval history and Jules Michelet’s history of the French Revolution. Lefort argues that from the perspective of the ‘forms of society’, namely, of ‘the political’, modern democracy is a reversal of the monarchic imagination. In medieval and early modern times, power was ‘embodied in the person of the prince’. Paralleling the Christian conception of the body of Christ, the king’s body was understood as a mediator between God and human beings and, ‘being subject to the law and placed above laws, he condensed within his body, which was at once mortal and immortal, the principle that generated the order of the kingdom’ (Lefort 1988, 17). ⁷ The French Revolution, however, transformed the symbolic structure of power: Louis XVI’s beheading was not only the end of monarchy understood as a certain type of government, but it was also the end of a certain conception of the embodiment of power. With Louis XVI’s death disappears the idea of the incorporation of power in a human body, and because of the ‘amorous identification’ of French society with the king’s body, the possibility of the embodiment of power in society is neutralized with this disappearance. ⁸ From this follows Lefort’s main argument about modern democracy: if democratic society is instituted ‘as a society without a body, as a society which undermines the representation of an organic totality’, then in such a society ‘the locus of power becomes an empty place’ (Lefort 1988, 18: 17). By this Lefort means that, contrary to what is sometimes believed, in modernity democratic power is not shared by all citizens (as in democratic Athens), but belongs to no one (Lefort 2007, 991). As a result, popular sovereignty consists of keeping the realm of power symbolically empty:

The legitimacy of power is based on the people; but the image of popular sovereignty is linked to the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it. Democracy combines these two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people; on the other, it is the power of nobody. And democracy thrives on this contradiction. (Lefort 1986, 279)

Thus, Lefort’s work analyses ‘the becoming anonymous of political power’ (Flynn 2012, 16). From the perspective of politics – the organization of collective life – people take turns holding functions that never constitute ownership of power but, rather, a transient and limited exercise of that power. As Žižek puts it, ‘the emptiness of the place of power is a distance that makes every empirical bearer of power deficient, contingent, and temporary’ (Žižek 2006, 559). From the perspective of the political – the essence of society – power is an empty room kept empty by the sovereign citizens whose sovereignty consists precisely in making sure power is never embodied or even shared. This negative definition of sovereignty – which consists neither in coercion nor in mastery over people or institutions – ensures the persistence of democratic power as symbolic void. In other words, sovereignty is connected to power, but negatively.

2) Democracy as political structure

Rancière mentions Lefort’s ‘empty space of power’ in several places, and in particular in his fifth thesis on politics, where he postulates that ‘the interpretation of democracy by Claude Lefort confers a structural sense on the democratic void’ (Rancière 2010, 34). ⁹ He refuses, however, to understand this structural meaning in terms of the historical disincorporation of power (Rancière 1999, 100). Repositioning the motive of emptiness as part of the philosophical mythology of the anarchic essence of democracy, he indicates that the structural void consists of ‘the absence of any legitimacy of power, which is itself constitutive of the very nature of politics’ space’ (Rancière 2010, 34). In so doing, he transforms Lefort’s argument about the mutations of the symbolic forms of society into an ahistorical position: ‘It is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body. And this duality is nothing but the empty supplement by which politics, itself, exists as a supplement to every social (ac)count and as an exception to every logic of domination’. The people has a double body because ‘the people is the supplement that disjoins the population from itself, by suspending all logics of legitimate domination’ (Rancière 2010, 34, 33). ¹⁰ For Rancière, therefore, democracy is not a form of society, as it is for Lefort, but the political per se seen in an ahistorical manner, namely, the confrontation between the disconnection of the people from itself and the order of society.

It is not wrong, however, to interpret Lefort’s conception of democracy as structural. If, indeed, for Lefort, democracy is the result of historical processes, it becomes quickly identified with modernity itself in a synchronic way. Put differently, although Lefort emphasizes the temporal passage from the monarchic embodiment of power to its democratic dis-embodiment, he seems to consider democracy as the only acceptable form of society rather than as another step in its historical continuity. In effect, democracy is not only the modern society, it is also the symbolic configuration that defines everything else, and from which everything follows. Therefore, democracy includes a normative aspect: popular sovereignty committed to maintain the emptiness of power is the political as it should be, namely, that which stimulates the desire for equality and individual freedom (Lefort 2007, 946). In modernity, that which is not democracy is always a deterioration of what is supposed to be. In that context, Lefort describes two processes which lead to the disintegration of democracy, processes which mirror each other. The first occurs when some party or group of people pretends to fill the symbolic void, and to appropriate and embody sovereignty. This phenomenon, Lefort argues, consists of a ‘mutation of a symbolical order’ which is ‘characteristic of totalitarianism’ (Lefort 1988, 13; 1986, 280). According to Müller, Lefort’s analysis fits the practices and aspirations of the recent populist movements and their claims to constitute authentic sovereigns. ¹¹ For Müller, new populism is

ultimately not about claims along the lines that ‘we want a little more democracy – especially direct democracy – and a little less liberalism, or the rule of law, or constitutionalism.’ For in theory, a populist and hence highly partisan constitution can be said fully to express the permanent unitary will of the people – which is to say, some people of the people. Rather, using Lefort’s framework, the pure people, or, in fact, the image of a pre-procedural people, as represented by a party or a single leader, will seek to occupy democracy’s empty space of power. (Müller 2014, 488)

The second process by which democracy disintegrates occurs when the location of power suddenly grows to be not only symbolically empty, but really empty. In these circumstances, those who hold political functions are regarded as ‘mere ordinary individuals, as forming a faction at the service of private interests and, by the same token, legitimacy collapses throughout society. The privatization of groups, of individuals and of each sector of activity increases: each strives to make its individual or corporatist interest prevail. Carried to an extreme, there is no longer a civil society’ (Lefort 1986, 279). This second process is engendered by neoliberalism (Lefort 2007, 941, 946).

This being said, it is hard to find in Lefort tools to resist the problems of current democracies. For him, indeed, in modernity problematic societies are never democratic: they emerge from a destruction of democracy’s symbolic void and, hence, from a transformation of the political. He recognizes that ‘democratic institutions have constantly been used to restrict means of access to power, knowledge and the enjoyment of rights to a minority… [and that] the emergence of an anonymous power facilitated the expansion of state power (and, more generally, the power of bureaucracies)’ (Lefort 1988, 19). However, compared to his underlying consistent claim that problematic societies are societies with ‘other’ symbolic structures, this criticism of democracy is rare (Lefort 1988, 28). My point is not to disagree with Lefort’s celebration of democratic institutions that aim at maintaining the symbolic void of power. It is to underline that the contradiction between the historical and normative conceptions of democracy hampers our ability to respond to the real problems of actual democracies. Democracy is what should be, but since its symbolic imagination depends on historical processes and on paradigms or the zeitgeist, there seems to be no concrete way to reform or improve empirical situations. For instance, if totalitarianism is based on a mutation of the political imagination, that is, on a new legitimation of collective life, not much can be done to renew the democratic structure. Indeed, how can a society change its own symbolic order? It seems that one can only wait for a change of structural imagination, which depends on historical events (just as the advent of democracy depended on the French Revolution), but which, like all paradigm changes, cannot be prepared or planned. The processes by which a symbolic system is elaborated escape knowledge, consciousness and human agency – because according to Lefort these all depend on that symbolic system (Poltier 1998, 187).

Reconceptualizing Lefort’s idea of the void of power in the sense of ‘non-entitlement’, Rancière regards democracy as ‘the power of the people, the power of those who have no special entitlement to exercise power’ (Rancière 2011a, 79). As such, democracy is the general structure of dissensus – a ‘magnitude that escapes ordinary measurement, this part of those who have no part’ that challenges the general order (Rancière 1999, 15). Democracy is an-archy, the ‘ungovernable on which every government must ultimately find out it is based’ (Rancière 2006, 49). It is not ‘a constitutive and permanent data of social life’ (Confavreux 2019, 6); indeed, it ‘actually happens very little or rarely’ (Rancière 1999, 17). Democracy refers to ‘situations in time [temporalités]’ (Rancière 2011a, 80) that ‘cannot simply be recuperated by majoritarian representative institutions, nor relegated to the terms of a Rawlsian (or other) liberal political theory’ (Chambers 2013, 14). Thus, contrary to Lefort, who does not distinguish between liberal democracies and the structural democracy based on a disincorporation of power, for Rancière the regimes that we call democracies are not democratic. Indeed, they have ‘given up posing as the power of the people’ (Rancière 1999, 96), and, therefore, they should be called ‘postdemocracies’ or ‘consensual democracies’: ‘Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests… This is the actual meaning of what is called consensus democracy’ (Rancière 1999, 102).

It must be stressed that Rancière’s understanding of consensual democracy evolved over time. In texts written after Disagreement, and, in particular, in those reflecting on the aftermath of 9/11, Rancière distinguishes between two forms of consensual democracy. In some countries, consensus still designates one or another version of the welfare state: an overall solidarity trying to arbitrate between conflicting interests. The state intervenes socially, moderating as far as it can the ‘iron-clad law of economic necessity.’ Elsewhere, in countries where the state has renounced its functions of social intervention, consensus takes the new form of insecurity management, as the administration of collective life (Rancière 2010, 106, 107, 108). Thus, interestingly, it is through the lens of insecurity, rather than competition or profit, that Rancière regards the neoliberal consensus which blocks the manifestations of popular power. This consensus is not ‘the egalitarian reign of communication and mass consumption’ commonly understood as ‘democracy,’ but the ‘integration of capitalist, state, military and media powers’ (Rancière 2010, 111).

In any case, Rancière’s understanding of democracy as structural process that casts into question the consensual order completely opens the definition of ‘the people’ to all those who will, at some point, demand to be seen and heard (Rancière 2010, 33). Thus, the power of the people ‘is not the power of the population or of the majority, but the power of anyone at all’ (Rancière 2006, 49). Rancière’s philosophy rejects all reification of society into defined groups or categories. For him, the people is ‘of a particular kind’,

one not definable in terms of ethnic properties, one that does not identify with a sociologically determinable part of a population or with the sum of the groups that go to make up this population. The people through which democracy occurs is a unity that does not consist of any social group but that superimposes the effectiveness of a part of those who have no part on the reckoning of society’s parties. (Rancière 1999, 99)

This reconceptualization of the political dispute prevents the reification of all political actors. Indeed, society is not divided into a ‘people’ and an ‘enemy.’ Rather, it is an ongoing fragmentation incessantly altering the partition of the political realm, which can be induced by anyone, anywhere. As Davidson and Iveson put it, ‘Rancière’s approach rejects the idea that any particular claim or subject is pre-destined to be a/the political actor’ (Davidson and Iveson 2014, 141). Rancière in effect eliminates all possibility of a reification of identity politics, since ‘parties do not exist prior to the declaration of wrong’ (Rancière 1999, 39; see also Çidam 2021, 137). Democracy is neither a conflict over interests or opinions, nor the sudden occasion by which constituted identities can be seen and heard. It is the de-constitution and reconstitution of identities, through the negation of the current order and, hence, of existing identities. If, therefore, ‘the we is neither the source of the action nor its outcome. It emerges alongside the ongoing activity, feeding and being fed by it’ (May 2010, 79), that ‘we’ is incessantly transformed.

Rancière’s reformulation of democracy is a powerful basis for a critique of all forms of police. However, it does not help much in evaluating the differences between the different orders – and between the different disruptions – and eventually choosing between them (Patton 2012, 131). Clearly, Rancière’s focus is not on the possible kinds of police, and, hence, he is not interested in such a choice (although, as mentioned above, he establishes a distinction between two kinds of contemporary consensual democracies). But while admiring his understanding of the disruptive nature of democracy, we must note that he is unclear about what constitutes a valuable collective life. When he claims that ‘we do not live in democracies’ (Rancière 2006, 73) and that ‘our institutions are not democratic, they are representative, hence oligarchic’ (Confavreux 2019, 2), he seems to be interested in the injustices of the current situation rather than in its possible alternatives. As Çidam puts it, ‘Rancière reduces politics to the negative moment of interruption at the expense of the positive moment of constitution’ (Çidam 2021, 140). That is, while there might be better or worse forms of police, the idea of a possible democratic governance is problematic from the beginning (May 2012, 120). ¹² Any order, be it a multicultural, multiracial or queer utopia, will still be a consensus – namely, a police, challenged by definition by democratic insurgence.

In his 2004 essay ‘The Uses of Distinctions’, Rancière tries to deflect these criticisms in arguing that his philosophy does not depict police institutions and egalitarian subjectivity as strictly opposed camps:

From the moment that the word equality is inscribed in the texts of laws and on the pediments of buildings; from the moment that a state institutes procedures of equality under a common law or an equal counting of votes, there is an effectiveness of politics, even if that effectiveness is subordinated to a police principle of distribution of identities, places and functions. The distinction between politics and police takes effect in a reality that always retain a part of indistinction. (Rancière 2010, 207)

These words mean that, in effect, police devices do not produce only domination, and representative institutions can also promote equality. This response, however, entails the risk of reducing the radicalism of Rancière’s philosophy to mere platitude. If the robust distinctions that he carefully formulated to explain emancipation as a disruption of the order of things have no substance in reality, his theses that ‘politics is a specific break with the logic of the arkhê’ and that ‘politics stand in distinct opposition to the police’ (Rancière 2010, 30, 36) are turned upside-down, and we are left with a mild observation about the need to inscribe equality in law. Moreover, if politics and the police work together, why does Rancière say almost nothing about their combined action, namely, about ‘the political’? It seems that in trying to keep his distinction between politics and police from taking disproportionate weight, Rancière reveals ambiguities and weaknesses in his conceptual apparatus (Marchart 2011, 132).

While the radical reduction of democratic politics to disruptive moments of negation makes it hard to understand the constitution of collective life, it has the rare merit of underlining the practices of emancipation effectuated by ordinary people and groups, as expressions of a constantly evolving popular will (Çidam 2021, 142). This aspect of Rancière’s theory is central to the reconceptualization of a sovereignty that avoids reification and essentialism. Therefore, we will here keep the notion of politics as disruptive moments radically distinct from the police, even if the price we must pay for this choice is the impossibility of a sustainable democratic governance.

Thus, what we can say at this stage is that Lefort’s and Rancière’s conceptions of democracy as a structure do not point a way toward reforming or improving existing democratic systems. Lefort convincingly shows that phenomena such as totalitarianism or neoliberal governance are deteriorations of that structure, but he does not propose any remedy for these deteriorations, which, being part of historical configurations, can hardly be opposed by human agency. As for Rancière, in conceptualizing democracy as the emancipatory disruption of all consensual order, he rightly emphasizes the conflictual nature of political life in general, and he opposes all essentialist definitions of ‘the people’. However, despite his attempts to correct this impression, his conception of democracy seems likely to accredit any kind of rebellion against the organization of collective life, and any means of disturbance. Moreover, his focus on dissensus has not much to recommend it as a way to improve the order of things. He is interested ‘in solidarity, emancipation and political participation. But he offers no game plan for how these might best be articulated or how they might come out’ (Panagia 2018, 34). By definition, the various processes of emancipation cannot create a consensus that should not be challenged, since it is the invariable nature of the political to be the meeting between order and disorder.

These difficulties make clear that Lefort’s and Rancière’s depictions of democracy are not blueprints for reform. However, if their portrayals of the essence of democratic life as division and disagreement do not have much to say about the future of existing liberal democracies, they emphasize the necessary role of the people in the configuration of the democratic space, and in the symbolic imagination of that space. It is this role that I here call ‘sovereignty.’ This use of ‘sovereignty’ to describe the political shaping of the public space may appear unexpected, and perhaps even inaccurate in view of the common use of the term for the juridical supreme and absolute right to rule, kill, etc. We will see now, however, that both Lefort and Rancière turn to the notion of rights to describe popular agency. In this, they both inscribe their understandings of democracy into a discourse of legitimacy. Democracy may be a way to keep the realm of power empty (Lefort) or to demonstrate equality in the midst of the existing order of things (Rancière) – but in both cases its demands are based on rights that are in fact supreme and absolute, even if they are not established a priori.

3) Division and rights

Lefort builds his conception of the division of social life on the works of Marx and Machiavelli. If the former describes the split between capital and labor, namely, the antagonism between two classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, his understanding of ideology misrepresents the symbolic dimension of the social domain, which consists of the emptiness of power (Lefort 1986, 185-186; see also 1988, 18). For Lefort, it is impossible ‘to reduce the language in which social practice is articulated to the effects of the labor–capital division’ (Lefort 1986, 186). Moreover, Marx’s thought is oriented toward the end of class struggle, while, according to Lefort, conflict is inherent to collective life. This is why Lefort also turns to Machiavelli, for whom struggles between the desire to dominate and the desire not to be dominated are an inevitable component of the public sphere. For Lefort, this does not mean that there are necessarily two pre-determined groups – those who dominate and those who refuse to be dominated. The political space constitutes itself through multiple processes of division – between state and civil society, between political parties, between social groups – which lead to endless reconfigurations. Accordingly, the fragmentation or ‘originary division of the social body [la division originaire du social]’ results in and is preserved by conflicts mediated by the emptiness of power (Lefort 2012, 454). Like Rancière, therefore, Lefort emphasizes the centrality of dissensus in politics. However, while Rancière would not put dissensus and institutionalized processes in the same category, Lefort claims that thanks to the symbolic emptiness of power, ‘the exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict’ (Lefort 1988, 17).

Thus, Lefort’s conception of political conflict disallows both the Marxist conception of class struggle and the liberal utopia of political and economic contractual consent (Lefort 2007, 565-566). More importantly, his understanding of division removes the danger of the people’s reification: ‘Democracy… defeats the representation of an actual people. The trial of social division, or, more generally, of difference, goes together with the tacit affirmation of people’s unity and identity. But the people does not take shape [ne prend pas corps]’ (Lefort 2007, 468). It does not follow that unity and identity do not exist at all, but that they are open: ‘The disappearance of natural determination, which was once linked to the person of the prince or to the existence of a nobility, leads to the emergence of a purely social society in which the people, the nation and the state take on the status of universal entities, and in which any individual or group can be accorded the same status’ (Lefort 1988, 18). By distinction with the conception of a concentration of power in an individual (monarchy) or in a political party (totalitarianism) that would embody the unity and will of the people, Lefort argues that in democracy unity is not a given but a constant imaginary process (Flynn 2005, 29). Thus, he emphasizes the contradiction between the real divisions inherent to democracy and the non-material unity that permeates its symbolic imagination. While the dream of unity cannot be abolished, social fragmentation prevents it from ever becoming real.

It is therefore the tension between the imagined state of unity and the reality of division that constitutes the possibility of agency. This agency is made possible not thanks to consensus, or the fantasized memory of an original contract, but thanks to processes of opposition and negotiation directed by this imagined state of unity. As a result, if modern democracy institutes a new pole of identity, that of the sovereign people, ‘it would be an error to believe that with that people is reestablished a substantial [substantielle] unity. Unity remains latent’ (Lefort 2007, 466). Thus, Lefort creates a tight connection between sovereignty and conflict: ‘While the people’s sovereignty is affirmed, it is tacitly admitted that the nation is not materially [substantiellement] one. Properly speaking, the nation is not reducible to any community because the use of power remains always dependent on the political conflict, which confirms and sustains the divergence of society’s interests, beliefs and opinions’ (Lefort 2007, 991; see also 1986, 304). Sovereignty is both affirmed and put into question by social divisions.

What does sovereignty mean, however, if it does not include the ownership of power, if it does not correspond to a substantial unity of the people, and if it is cast into doubt by social fragmentation? For Lefort, popular sovereignty is a practice generated by a claim of human rights. This is surprising because, in the liberal tradition, these rights are understood as opposed to and as limiting all sovereignty. Contrary to the liberal tradition, however, Lefort does not regard human rights as moral principles exterior to political concerns – as a unique property of the naked, undetermined individual – but as references or matrices of political performance. Yet this does not mean that, like conservative followers of Maistre or revolutionary followers of Marx, Lefort would ridicule the fiction of the naked human being and claim that concrete individuals are always shaped by their political community or class (Lefort 1986, 257). Focussing on the indetermination of the rights themselves rather than on that of human beings, he argues that it is thanks to their indetermination that these rights create a ‘representation of the universal’ (Lefort 2007, 294, 400) which goes beyond ‘any particular formulation which has been given of them; and this means that their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation, or that acquired rights are necessarily called upon to support new rights’ (Lefort 1986, 258). ¹³

Against critiques of human rights, therefore, Lefort asserts that far from being abstractly individualist, the conception of an undetermined human being creates the idea that human beings cannot be determined by power: ‘This means that it is impossible to allocate specific places to people “in society” as subjects, citizens, bourgeois, proletariat or laborer…’ (Lefort 2007, 418). In other words, the political aspect of human rights does not come from the fact that humans belong to political communities, but from the fact that thanks to their indetermination and universalism, human rights allow people to create political spaces and activities through mobilization, demands and contestation (Lefort 2007, 417-419; Cohen 2013, 128). Therefore, human rights ‘are one of the generative principles of democracy’ (Lefort 1986, 260). They prompt groups, identities and minorities to acquire representation and legitimacy (Lefort 1986, 264). If so, popular sovereignty does not confer ultimate and absolute power over individuals or institutions. It is not a right to kill or punish or decide on the exception, but consists in the formulation and reformulation of demands for rights seen not as the essence of individual interests but as generating the ‘survival and extension of the public space’ mediated by the symbolic emptiness of power (Lefort 1988, 43).

Like Lefort, Rancière understands human rights as being political rather than as belonging to natural beings purged of all identities. As he explains, ‘The Rights of Man are the rights of the demos, which is the generic name of political subjects,’ who concretely obtain these rights when they use them to enact a dissensus against the denial of rights (Rancière 2010, 70-71). As in Lefort’s case, Rancière’s politicization of rights does not put him on the side of critiques against their abstract formalism. ¹⁴ Rancière asserts, indeed, that ‘political subjects’ are not a determination of ‘human beings,’ and, hence, the politicization of rights does not contradict their universalism. Political subjects are not a priori part of definite collectivities, but are ‘surplus names that set out a question or a dispute [litige] about who is included in their count’ (Rancière 2010, 68). It is precisely the difference between the universal ‘man’ and the determined ‘citizen’ which opens ‘an interval for political subjectivation’ in the reconfiguration of the social–political realm that constitutes the dissensus (Rancière 2010, 69). Human rights are but another term for the principles of equality and freedom thanks to which the order of things can be disrupted.

Rancière rejects the tradition of political philosophy that uses the concept of human rights to define atomized individuals in their ontological distance from sovereignty, but he also opposes the idea of a sovereignty dissociated from the individuality of individuals, and which promotes the end of divisions and quarrels. It makes little difference if such sovereignty belongs to a man, a group, or a citizens’ assembly – and therefore, according to Rancière, Hobbes and Rousseau share the same conception of a politics without surplus, and of a sovereignty beyond which there are only non-political, namely, private, interests that must alienate themselves from sovereignty. Both Hobbes and Rousseau refuse the dispute and fragmentation inherent to politics. Therefore, Rancière rejects the concept of sovereignty that is based on a separation between individual interests and the power of the state – a separation that is enabled both by the liberal conception of human rights and by its critique that urges us to choose between the rights of man and those of citizens, and then shows that both choices lead to an impasse. ¹⁵

When he gives historical examples of dissensus, however, and emphasizes the political component of universal rights, Rancière hints at the possibility of a sovereignty which issues from dissensus. For instance, ‘The young black woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who, one day in December 1955, decided to remain in her seat on the bus, which was not hers, in this way decided that she had, as a citizen of the United States, the rights she did not have as an inhabitant of a State that had banned the use of such seats to individuals with one-sixteenth or more parts of “non-Caucasian” blood’ (Rancière 2006, 61). Or, apropos of the French socialist suffragist Jeanne Deroin, who stood in the 1849 French legislative elections at a time when women did not have the right to do so, he writes: ‘She reveals herself and she reveals the subject “women” as necessarily included in the sovereign French people enjoying universal suffrage and the equality of all before the law yet being at the same time radically excluded…. This demonstration is not a simple denunciation of an inconsistency or a lie regarding the universal. It is also the staging of the very contradiction between police logic and political logic which is at the heart of the republican definition of community…’ (Rancière 1999, 41; emphasis added).

We should note that in both these examples, Rancière does not put into question the ideas of a national collective and of unity. In the case of Rosa Parks as in that of Jeanne Deroin, the contradictions between universal rights and discrimination, and between belonging and exclusion, are visible and acknowledged by all (which does not mean that discrimination and exclusion were condemned by all). It was clear that Rosa Parks was American and Jeanne Deroin was French, and that they were nevertheless denied the rights of citizens in their respective countries. This allows us to argue that Rancière’s dissensus does not destroy the idea of unity: Rosa Parks and Jeanne Deroin demanded to be part of a collective agent that they could imagine and from which they felt wrongly excluded. More: it is this idea of unity that justified their feeling of being wronged, and their demand.

Of course, these examples of Rosa Parks and Jeanne Deroin might lead one to argue that Rancière is more interested in an imagined common project or social whole that would always be displaced and divided and, therefore, would never reach any fixed unity, than in any kind of popular sovereignty. His use of rights, however, opens up the possibility that the imagined notion of a social whole is not simply descriptive, but also normative. Rancière not only depicts processes of emancipation; he also highlights their universal value: emancipation is not a morally neutral term, because it is the claim to rights. Certainly, he does not explain how politics should be, but he strongly emphasizes that politics should be. This does not mean that politics is a necessary event, a fate, or a property – indeed it occurs ‘as an always provisional accident within the history of forms of domination’ (Rancière 2010, 35, 37) – but that politics constitutes the significant aspect of collective life. What should be therefore is not only the existence of a common world, but the power to transform that world in reconfiguring and requalifying it. It is that power that I here call sovereignty.

In that context, readers of Rancière sometimes go further than he did with his own theory, and wonder what should happen when a non-national claims rights that she does not have – namely, when there is no visible and acknowledged contradiction between belonging and exclusion, because by definition a non-national has no rights within the demos. Taking Rancière’s theory more radically than he himself did, it seems that such a situation of dissensus would reshape the imagination of unity, and therefore potentially open the practices of sovereignty to all individuals and groups whose actions put the dominant order into question. Although Rancière rarely focuses on such contemporary examples, ¹⁶ his philosophy is – critically – used in feminist and postcolonial theory (Sparks 2016), as well as by scholars who analyze the reconfigurations of political spaces due to the arrival of migrants and refugees (Karaliotas and Kapsali 2021, 402).

The popular sovereignty that Lefort and Rancière, read together, let us start to conceive – although, as noted above, they do not conceptualize it themselves – does not consist of the people’s direct participation in government, or of formal auto-legislation. ¹⁷ Lefort’s and Rancière’s philosophies propose a vision of democracy as an inherently divided political society, in which the people creates and transforms itself and its values, norms and needs through struggle. In other words, the conception of sovereignty that we can draw from their works is the ability, which belongs to the people and to the people only, to shape collective life in repositioning existing actors and in generating new ones. These actors are not passively relocated in the public sphere by private interests or anonymous and diffuse networks of power relations, but they make themselves collectively visible through claims that express universal rights and that aim at a social unity which is, however, constantly put into question. Let us insist that these claims do not presuppose any rational agreement or unanimity ¹⁸ but, on the contrary, express constant disagreement and conflict through which emerge political discourses and practices that seem to promise unity, and are soon altered or replaced by others.

Popular sovereignty, thus understood, consists of the aptitude, based on social fragmentation and symbolic disincorporation, to express and create autonomy. That is, while sovereignty is not seen here as absolutist mastery over people or institutions, it nevertheless consists of the ultimate power to organize the collective space, not according to consent between predefined participants, but on the basis of new and unpredictable events and processes through which new participants emerge. Such a power is an idea, an imagination thanks to which the people does not dissolve in individual interests but endlessly constitutes itself. In such an ‘anarchic’ society, popular sovereignty means that the people is not pre-determined by identities or rentability, but acquires the agency to institute itself and to reconfigure the public space. In this, popular sovereignty cannot be associated with a specific type of regime. Rather, it is the essence of political freedom.