Neuhann, Esther Author aut Text xx# 2020 Verfassungsblog 2020-12-20 eng

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In her book Constituent Power: A History (2020), Lucia Rubinelli aims to provide a history of the “language” or, more precisely, the “words ‘constituent power’” (14). She narrates this impressive history along five historical key moments, from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès to Hannah Arendt. In the following, I will, first, comment on the methodology Rubinelli adopts throughout the book and, second, focus on the fifth historical moment “Arendt and the French Revolution” (Chapter 5). In this chapter, Rubinelli reconstructs Arendt’s critique of “sovereignty as a theoretical category and as a principle of political organization” (177) and her suggestion to replace it with ‘constituent power’. It is an original contribution of the book to show that Arendt’s argument is in line with the sense in which Sieyès originally put forward ‘constituent power’ – although Arendt herself framed it as a critique of Sieyès which, according to Rubinelli, is rooted in her inaccurate reading of Sieyès through Carl Schmitt. CC BY-SA 4.0 Neuhann, Esther funded by the government Constituent Power Hannah Arendt Lucia Rubinelli 342 https://staging.verfassungsblog.de/constituent-power-a-history-of-what-exactly/ 2366-7044 Max Steinbeis Verfassungsblog gGmbH 10.17176/20201220-172706-0 201220 10.17176/20201220-172706-0 Converted from MARCXML to MODS version 3.7 using MARC21slim2MODS3-7.xsl (Revision 1.140 20200717)