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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Political Theory



H12(b) - Early Modern Constitutional and Democratic Theory

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 02:00pm to 03:30pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Cameron Cotton-O'Brien (McGill University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Eli Friedland (Concordia University)


Session Abstract: This panel features a set of papers exploring themes in early modern constitutional and democratic theory. The panel’s papers focus on the writings of two pivotal figures in early modern political thought: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Bodin. Geoffrey Sigalet’s paper explores how Rousseau understood judicial discretion in his theory of the separation of powers. Arash Abizadeh explains and critiques Rousseau’s subordination of political equality to the agency of a sovereign “people”. Juliette Roussin critiques epistemological readings of Rousseau that disconnect his concept of the “general will” from the enactments of particular political communities. Catherine Power explores the ways in which Jean Bodin’s idea of sovereignty can constitutionally constitute and constrain political power. Together, these papers demonstrate the depth and difficulty of early modern thinking about the nature of constitutional and democratic politics.


On the “Puerile Lure” of Rousseau’s Separation of Powers: Geoffrey Sigalet (McGill Univserity / Stanford University)
Abstract: Rousseau identified sovereignty with the direct power of the people to legislate while separating the administration of law from this assembly. In this separation of powers there is a tension between constraining the discretion of administrative officials so that they do not function as privileged legislators, and the insistence that technical forms of reasoning about administrating the laws will dominate the legislative power of citizens. Rousseau castigates the “puerile” English concern with detailed laws and the techniques of reasoning employed by judges and “swarms of lawyers”. He recommends that laws be “clear and simple” and that judges and lawyers be subject to rotation in order to ensure that they exercise their functions not as professionals but by “good sense.” The problem is, however virtuous judges and lawyers may be, their adjudication according to “good sense” could threaten citizens’ legislative power. I explore how Rousseau’s praise for English examples of due process (e.g. the prosecution of John Wilkes’ and the printers of The North Briton) and the Royal “negative” in his Letters Written from the Mountain further complicate the tension between legislative power and judicial discretion. I argue that in his ‘circumstances of politics’ Rousseau shifted his hostility against detailed laws and technical reasoning towards abuses of discretion. He defends technical law in cases where it is used to politically contest abuses of administrative discretion. But this balances powers against one another and collapses his theory back into what he sought to avoid by subordinating all power to the people’s legislative


Popular Sovereignty vs Democracy: Or, How Rousseau Killed Democracy: Arash Abizadeh (McGill University)
Abstract: The democratic tradition is constituted by a dual commitment: to people’s political agency and their political equality. My thesis is that democratic theory went off the rails in the modern period thanks to its fusion with two other, distinct ideological currents: sovereignty theory as initially articulated by Bodin, and social contract theory, which was fused together with sovereignty theory in Hobbes. Rousseau’s subsequent fusion of these two currents with the democratic tradition culminated in the subordination of political equality to political agency, and the equation of political agency with popular sovereignty. The turn to popular sovereignty replaces the previous conception of democratic agency—as people’s participation and influence in decision-making—with agency understood as consent, which, as Hobbes knew and Rousseau illustrates, is perfectly compatible with no popular participation or influence. The theory of popular sovereignty is at once the ideological source of democracy’s collapse into nationalism and populism and, by eviscerating genuine popular political agency qua participation and influence, elite capture of political institutions.


Volonté générale et majorité infaillible dans le Contrat social : Juliette Roussin (Université de Montréal)
Abstract: Plusieurs défenseurs d’une approche épistémique de la démocratie ont récemment proposé une lecture épistémique de l’argument de Rousseau en faveur de la règle de majorité dans le Contrat social, IV, 2. Pour ces philosophes, la démocratie tire une part importante de sa légitimité du fait qu’elle favorise la prise de bonnes décisions politiques. En distinguant entre volonté générale et volonté de tous et en suggérant que la valeur d’obligation de la volonté majoritaire découle de ce qu’elle porte les caractères de la volonté générale, Rousseau ferait figure de « saint patron » des démocrates épistémiques (Schwartzberg 2015). Je montre que ce patronage n’est possible qu’au prix d’une torsion du propos de Rousseau. Certes, la lecture épistémique permet de rendre compte d’aspects cruciaux du texte de manière plus satisfaisante que les lectures concurrentes, conférant notamment un sens non sophistique à l’affirmation de l’erreur de la minorité. Mais l’application trop rapide des catégories de la philosophie contemporaine au raisonnement rousseauiste produit aussi un contresens sur le statut ontologique de la volonté générale. Contre une lecture épistémique forte qui y voit une norme de justice indépendante de la communauté dans laquelle elle s’exprime, je montre que la volonté générale se caractérise par une double idiosyncrasie. Elle est ancrée dans une communauté socio-historique particulière et, si les conditions de l’État légitime sont réunies, elle n’est jamais exprimée que par le plus grand nombre des membres de l’État. Loin d’être universelle et abstraite, la volonté générale émerge toujours d’une association particulière, dans des conditions définies.


Between God and History: Bodinian Sovereignty and the Laws of Power: Catherine Power (Glendon College)
Abstract: Jean Bodin is famously known as the father of sovereignty and the theological politics of law associated with it. Bodin’s sovereign-as-law-maker is not merely an office responsible for the passing of formal laws, but is implicated at a deep ontological level to the very nature of law qua law and what distinguishes law from norms or rights within a Bodinian framework. While the concept and political theology of sovereignty is sometimes construed as necessarily in tension with any other form of law, scholars such as Daniel Lee or Benjamin Straumann have compellingly demonstrated some of the ways that Jean Bodin’s germinal sovereign exists within, rather than opposed to, the contours of an external constitutional framework dictating the preservation of property and contracts. Yet, if Bodin’s sovereignty, which otherwise serves as the metaphysical distinction that makes law binding as law, is indeed subject to constitutional law, the problem of the nature of law that sovereignty might be seen to have addressed re-emerges. Is there a Bodinian constituent power and, if so, what is its nature and providence? This paper focuses on Bodinian constitutional law and argues that we can only begin to pin down force of constitutional power by reflecting on the relationship between history and sovereignty at play within Bodin’s framework.




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