Constituent Power

* Book: Antonio Negri. Le Pouvoir Constituant. Essai sur les alternatives de la modernite. PUF.

Review

By Michel Bauwens, 2003:

- This is complex book of political theory, on the original power of creating states and new social orders and its subsequent dilutions in constituted power, i.e. constitutions, judicial power and other institutions. Negri identifies a genealogy in modern thought which recognizes constituent power as radical power, going from Machiavelli through Spinoza to Marx. The notion of constitutent power is opposed by Negri to that of sovereignity which he clearly rejects. First Negri reviews the different attempts to neutralize 'constituent power', then he examines Machiavelli who turns out to be a democratic author, stressing the role of the people in good government. In fact, Machiavelli clearly identifies the the power of the Prince with the power of the multitude. He then looks at the reception of these ideas in different countries as time progresses.

- Negri then goes on to discuss James Harrington, the 'first English civic humanist' and 'machiavellian'. His 'anti-feudalism' is not 'pre-capitalist' but another line of modernity insisting on socialized property. The logic is: 'property creates power creates people in arms'. In the whole book, Negri focuses all the time between 'virtue' and 'fortune', and how the first creates the Republic, that is continuously corrupted by the latter.

- After Harrington, Negri discusses the American Revolution, focusing on how constituent power was neutralized in the Constitution.