The reason of democracy: a preliminary note on political consent

Abstract

The surmise underlining this introductory note is that an examination of the forms taken by political consent, apprehended as the reason of democracy, may grant the benefit of historical depth to the transformations the corporeality of democracy, that is European nation-states, both Western and Eastern, had to cope with in the period between the junctures of 1945 and 1989, but also before and beyond. The assumption of the paper is that the language of political consent was, and still is idiomatic, dialectal and rarely submitted to a universally accepted rule and that the nation-state may not be, the only imaginable incarnation of democratic expectations. Regarded as an autonomous and discriminating response given by ordinary citizens to the different appeals of democracy (electoral, liberal, constitutional, popular, pluralist, populist), consent might be a research object that is worth being imagined, contrived and probed.