Alexander Somek from the University of Vienna will speak at the next meeting of the Maastricht Foundations of Law Colloquia. His lecture is titled: ‘Republicanism and Liberal Democracy: Transformations of our Political Predicament.’
There is currently much lament in genteel circles about the impending demise of ‘liberal democracy’. But do we really know what we are talking about? 

Historically, this modern type of democracy emerges from overwriting the republican focus on mixing constitutional regimes with the language of popular sovereignty. What is thereby rendered obscure is that constitutions are supposed to bridge or to overcome the ‘republican split’ between – putting it in Italian Renaissance parlance – the grandi and popolo. While, according to the republican tradition, a mixed polity was considered key thereto, modern constitutional law accorded this function to the election of representatives. Yet the republican split, though rendered invisible by modern constitutional law, retains its tenacity and leads to substitute attempts to resolve it. The chain of substitutions runs from representation to the political party system and, finally, to courts.