Democracy in the twenty-first century faces a number of major challenges, populism, neoliberalism and globalisation being three of the most prominent. This book examines such challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have been altered at several key historical intervals since 1945. It demonstrates that the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood, such as elections, have always been complemented by civic, cultural, educational, socio-economic and constitutional institutions that mediate between citizens and state authority. Rearticulating critical theory with a contemporary focus, the book shows why a sociological approach is urgently needed to address conceptual deficits and explain how the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood need to be complemented and updated in new ways today.

Darrow Schecter is Professor of Critical Theory and Modern European History at the University of Sussex

Introduction1 Reconsidering the theoretical preconditions of modern democratic statehood: on mediated unity and overarching legal-political form2 Mediated unity in question: on the relation between law, politics, and other social systems in modern societies3 Functional differentiationand mediated unity in question: looming constitutional conflicts between the de-centralist logic of FD and the bio-political steering of austerity and global governance4 Dilemmas of contemporary statehood: on the sociological paradoxes of weak dialectical formalism and embedded neo-liberalism5 Re-thinking inclusion beyond unity and mediation beyond discretionary steering: on social systems and societal constitutionsConclusion: democratic state, capitalist society, or dysfunctional differentiation?Index