Abstract

The core argument put forward in this article is a criticism of the idea of politics undergirding the revival of republicanism. The first two sections take issue with Pettit's and Bellamy's versions of constitutional republicanism and they show why and how both authors are not taking politics very seriously. The third section introduces constituent power as a necessary feature of a republican theory and the last section, by exploring this intuition, proposes a reflexive understanding of republican politics. The main tenet of this reflexivity is a radical understanding of disagreement, which turns constituent power into the foundation of republican politics.