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Ruijie Tan

Title of Research:

The Paradox of Constituent Power: An Arendtian Solution

Brief overview of research topic:

The paradox of constituent power is one of the most important issues in modern constitutionalism. Constituent power is the legitimate source of all constitutions. But the people, which is the entity to exercise the power, usually gains its identity from an established constitutional form. I start the thesis with an assumption that Arendt's work contains a possible solution to the paradox, due to the “circular” characteristic of Hannah Arendt’s concept of action, which provides a unique perspective to understand the paradox. Then by reading Arendt together with both liberal-constitutional (Ackerman) and radical (Negri) alternatives to the paradox, I try to achieve an Arendtian solution to the paradox.

Ruijie Tan

Ruijie is supervised by Professor Monica Brito-Vieira and Professor Matthew Festenstein

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Mr Ruijie Tan