After the people: the demise of self-determination, a new constitutional theory and the tradeoffs of peoplehood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a new lens -- polity-formation -- this thesis explores the concept of 'the people' in three bodies of thought: international law, constitutional theory, and political theory. It writes off self-determination, recasts constituent power of 'the people', and illuminates the tradeoffs involved in the invocation of peoplehood. In Chapter 1, I argue that 'self-determination of peoples' is disappearing from the discourse of powerful decision-makers after the end of the Cold War, replaced by a set of moral and prudential principles that I explore in detail. That demise of self-determination in turn demands the reconsideration of the role of 'the people' in constitutional theory. I uncover the formation of a polity not as the work of a sovereign people or its constituent power, but rather as a phenomenon that involves actors on both sides of the tentative boundary between inside and outside of a new polity. In Chapter 2, I articulate and name that phenomenon enlarged constituent power building on engagements with the work of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes and Cari Schmitt. In Chapter 3, I identify important rhetorical and normative benefits that flow from the concept of 'the people', including the fostering of political participation and territorial solidarity. In addition, 'the people' serves as the source of ultimate political authority, and provides a yardstick for judging a polity's legitimacy. Complementing this theoretical re-description, Chapter 3 offers an alternative way of looking at those issues by engagements with the works of Hannah Arendt, Hans Kelsen, Allen Buchanan and Will Kymlicka. Finally, in Chapter 4, I argue that three theoretical characters will rise to prominence if we abandon the vocabulary of 'the people': an imperial republican, a civic ethnonationalist and a sensible radical. Together, these characters outline the possibilities for political action in contemporary geopolitical realities
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".