In contemporary discussions of modern republican constitutionalism, two paradoxes have exercised the minds of political and legal theorists. The first goes like this: If we assume that a people is the author of a constitution, then they must have rejected the authority of the old constitution without being able to rely on the legal authority afforded by the new constitution; all democratic legality thus seems to have an extralegal origin. If, conversely, only the allegiance or consent to a given constitution authorizes a group of individuals to call themselves a people, then this constitution cannot be a democratic one, since it will not have been given by a people to itself. The second paradox concerns the validity over time of a revolutionary constitution: If the revolutionary event is the source of the constitution's authority across generations, then by keeping alive this past event in the present, one deprives new generations of the revolutionary power to give themselves a new constitution; if, on the other hand, this revolutionary power is maintained as a living possibility for each new generation, then this can only be done by depriving the old constitution with its cross-generational authority. In all of these cases, there seems to be an antinomy between the power of the people and the authority of the constitution: Neither can do without the other, but each finds it impossible to live with the other.

Both paradoxes were formulated in Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (1963), and she claimed to have resolved both problems in that book. The paradoxes were taken up, a few years later, by Claude Lefort and John Pocock in their respective groundbreaking interpretations of Machiavelli and modern republicanism. Since these works of historiography, the relation between republican constitutionalism and temporality has been an important and recurrent theme in democratic political theory. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo fast-forwards on this historical background in order to offer a lucid discussion of the most recent solutions proposed to these paradoxes of foundation. In a clear prose and through a well-structured argument, she offers a novel approach to these foundational paradoxes by reconceiving the idea of a constituent people through the categories of the “process philosophy” associated with early-twentieth-century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, but also, of late, with the pluralist political thought of William Connolly.

Ochoa Espejo's fundamental claim is that “the people”—as a constituent power—is a plural rather than a unitary reality. It is a mistake to think of the people as a supraindividual “collective subject” who is born at a certain moment from the consent or contract between a determinate group of individuals, and then goes on to give itself a constitution while subjecting itself to the state thus formed. As she says “you cannot legitimize the state by relying on the unified will of a people. The people and its will never unify: the people conceived as a collection of individuals is always indeterminate. This indeterminacy is clear in the unified-will legitimizations of democracy, since these attempts to legitimize democracy produce a vicious circle between the unified people that should create institutions, and the legitimate institutions that bring the people about” (p. 136). To avoid such a vicious circle, the author proposes to think of a people as an open-ended “process” composed of “people-events” in which individuals act by constituting, governing, and changing authoritative institutions over time.

In the first six chapters, Ochoa Espejo discusses the thesis of the “indeterminacy” of the people and explains why it poses a serious problem for current liberal-democratic theory. She believes that the thesis of indeterminacy is a fact of political life; moreover, she says that all images of the people as a collective subject undermine the recognition of each individual's equal worth and freedom. But, paradoxically, her thesis is that the truth of indeterminacy does not have to invalidate the republican idea of popular sovereignty. In crisply argued pages, the author reviews most current liberal and neoliberal accounts of democracy in order to argue that all of them require some sort of conception of the people and of popular sovereignty somewhere along the line in order to legitimate their conception of the state.

Although Ochoa Espejo does not mention this, the idea of the indeterminacy of the people was the centerpiece of Hans Kelsen's theory of democracy in the 1920s; it was then taken up by Joseph Schumpeter, and thereafter used both by liberal and neoliberal political thinkers in order to conceive of democratic government without having to rely on the republican, Rousseauian-inspired idea of popular sovereignty. Kelsen wanted to do away with the people as a collective subject in order to make room for his idea of democracy as an open-ended legal procedure. This, in turn, was one move in a complex game designed to eliminate the traditional distinction between state and law, sovereignty and democracy. Thus, Kelsen was after a conception of legal democracy that could realize Rousseau's general will without Rousseau's social contract. This general strategy lies behind all current attempts at making constitutionalism more “dynamic” in order to escape the problem of the “indeterminacy” of the people, including the one proposed by Ochoa Espejo.

This book helpfully discusses at some length two such attempts found in Jürgen Habermas and Bruce Ackerman. The “dynamic” set up by Habermas and Ackerman features a “normal” or liberal construction of the people as a constituted power and an “exceptional” or republican construction of the people as a constituent power. The passage from one to the other mode of existence of a people passes through the “iteration” of the principles found in the “old” constitution in order to make room for the “new” demands of an ever-changing, democratically articulated people. Ochoa Espejo argues that Habermas's and Ackerman's variants of dynamic constitutionalism resolve the paradoxes of foundation by resorting to a hidden “metaphysics” of history characterized as a teleological process. She claims that “process philosophy” exchanges teleology for “creative evolution.”

Both Habermas and Ackerman ultimately draw their idea of political and historical dynamism from Arendt's original proposal, in On Revolution, that a revolutionary constitution necessarily lives on through its historical repetitions. On this model, repetition or iteration is the matrix of all novelty. The same basic intuition was articulated, roughly during the same years, by French philosophies of the event like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida (now taken up by Alain Badiou and others): All of them thought that repetition in history puts an end to any and every “metaphysics” of history of the kind Ochoa Espejo imputes to Habermas and Ackerman. Since the political conception of event is central to her own positive proposal to think the people as process, it is unfortunate that she did not compare and contrast the political theories of the event based on the idea of repetition (what Machiavelli called “return to beginnings”) with the theory of event she finds in “process” philosophy.

In the last two chapters, Ochoa Espejo presents her alternative proposal based on process philosophy. Perhaps her most radical intuition concerns the composition of the people as a process: “I claim that the persons participating in peoplehood are all those individuals intensely affected by the supremely authoritative institutions and by the events that modify the institutions” (p. 159). This definition of “people-events” replaces the traditional definition, where the people is composed of those individuals, or their representatives, who were party to an actual or hypothetical “social contract.” The author makes a good case for her own “dynamic” application of the quod omnis tangit (the “all affected interests”) principle as the best way to resolve the paradoxes of foundation associated with the more static idea of the people as a collective subject. At the same time (as she admits on page 175), her application of the q.o.t. principle must rely on what Arendt had already recognized, namely, that any processual construal of peoplehood and of the ever-new formations of popular power, depends on maintaining the “authority” of legal institutions, which is not itself constituted “democratically.”

How this is possible remains an open question, and Ochoa Espejo admits that her admirable book does not offer a “full processual theory of democracy.” It is to be hoped that the author will produce an account of the relation between legal authority and power of the people based on the promising ground she has opened up with her account of the people as process.