'When is Democracy Worth Defending?' with Paul Kahn

Among the most pressing problems today – for both theory and practice -- is to distinguish democracy from populism. To do so, we must understand how elections fit into a robust – and defendable – concept of democracy. A democracy worth supporting is one that includes much more than elections. Paradoxically, to trust democracy we must distrust elections. In place of elections, I will argue that the rule of law is the key to a successful democracy.

Our inability to imagine law as a representation of popular sovereignty is central to our unstable politics today. Many, if not most, citizens see law as only another field of partisan conflict. Whether we can recover an idea of a law worthy of citizen sacrifice is, accordingly, the most important question we face regarding our political future. Absent such an idea, it is hard to see an end to our deep polarization and a politics of civil conflict.

About the speaker

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.

Professor Kahn teaches in the areas of constitutional law and theory, international law, cultural theory and philosophy. Before coming to Yale in 1985, he clerked for Justice White in the United States Supreme Court and practiced law in Washington, D.C., during which time he was on the legal team representing Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice.

He is the author of Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory; The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America;The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship; Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear; Putting Liberalism in its Place; Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil; Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, Sovereignty; Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation; and Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.