NSSR Professors to Address Modernity and Political Power in Barcelona
Carlos Forment, associate professor of sociology and Andreas Kalyvas, associate professor of political science at The New School for Social Research will present their work at Trajectories of Modernity in the 21st Century: Comparing Non-European and European Varieties,, an international conference at the University of Barcelona in February 2012, which will examine political modernity in the 21st century in the areas of democracy, freedom, solidarity.
Forment’s presentation, Communitarian Cosmopolitanism: Argentina’s Recuperated Factories, Neoliberal Globalization and Citizenship,, will examine the ways that workers across the greater metropolitan region of Buenos Aires, in the course of engaging in participatory and representative forms of democracy across the domestic and transnational domain, generated the social, legal, economic and narrative resources they needed to transform themselves from , pariahs, into really existing citizens.,
Kalyvas’ presentation, The Constituent Power: Modern Sovereignty and Democracy,, explores an alternative theory of sovereign power that emerged in opposition to the dominant idea of absolute monarchy. This new notion of political power, Constituent Power, became associated with the authority of the people to constitute new political and legal forms. By tracing the political and conceptual genealogy of the sovereign power to constitute, Kalyvas argues for a new theory of political modernity defined by the conflict between two paradigms of sovereignty: popular and state sovereignty.