Pontificia uniVersidad católica de chile Resumen Este ensayo discute la génesis del concepto de la natalidad en Arendt, y las razones que la llevaron a proclamar la natalidad como un concepto fundamental del pensamiento político. El trabajo argumenta en contra de la tesis comúnmente aceptada según la cual Arendt habría sacado el concepto de natalidad de la analítica existencial de Heidegger. Por lo contrario, el escrito propone que el discurso arendtiano sobre la natalidad debe ser visto como parte de un discurso sobre la bio-política, y que está basado sobre un concepto de vida anti-Heideggeriano. El pensamiento político de Arendt es una especie de bio-política que contrasta al totalitarismo en su propio terreno, es decir, identificando los aspectos de la vida que oponen resistencia al proyecto totalitario de dominio absoluto sobre la vida.

This article discusses the current debate between populist and republican accounts of democracy. To talk about democracy is inevitably to talk about the idea of a people and its power. From the beginnings of the Western political tradition, 'the people' has referred to both a constituted part of society (populus) and to a part excluded from political society (plebs). The article examines the differences between populism and republicanism in light of the different ways in which these two parts relate to each other, and the resulting conceptions of the power of the people. For populism, the people have power when the plebs achieves hegemony within the populus by wresting control of the state from the 'wealthy' elites. According to the alternative republican account developed in this article, instead, the people have power when the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule. The distinction between these two conceptions of popular power is pursued in terms of the opposing attitudes that populism and republicanism have in relation to the rule of law. The article also raises a hypothesis as to the historical reasons for these distinctions between populism and republicanism by examining three historical moments, which are crucial for the development of plebeian politics: the early Roman republic, the Augustinian foundation of a Christian republic and the crisis of guild republicanism in Machiavelli's age. Contemporary Political Theory (2012) 11, 242-263. doi:10.1057/cpt.2011.25; published online 11 October 2011Keywords: populism; republicanism; rule of law; plebeian politics; Machiavelli; Cicero The revival of republican political theory has brought to the fore once again the importance of distinguishing between freedom as non-domination, which depends on the rule of law, and freedom as collective self-rule, which depends on a conception of popular sovereignty. For neo-Roman political theorists, popular sovereignty, being a species of sovereignty, is part and parcel of a theory of the state, whereas the rule of law -at least as it is conceived in the modern republican tradition -is not a mutation of state sovereignty r

The aim of this article is to give a new reconstruction of the conception of human dignity as a pre-associative yet legal status. Such a legal conception of human dignity carries a universal legal obligation to respect the "innate" right to independence and enables us to move beyond the impasse between moral and political views of human rights. The argument has a normative and a genealogical component. The normative component shows why a legal conception of human rights is grounded on the Kantian idea of an innate legal right to independence, as well as showing that Kant adopted a legal status concept of human dignity. The genealogical component shows that the conception of human dignity as legal status undergoes a transvaluation from its ancient aristocratic to its modern democratic meaning in Dante's political thought, which is itself rooted in the western reception of Arabic philosophy, in particular political Averroism. By contrast to the Christian elaboration of dignity, the Averroist genealogy of dignity better describes the modern pursuit of an ideal of worldly happiness essentially linked with the collective attainment of public happiness through the unrestricted public use of reason facilitated by republican constitutions crowned by human rights.

Rawls and Schmitt are often discussed in the literature as if their conceptions of the political had nothing in common, or even referred to entirely different phenomena. In this essay, I show how these conceptions share a common space of reasons, traceable back to the idea of public reason and its development since the Middle Ages. By analysing the idea of public reason in Rawls and in Schmitt, as well as its relation to their theories of political representation, I show in what way Schmitt's concept of the political cannot be divorced from an idea of justice, while, conversely, Rawls' conception of justice cannot be divorced from a theory of the political. In that way this paper thematizes the internal relation that each theory establishes between justice and power, deliberation and decision, and consensus and disagreement.

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