Paulina Ochoa Espejo

Brilliant. Best book I've read all year. Her theory of the people as a process as articulated in Chapter 6 (successfully, in my view) resolves the problem of defining the demos, which is one of the fundamental dilemmas in democratic theory today (or it was before she wrote this book). She defines people as a process, which means it consists of a series of events coordinated by a complex interplay of factors both internal and external to the process itself, ranging from individual intentions to environmental conditions to random chance. For her, there is no need to draw sharp spatial or temporal boundaries around the demos, because these borders are inevitably fuzzy (since they occur within a continual process of evolution), and also because she holds that a person can participate in this process in a myriad of ways (only some of which require the formal citizenship rights that mark one as an official member of the demos). Moreover, since this process is retroactively alterable and unfolds over time, the demos does not need to be constituted prior to the formation of institutions. Moreover, her view that institutions and the demos can both be affected by external events disrupts the traditionally paradoxical relationship between these two notions, since neither democratic institutions nor a democratic people are required to launch the process of becoming democratic, from her perspective. Ochoa Espejo also makes important contributions to political theories of time, space, identity, freedom, subjectivity, and the event. I do have some substantive disagreements about her conception of the democratic people process specifically (I think she doesn't leave enough room for non-institutional forms of politics and imports some questionable assumptions from the liberal tradition about notions like "rights" and "legitimacy"), but I don't really see that as a downside. It's a productive form of disagreement inspired by her interesting and innovative ideas.… (más)