The greatest challenge to liberal democracy today comes from the political ascent of movements that, in the name of democratic equality and popular sovereignty, attack the foundations of the liberal constitutional order. Comparing two influential accounts of these tensions, the chapter interrogates the meaning of popular sovereignty to shed light on the vulnerabilities and strengths of liberal democracy. While Schmitt insisted on differentiating liberalism from democracy to attack liberalism, Tocqueville insisted on the same to advance liberal self-understanding and to guard against modern threats to freedom. If for Schmitt, the difference between democracy and liberalism concerns the meaning of equality, for Tocqueville the crucial question is who and how delimits the popular will. While both saw pluralism as a challenge for constitutional democracy, Tocqueville considered it an indispensable aspect of popular sovereignty. Schmitt, by contrast, rejected the possibility and desirability of a pluralistic democracy.

The introductory chapter places Statute and Judgment and The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual of the Individual in the context of Schmitt’s political and constitutional theory. It illustrates how certain key themes emerging in Schmitt’s early legal-theoretical writings – in particular, the problem of the realization of law – drive the development of Schmitt’s political and constitutional theory. The chapter also offers discussion of the intellectual and biographical background to Schmitt’s early legal-theoretical works.

The North American and Israeli scholars who founded Genocide Studies in the 1980s and 1990s also insisted on genocide’s Holocaust archetype. These scholars successfully resisted the “conceptual stretching” of genocide to include political criteria in its definition. Domestically, they advocated an apolitical “toleration” pedagogy as genocide’s antidote. The US victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s sidelined the lively critique of the US national security state and gave rise to a new age of interventions. Vietnam-induced doubts were left behind as “the indispensable nation” became the world’s hyper-power. Although the founders of Comparative Genocide Studies were liberals who opposed the Vietnam War, they eagerly adopted the role of academic handmaiden to US global aspirations: the field anointed the US as the benign force to police the non-West in the form of humanitarian interventions to prevent genocide, other “atrocity crimes,” and to wage “war on terror.”