Spectatorial Democracy

During the twentieth century, the state founded on constitutional law was the form of organization that best ensured the participation of citizens in the construction of the legal discourse and the respect of a wide range of constitutionally guaranteed principles and values. In this respect, the theory of law has identified the recipient citizen with the role of the observer: a form of epistemologically active subjectivity, always able to modify or intervene on legal reality, participating in the democratic game of law. However, the crisis of the state organization and twentieth-century models of sovereignty, the fragmentation of legal systems, and the advent of the “society of images” have ended up relegating the recipient to a passive state. Just like a spectator at a theatre, the recipient today witnesses helplessly the evolution of law that increasingly resembles a grand mise-en-scène. These pages contain a reflection upon the passage between these forms of subjectivity and the risks that a “spectatorial democracy” presents for the future of the constitutional state.