El legislador extraordinario en El contrato social. Una lectura schmittiana

Sebastián Abad

doi:10.22201/fesa.26832917e.2025.6.1.381

Authors

Sebastián Abad University of Buenos Aires (AR) https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6315-8904

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22201/fesa.26832917e.2025.6.1.381

Keywords:

Legislator, Social contract, Mediation, Civil freedom

Abstract

The following article proposes to determine the philosophical-political status of the figure who, in the Social Contract establishes, in some sense, the political community, but does so from an authority “that is nothing”. It aims to demonstrate that the extraordinary Lawmaker functions as a postulate not explicitly recognized by Rousseau and to unravel its argumentative performance through the breakdown of the concept into three moments, whose reciprocate relation generates various aporias: the gnoseological moment, the historical moment, and the practical-revolutionary moment. These three moments enable three typical ways of thinking about the Lawmaker: the censor, the despot / usurper, or the sovereign dictator. The irreconcilability of these three types refers to the difficult, almost insoluble, problem of the origin of political freedom.

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Author Biography

Sebastián Abad, University of Buenos Aires

He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires. He has completed postgraduate studies at the Universität zu Köln. Professor of Political Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and Philosophy of Religion at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (Unipe). He published (in co-authorship with Marina Cantarelli) Habitar el Estado. Pensamiento estatal en tiempos a-estatales and compiled (along with Esteban Amador) El fantasma en la máquina. Formación de agentes estatales, in addition to several articles and translations (from English to German) on Political Philosophy. He founded the Editorial Hydra and is member of the editorial committee of the annual Deus mortalis. Besides his teaching duties, he currently works as a Director at the Departamento de Humanidades y Arte at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.

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