Das Prinzip der Republik

The current general decline of the political order highlights the fact that political integration is needed, and Western democracies are no exception in this respect any more. In contrast to liberal approaches, which assume political sense is a limited resource, republics include a principle that produces such sense. The title of this work refers to a starting point for political good sense, as discovered by Alex de Tocqueville within a trial by jury process. The most important result of presenting the problem using Hobbes, Schmitt, Arendt and Rawls in the first chapter and the reconstruction of the conditions under which ancient democracy emerged, followed by an examination of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero in the third chapter, was the insight that Tocqueville’s discovery fulfils the decisive conditions for the birth of collective political action in the public sphere: the opportunity to experience political sense as one’s own discovery and an inspirational moment without further derivation.