Semi-Future Democracy

Andre Santos Campos is a Research Fellow in Political Theory at the Nova University of Lisbon. His research concentrates on issues that connect contemporary political theory with jurisprudence and intellectual history, especially democratic theory and intergenerational justice. He is the author of Spinoza’s Revolutions in Natural Law (2012). He is also the editor of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy: New Readings (2021), Sovereignty as Value (2021), Spinoza and Law (Routledge, 2016), Spinoza: Basic Concepts (2015), and Challenges to Democratic Participation (2014). In 2019, he was the recipient of the Brian Barry Prize in Political Science, attributed by The British Academy.

• Introduction: Facing the Democratic Temporal PuzzlePart I – Democracy and the Long-Term ViewChapter 1: Multitemporal Democracy: The Balance Between the Short Term and the Long TermChapter 2: Bringing the Future into the Present: The Legitimacy Gap in Non-Overlapping ContextsPart II – The Semi-Future PolityChapter 3: The Semi-Future Temporal Order: A Novel Form of PresentismChapter 4: Semi-Future Representation: Justifying Responsiveness to Objective Interests in the FutureChapter 5: Semi-Future Accountability: The Ways of Responsibility and Reflexivity Towards the FutureChapter 6: Semi-Future Policymaking: The Implementation of Long-Term Democratic GovernanceEpilogue: Future-Oriented Democratic TheoryAcknowledgementsBibliography

This is a rich, innovative and important book on the potential for making democratic institutions more sensitive to the interests of future generations. Taking normative commitments to democratic legitimacy seriously, Santos Campos shows how we can avoid myopic electoral politics on the basis of new democratic understandings of time and political representation.