Three Forms of Democratic Political Acclamation

The present paper takes its initial inspiration from Carl Schmitt's claim in 1927 that the original democratic phenomenon is acclamation, and draws upon the interchange between religious and political forms of acclamation observed by Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz and Erik Peterson and elaborated recently by Giorgio Agamben. If Schmitt is correct, then acclamation is central to the construction of "the people," who by definition are the source of democratic political legitimacy. What is required is an "analytics of publicity" that would study the different ways in which the public is formed through different forms of acclamation. There are three such ways.