Executive power in a democracy

The 2014 lecture had analyzed why executive power had remained on the bangs of democratic theories, due to a sacralization of law and the pre-eminence accorded to parliamentary order. He had also shown why this blind spot in political thought had been maintained despite the rise in power of the executive after the First World War. The 2015 lecture extended this reflection, starting from the observation that while the first historical form of the democratic regime, that of the parliamentary-representative model, had faded in practice, giving way to a presidential-governing model, the latter had not been theorized and included in a positive vision of democratic development. Indeed, this presidentialization of democracies has most often been reduced to the accompanying phenomenon of the personalization of power. For its part, the lecture focused on the factor that has generated this presidentialization: the rise in power of the executive, now identified with power, taken in the singular.