Majority rule and the aporia of constitutional heteronomy: A critical inquiry into republican and deliberative perspectives

Abstract Constitutional heteronomy, understood as a viable balance between autonomy and heteronomy, represents a core difficulty in democratic decision-making. Framed within Kant’s transcendental balance between private and public autonomy, it rests on two interrelated normative demands: countering inhibitive heteronomy by eliminating impediments to citizens’ equal standing and fostering affirmative heteronomy by enabling their intersubjective engagement. This second prospect proves structurally elusive. Default reliance on majority rule yields truncated rather than substantively robust forms of aggregation. To illustrate, the article considers two influential theoretical perspectives: Republican majoritarianism, as in Waldron and Bellamy, grounds the legitimacy of majority decisions in the twin imperatives of political equality and the need to resolve persistent disagreement. Yet this decisionist conception remains ill-equipped to confront the problem of civic decoupling associated with a routine reliance on majoritarian procedures. Habermas’ deliberative reformulation of majoritarianism seeks to address this gap by grounding the legitimacy of majority will-formation in discourse ethics, an aspiration that sits uneasily with the empirical realities of the public sphere. I argue that neither egalitarian nor deliberative accounts provide a definitive framework for addressing the heteronomous potential of majority rule, which exposes the infeasibility of substantive aggregation and thereby the undecidability of constitutional heteronomy.