Colloquium48 - Katrin Meyer: Popular sovereignty, women's suffrage, authoritarianism

Many contemporary democracies are struggling with authoritarian tendencies. In these debates, many commentators naively identify democratic structures with inclusion, equality and justice which they oppose to the new illiberal movements. In her talk, political philosopher Katrin Meyer will argue that the situation is more complex. Certain legal democratic structures can be considered undemocratic as it shows in the case of Switzerland where Swiss women were excluded from suffrage rights on a national level until 1971. This exclusion not only did last for decades, but also was formalized and reproduced in the 20th century by various legal procedures, authorized by the parliament, the executive power, the jurisdiction, and last but not least, the Swiss male voters who denied their female co-citizens their equal political rights by several popular votes on the cantonal and national level. If we want to understand the institutional conditions and the historical continuity of the contemporary rise of authoritarianism, we therefore have to critically reconsider the notion of popular sovereignty.

 Katrin Meyer studied Philosophy, German Literature and Church History in Basel, Berlin and Paris. In 1997, she graduated with a PhD on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. During her PhD, Meyer worked as a research assistant on a collected volume of Nietzsche's letters as well as at the Philosophy Department of the University of Basel. She, then, became a staff member of the General Secretariat of the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) in Bern. From 2002-2005, she was a research assistant in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen and from 2005-2017, she was the coordinator of the Swiss Gender Studies Network in Basel. Meyer completed her post-doctoral research on theories of power, ranging from Michel Foucault to Hannah Arendt. Since 2012, she is a private lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Basel and since 2017, she is a senior research and teaching assistant in Gender Studies at the University of Zurich.