The Semi-Future Democracy: A Liberal Theory of the Long-Term View

Traditional institutions are often considered inadequate to govern for the long term as their politicians promote short-term thinking which can harm the future. This book proposes a novel theory of social time perception to address the short-term thinking of traditional institutions which threaten to stifle liberal democracies. The semi-future reconfigures liberal democracies’ franchises, representative instruments, deliberative practices, accountability mechanisms, and policymaking to include in the demos all citizens, regardless of age, and holders of representable objective interests in the future. The result is not only a way to legitimise long-term governance but also to improve the quality of current democracies.

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.