An interview with Andrew Arato: Critically revisiting civil society, constituent power and constitutional democracy in populist times

This article features a collective interview with Andrew Arato. In critical theory, the work of Andrew Arato stands out not least for its in-depth and wide engagement with comparative empirical analysis.1 In his earlier work, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Arato’s work focused on Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School and its continuation with Ju¨rgen Habermas, but was also immediately relating such theoretical discussions to real life events, not least those related to the ‘really existing socialisms’ in East-Central Europe, as with the emergence of Solidarnos´c´ in the late 1970s,2 but equally to the processes of democratic change in Latin America.