Sustainability and Democracy

What does the goal of sustainability mean for our democracy? Allegedly, there is a contradiction between the claim to individual freedom on the one hand and the ecological necessity of collective self-restraint on the other. In order to show a way out of this supposed dilemma, Felix Heidenreich draws on the republican tradition of democratic theory in this seminal book. Where liberalism celebrates freedom as individual freedom, republicanism conceives of freedom as collective self-commitment. Democracy, therefore, does not consist in being subject to a minimum of regulations, but in understanding oneself as a co-author of collective self-commitments that enable the construction of sustainable environments.