Democracy, Republic, Representation

Abstract

The democratic scandal consists simply in revealing this: there will never be, under the name of politics, a single principle of community that legitimates the actions of those who govern on the basis of laws inherent in the coming together of human communities. Rousseau was right to denounce the vicious circle of Hobbes, who claimed to prove the natural unsociability of men on the basis of court intrigues and the backbiting of the salons. But in describing nature according to the model of society, Hobbes also showed that it is vain to look for the origin of political community in some innate virtue of sociability. If the search for origins freely mixes before and after, it is because it always comes after the fact. The philosophy that looks for the principle of good government or the reasons for which men give themselves governments comes after democracy, which itself comes after, interrupting the ageless logic according to which communities are governed by those who have the right to exercise their authority over those who are predisposed to be subjected to it. The word democracy, then, properly designates neither a form of society nor a form of government. “Democratic society” is never anything but a fanciful picture intended to support one or another principle of good government. Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. And, properly speaking, there is no democratic government. Government is always practiced by the minority on the majority. The “power of the people” is thus necessarily heterotopic to inegalitarian society as well as to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is thus also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. People like to simplify the question by returning to the opposition of direct democracy and representative democracy. One can then simply employ the difference between times and the opposition between reality and utopia. Direct democracy, it is said, was good for ancient Greek cities or the Swiss cantons of the Middle Ages, where the whole population of free men could gather in a single place. For our vast countries and modern societies, only representative democracy is suitable. The argument is not as probative as one would like. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, French representatives saw no difficulty in gathering all the electors in the commune’s administrative center. It sufficed that the electors not be too numerous, which was readily achieved by limiting the right to elect representatives to the nation’s best, which is to say to those who could pay a poll tax of 300 francs. “Direct elections,” said Benjamin Constant, “constitute the only true representative government.”1 And Hannah Arendt could still in 1963 see the true power of the people in the revolutionary form of counsels where the only effective political elite is constituted – the elite, self-selected on