The People against representation. The concept of representation in current antirepresentationalist theories of democracy

The representative form of democracy has come under strong criticism in political movements as well as in recent contributions to democratic theory. This criticism rests on a widely shared concept of representation as the representation of oneness, whose intellectual origin traces back to Hobbes’ theory of the sovereign state. I analyze this application of the Hobbesian theory of representation to present-day democracy. I argue that although such an interpretation may shed some light on defects of the latter it is nonetheless a one-sided interpretation, which forecloses any possibility to theorize the democracy enabling aspects of representation. Three shortcomings prove crucial in this regard: a misconception of political conflict, an undervaluation of the egalitarian credentials of representation based on universal suffrage and majority rule and a troubling redescription of democracy itself. First I briefly recapitulate Hobbes theory of representation. For Hobbes representation allows the unification of the multitude via the authorization of the Leviathan to act in the name of the common will. The state is a person by fiction who attains through representation a presence in the world and a capacity to act. Membership means subordination to civil law commanded by the sovereign and not participation in a political community. The price for political unity is a depoliticized and disempowered citizenry. If this concept is applied to modern democracies, representative institutions are seen as oppressing the will of the people. In the next step I lay out three defects of this reasoning. The Hobbesian interpretation leads to a focus on the vertical conflict between the state and the people but it misses the constitutive role of horizontal conflict between citizens in pluralistic societies. But modern representative democracies do not necessarily rely on the representation of oneness, but on the representation of difference. Representation makes the internal divisions of society visible on the political stage. While Hobbes sought integration by abandoning conflict from the political sphere and separating the citizens from power, representation allows the politicization of social conflict. Thereby it prepares the stage for political self-determination. This is accompanied by a second strength of representative democracy. Representation based on universal suffrage and majority rule is a bulwark to the transformation of social inequality into political inequality. Far from being perfect in this regard it still guarantees at least some basic form of political equality. It is rather dubious if spontaneous forms of direct political action and self-organization can match this egalitarian aspect. The antirepresentationalists acknowledge that every political order needs some representation but simultaneously they claim that representation is fundamentally at odds with democracy. They try to solve this dilemma by a redescription of democracy. Democracy does not signify a form of governance anymore; it is reduced to the resistance against any political order. Populism becomes indeed the logic of democratic political action. But if democracy and populism coincide, the difference between democratic and autocratic regimes vanishes, democracy becomes a mode of emergency and political institutions erode.