Democracy and Representation

Democracy and representation have been conceived as concepts in opposition to one another for much of modern history. Our intellectual historical approach to both of these concepts primarily revolves around the process of their emergence in political debates during the eighteenth-century, when democracy was finally identified with representative government. The essay pays attention in particular to the contexts and contingent circumstances which made the relationship between democracy and representation a central issue in the shaping of modern politics. The progressive awareness of the correlation between democracy and representation did not arise from a slow and gradual process of conceptual convergence. Rather, it was the result of significant eighteenth-century turning points, such as the increasing economic transformation of society, the emergence of the science of political economy as the modern language of politics and finally the two revolutions in France and in North America in the last decades of the century, which made democracy and representation essential elements of the history of modern political practices and constitutional issues.