Concentration or representation : the struggle for popular sovereignty

There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of 'the people' that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a 'neo-Jacobin' commitment to popular sovereignty, understood as the formulation and imposition of a shared political will. A people's egalitarian capacity to concentrate both its collective intelligence and force, from this perspective, takes priority over concerns about how best to represent the full variety of positions and interests that differentiate and divide a community

Revolução 2008-? Revolution 2008-?

Por dois séculos, a experiência da França em 1789 transformou a relativamente anódina categoria da revolução num eixo obrigatório do juízo político em todo o mundo. Nessa longa travessia, ela serviu mais insistente e efetivamente para definir a lealdade e a antipatia políticas do que para dirigir a agência política para fins bem definidos e politicamente acessíveis. O que a equipou para fazer isso foi uma imagem das exigências imperiosas e abrangentes da razão humana no interior da vida coletiva. Mas é duvidoso hoje que tais pretensões sejam capazes de oferecer uma base massiva de solidariedade para reconstruir a sociedade e a política, depois do colapso ou derrubada de um regime.<br>For two full centuries the experience of France in 1789 turned the relatively anodyne category of revolution into a mandatory axis of political judgment across the world. Throughout that long traverse it served more insistently and effectively to define political allegiance than to direct political agency towards well defined and potentially accessible ends. What equipped it to do this was a picture of the comprehensive and imperious requirements of human reason within the collective life. But it is dubious today that those claims are still able to offer a massive basis of solidarity for reconstructing society and polity in the aftermath of regime collapse or overthrow