Nadia Urbinati

It is usually held that representative government is not strictly democratic, since it does not allow the people themselves to directly make decisions. But here, taking as her guide Thomas Paine’s subversive view that “Athens, by representation, would have surpassed her own democracy,” Nadia Urbinati challenges this accepted wisdom, arguing that political representation deserves to be regarded as a fully legitimate mode of democratic decision making—and not just a pragmatic second choice when direct democracy is not possible. As Urbinati shows, the idea that representation is incompatible with democracy stems from our modern concept of sovereignty, which identifies politics with a decision maker’s direct physical presence and the immediate act of the will. She goes on to contend that a democratic theory of representation can and should go beyond these identifications. Political representation, she demonstrates, is ultimately grounded in a continuum of influence and power created by political judgment, as well as the way presence through ideas and speech links society with representative institutions. Deftly integrating the ideas of such thinkers as Rousseau, Kant, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Paine, and the Marquis de Condorcet with her own, Urbinati constructs a thought-provoking alternative vision of democracy.

Despite John Stuart Mill's widely respected contributions to philosophy and political economy, his work on political philosophy has received a much more mixed response. Some critics have even charged that Mill's liberalism was part of a political project to restrain, rather than foster, democracy. Redirecting attention to Mill as a political thinker, Nadia Urbinati argues that this claim misrepresents Mill's thinking. Although he did not elaborate a theory of democracy, Mill did devise new avenues of democratic participation in government that could absorb the transformation of politics engendered by the institution of representation. More generally, Urbinati assesses Mill's contribution to modern democratic theory by critiquing the dominant "two liberties" narrative that has shaped Mill scholarship over the last several decades. As Urbinati shows, neither Isaiah Berlin's theory of negative and positive freedom nor Quentin Skinner's theory of liberty as freedom from domination adequately captures Mill's notion of political theory. Drawing on Mill's often overlooked writings on ancient Greece, Urbinati shows that Mill saw the ideal representative government as a "_polis_ of the moderns," a metamorphosis of the unique features of the Athenian polis: the deliberative character of its institutions and politics; the Socratic ethos; and the cooperative implications of political agonism and dissent. The ancient Greeks, Urbinati shows, and Athenians in particular, are the key to understanding Mill's contribution to modern democratic theory and the theory of political liberty. Urbinati concludes by demonstrating the importance of Mill's deliberative model of politics to the contemporary debate on liberal and republican views of liberty. Her fresh and persuasive approach not only clarifies Mill's political ideas but also illustrates how they can help enrich our contemporary understanding of democracy.

The year 2006 marked the two hundredth anniversary of John Stuart Mill's birth. Though his philosophical reputation has varied greatly, it is now clear that Mill ranks among the most influential modern political thinkers. Despite his enduring influence, the breadth and complexity of Mill's political thought is often underappreciated. While his writings remain a touchstone for debates over liberty and liberalism, many other important dimensions of his political philosophy have until recently been ignored. This book aims to correct such neglect, by illustrating the breadth and depth of Mill's political writings, by drawing together a collection of essays whose authors explore underappreciated elements of Mill's political philosophy. The book shows how Mill's thinking remains pertinent to our own political life in three broad areas - democratic institutions and culture, liberalism, and international politics - and offers a critical reassessment of Mill's political philosophy in light of recent political developments and transformations.

This essay reclaims a political proceduralist vision of democracy as the best normative defense of democracy in contemporary politics. We distinguish this vision from three main approaches that are representative in the current academic debate: the epistemic conception of democracy as a process of truth seeking; the populist defense of democracy as a mobilizing politics that defies procedures; and the classical minimalist or Schumpeterian definition of democracy as a competitive method for selecting leaders

In this elegantly written book, Nicholas White takes on the interesting and timely task of discussing and questioning the myth of “the Greek way” of thinking about ethics fabricated by modern philosophers since the end of the eighteenth century. As the author says in the introduction, this is a preparatory work to a history of Greek ethics, rather than a full-fledged history of Greek ethics or a study of the reception and the uses of Greek ethics in modern philosophy. The “Greek way” of thinking about ethics can be rendered in a single word: harmony. Attracted to or skeptical for what they thought was an unrepeatable experiment, modern philosophers selected the Greek harmonious world as the paradigm of human perfection and happiness. “Admirers of Greek ethics have always been torn between a desire to think of it as advocating a powerful form of eudaimonism and an aversion to regarding it as egoist”.

The basic theoretical premise of this article is that representation does not necessarily imply a break with democratic principles. Its goal is to challenge the traditional liberal-elitist approach to representative government according to which this system is a mixed regime that is not identifiable with democracy since its main institution, election, is a mechanism that is inherently aristocratic, although it can be implemented in a democratic way. I question this powerful argument by questioning its main assumption: the idea that representative government, since its 18th-century inception, has had a linear and univocal history which was essentially undemocratic.I go back to the age of the French Revolution and analyse Condorcet’s plan of constitution in order to prove my case. Condorcet devised institutional mechanisms and procedures that were able to make representative government democratic by overcoming the polarization between representation and participation and making them related forms of political action constituting the continuum of decision-making and opinion formation in modern democratic society

The theoretical interpretations of liberalism in its relations to multiculturalism occupy a central role in contemporary political theory. Yet, although arguments of rights and equal respect have provided for reasonable justifications of cultural diversity, daily papers and political columns give us an image of democratic societies that is often intolerant, exclusionary and insensitive to the argument of rights when faced with cultural and religious pluralism. The diachronic rhythm between intellectual reasonableness and widespread opinion often goes unobserved in academic literature. In this chapter I dwell on this unobserved reality and call attention to the phenomenology of subordination that the failure to respect cultural diversity can generate or exacerbate. Relaying upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the relationship between the “three races” in America, I render the phenomenology of subordination through the relationship between memory and forgetting and treat the latter as a terrain in which cultural discrimination can occur

Nicolas de Condorcet, the innovating founder of mathematical thinking in politics, was the last great philosophe of the French Enlightenment and a central figure in the early years of the French Revolution. His political writings give a compelling vision of human progress across world history and express the hopes of that time in the future perfectibility of man. This volume contains a revised translation of 'The Sketch', written while in hiding from the Jacobin Terror, together with lesser-known writings on the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, the meanings of freedom and despotism and reflections on revolutionary violence. The introduction by Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati sets these works in context and shows why Condorcet is of real interest today as we reinterpret the meaning of Enlightenment, the very idea of progress and the founding ideas of social democracy.