Daily RC Article 374

Reconsidering Representative Democracy: Rousseau and Condorcet's Perspectives

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At the dawn of representative democracy in Europe, two significant voices were raised that questioned its meaning and value at the root. The first – well known, and tainted by all manner of accusations, from naivety to historical disinformation, an innate tendency towards ‘‘totalitarianism,’’ and so forth – was that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His premise, is that ‘‘sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be transferred.’’ Sovereignty consists of ‘‘the general will, and the general will cannot be represented.” From this comes Rousseau’s famous devaluing of the representative system, which by then had been in place in England for many decades: ‘‘The English people believe they are free, but they are grossly mistaken. They are only so during the elections of members of parliament. As soon as these have been elected, the people are immediately consigned to slavery; they are nothing. The way they use their freedom during the brief moments when they possess it means that they thoroughly deserve to lose it.’’

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The acid test, so to speak, for Rousseau lies in the historical precedent of antiquity: ‘‘In the ancient republics, and also in monarchies, the people never had representatives.” It is striking that he is not especially concerned with highlighting the severe limits that the ‘‘free" English system placed on representation, that is, the system by which members were elected to the House of Commons; it is the existence of representation in itself that is called into question. This may seem an extreme paradox but, in a far-seeing way, he emphasizes a disastrous effect of the representative system: the transformation of elected representatives into what we now call a ‘‘political class’’ (whatever their political affiliations), their essential separateness from the specific interests of those who have designated them their representatives, and the way in which they function, at decisive moments, as a separate, self-referential body. Rousseau condemned this vice at the outset from a logical and philosophical standpoint but also from a legal one. This is therefore both an admonition and a premonition.

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The other ‘‘preventive admonition’’ is that formulated by Condorcet in 1785… He argues that confusion must result from any electoral procedure in which voters are presented with more than two choices. According to the now famous ‘‘paradox,’’ it is manifestly impossible to obtain a meaningful overall result (or, as the phrase goes, ‘‘extend the transitivity of individual preferences to social ones’’). An individual’s choices regarding three options, expressed in an order of preference (A, B, C), can be stated and are meaningful – ‘’ Mr x prefers A to B and B to C’’ is perfectly clear. The same is not true of the ‘‘sum’’ (or the balance) of many individual choices of the same kind. The illustration of this apparent paradox is based upon three options and three ‘‘voters’’: x, y, and z. Assume their cyclic orders of preferences are ABC, BCA, and CAB respectively. It follows that A defeats B and B defeats C. However, C also defeats A since, if we compare its result directly with that of A, we see that two voters have preferred C to A, whereas only one – x – has preferred A to C.