About the Author John P. McCormick is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

an answer to my critics nadia urbinati Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 420 W. 118th St., Mail Code 3320, New York, NY 10027, USA E-mail: [email protected]

doi:10.1057/eps.2015.16; published online 20 March 2015

am sincerely grateful to my commentators for the time they spent on my book, Democracy Disfigured, and for their generous effort to extract the best from it. I shall concentrate my answer on those aspects and issues only that can allow me to rephrase, clarify or revise my thoughts. Jan Biba goes to the core of the idea of diarchy of will and power that I coined in order to define representative democracy. It seems to me that the diarchic model allows us not only to understand the process of modern democracy, but also to detect its problems and transformations. As I am going to explain below, this model wants to be not an ideal, but a scheme of interpretation thanks to which we can judge this form of government and politics in its actual manifestations. Diarchy is the name of a dynamic relation between the power of decision and the power of opinion; like a thermometer or a scale, it should allow us to describe and judge the dynamic of representative democracy. In the book, I argue that diarchy makes

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certain changes in contemporary democratic societies visible, including the change towards the epistemic emendation of partisan opinions, the populist overcoming of the distance between will and opinion, and the overburdening of the audience. Jan Biba observes that it is hard to indicate the moment in which these transformations occur and see the changes in diarchy. He is certainly right. Yet the impossibility of scientific precision is not something exceptional in democracy, which, except for the voting power, is fatally subjected to the verisimilar nature of political praxis. This lack of accuracy is in fact a sign of the potency of the dynamic of representative democracy, which is capable of enduring a broad spectrum of variations without changing the regime. The elasticity and plasticity of this form of democracy is what makes it successful – a characteristic that already Paine (1989, 170) had detected when he argued that through representation democracy would be able to ‘perfect itself’: ‘Athens, by nadia urbinati

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representation, would have surpassed her own democracy’ as it would have better conformed to its principles, protected the res publica, and be more stable (ibid.). This aspect is crucial in order to grasp the meaning and value of representation in democracy. By remaining ‘simple’, Paine’s reasoning goes, Athenian democracy condemned itself to a short life because it could not overcome the contradiction of, on the one hand, stimulating individual freedom and a dynamic society and, on the other, lacking the means to cope with the pluralistic outcome of that freedom. Despite its small territory, Athenian democracy declined because it had no ‘method to consolidate the parts of society’ (ibid., 167). Its political principles unleashed social dynamism, although the directness of its decision making process presumed a static society made of not only legally and politically equal citizens, but also citizens with equal social and economic interests. The distinction between will and opinion – the fact that opinion does not translate immediately into lawmaking – fits a complex and pluralistic society. Indeed, the ‘interest of the public’ does not spring immediately from the will of the single individuals, but is created and interpreted out of a reflection that starts from the social and individual differences, yet does not identify immediately with them. Multiplicity of interests and views has to be transformed into a unitary process of decision or a general law that obliges all without representing any particular will or interest. This is the miracle of the diarchy of will and opinion, a current that unifies the individual wills without making them identical and that allows the entire system to change along with the changes of the opinions of the citizens. Without the filtering work of representation, democracy lacks this stabilizing capacity and cannot shield the ‘general interest’ from the direct interference of particular interests and the classes (ibid., 170).1

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Representation, we learn from Paine, resolves the problem of presentism that sovereignty, as an act of the will or direct voting on issues, engenders. It can break the cycle of democratic decline because, in providing social interests with a mediated public channel through which to convey their requests and aspirations, it forces them to work for the general interest although never constraining them within a specific interpretation of it. In acknowledging the plastic character of this form of government, Manin (1997) has employed the biological term of ‘metamorphoses’ in order to make sense of the several transformations of which this government is capable. To make sense of them I coined the idea of physiognomic or a figure to be seen from outside. Yet the fact remains that representative democracy lasts because it can metabolize the changes occurring in the domain of both powers (will and opinion) without the entire system changing. The puzzling relationship between will and opinion and the changing forms of the latter is what we see in action today. (I concede that this happened also in the past, as Jeffrey Green notes; yet, unless we want to write the history of democratization, it seems to me that the concern with democracy is a concern with the present, and, in this sense, what interests me are the changes in today’s democratic societies.) I think the diarchic structure can hardly be found in today’s consolidated democracies because the changes in the domain of opinion because of the injection of private money gravely violate the principles that sustain diarchy: equal political liberty. When intermediary bodies that should serve to make the diarchic dynamic work, like political parties and the means of information and communication, are in the hands of few persons or private corporations, citizens face the risk of a change of regime, not simply a

disfiguring of democracy. Private money in politics is in my view one of the most hard challenges to the diarchic dynamic as it has the force to jeopardize the entire political game. John McCormick thinks this is a secondary issue and judges my proposal of legal reforms that strictly limit the use of private money in politics as a minor device. But political reforms like this one are crucial as the diarchic dynamic entails several things: the existence in representative democracy of two distinct powers (will and opinion); the fact that these powers have to remain tied to one another, yet never merge; that all citizens have an equal possibility of operating within both; which means that all citizens must have an equal vote but also dispose of a voice that is not meaningless. Although voting is a tangible and measurable power, voice is imprecise, and moreover its immateriality and subjection to our perceptive evaluation makes it a subtle kind of power. Until recently, parties, unions and other civil associations, along with a rich plurality of means of information contributed in keeping unequal social and economic power under check and never capable of monopolizing voices and votes. For sure, society was not made of economically equal citizens. Yet, while some had more money than others, the latter could rely upon strong organizations capable of stopping the plan of the former to monopolize power. Today this scenario has changed and private money is more aggressive in buying political parties and media, the instruments that make the dynamic of diarchy operational. In the first chapter of Democracy Disfigured, I point to this as the main source of distress in the diarchy and of the risk of regime change. Civil discontent, always an important source of surveillance in democracy, seems thus to lose the power to impact the system. I agree with Biba that the fact that representative institutions are less and less responsive to ordinary citizens’ demands, that the ‘ “will” is

not responsive to “opinion” ’, is the heart of the problem facing these institutions. Hence Biba asks: given this problem, does it make sense to put so much emphasis on opinion-formation and its relation to institutions? Would it not be more useful to focus on those strategies that can shake the system instead? Would it not be the case that some amount of populism is welcome? Some forms of action, like citizens’ juries, sortition, referenda, plebiscites and veto power institutions (Biba refers to all of these different procedures or strategies as ‘some forms of so-called left-wing populism’) would construct the people not only in opposition to political and economic elites, but also in opposition to racism, xenophobia and so on. Biba does not want to advocate any of ‘these particular institutions’, but rather wants to suggest or try to find a way that could ‘facilitate the influence of “opinion” upon “will” in cases where the latter is unresponsive to the former’. Biba thus corrects, or rather completes, my argument when he suggests that we do not concentrate ‘exclusively on opinion formation without giving it any formal authority’ otherwise we ‘may find ourselves defending a Schumpeterian model where, in the end, the only role for citizens to play would consist in selecting their leaders’. Biba’s either/or conclusion somewhat restates a paradigm that is classical in democratic theory, and which never resolved the dualism between a minimal formalism and an imprecise call for participation. Inside institutions/outside institutions: this is the dualism I try to overcome through the idea of diarchic and dynamic interaction between these two domains of politics. Thus, I would strongly support Biba’s proposal of prefiguring forms of participation that can inject contestation of the status quo also because this is consistent with the logic of diarchy. Diarchy is meant as a solution to the static polarization of democracy as either nadia urbinati

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a question of institutions and procedures or a question of extra-institutional participation in the form of deliberative dialogue or populist mobilization or audience judgment. As a form of politics and decision making, democracy is its procedures; however, for procedures to be democratic, they must work in a way that is respectful of basic political equality: citizens’ liberty consists in this. The dynamic character of diarchy allows me to answer Jeffrey Green’s objection of perfectionism. The pure political procedural view I defend is the general democratic criterion by which to construct institutions and rules, to judge their functioning, and to introduce changes if needed. But diarchy is not an ideal city to aim at, or a good life to be achieved, or a perfect democracy to be reached. I do not create a Platonist dual track so as to put the ‘real’ democracy in the ideal world and make the empirical reality its pale shadow. This dualism would fatally translate into bowing to facticity. This is the reason why I give opinion full residence in politics, contra Plato and his numerous followers. This would be my answer to Green’s objection according to which ‘Maybe the epistemic, populist, and plebiscitarian theorists have it wrong, but it would be the death of democratic thought to settle permanently on a wellentrenched, exceedingly well-theorized, traditional liberal-democratic model’. A purely political procedural rendering of democracy allows us to appreciate the fact that democracy is a permanent process of reconfiguring itself. Thus, I do not espouse a liberal-democratic conception, which has paid exclusive attention to institutions and decision making processes and not sufficiently attentive to extra-institutional practices and the conditions of citizens’ participation. Procedure is thus democracy’s substance. But traditional liberal-democracy does not carry this maxim to its consequences and remains formalistic to the point that even quasi-authoritarian regimes may fit its

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rendering. Like McCormick, Green concludes that, for precisely this reason, the few-many distinction is better than the diarchic and procedural rendering I propose, because it is better able to overcome the unfair effects of economic inequality on civic life. This criticism is unclear to me because the diarchy and the few-many distinction are simply two different things altogether, in so far as the former pertains to the process of opinion- and will-formation in the overall decision making process, while the latter pertains to the economic relationship of classes and the unequal distribution of social resources. Democracy consists in preventing that the political process is captured by the classes. This makes it different from both oligarchy and patrimonialism and also from socialism. It is thus unclear to me how the few-many distinction is better than diarchy, and in addition why the polarization of the few and the many would help to redress democracy. Although I am convinced of the importance of social policies and justice as redistribution, I am aware that this trajectory is not identical to democracy. Moreover, the ‘many’ is a general and imprecise category that does not tell us much about the causes of economic inequality. In his Machiavellian Democracy, McCormick renders the few-many dualism in terms of income, which is at the most a reflection rather than a cause of unequal economic power. Moreover, the generic category of the ‘many’ is silent to the internal pluralism it contains: unemployed and precarious labourers, immigrant workers, unionized labourers, artisans, tenured professors and professionals are not exactly equal in needs and interests, although their income may be below the threshold that McCormick states as the border separating the many from the few. In addition, this dualism betrays an inter-classist approach that is hard to translate into social policies that are capable of achieving economic

equality. For someone who cares about economic redistribution as a condition of political equality, ‘class’ would be a better approach than the generic assemblage of the ‘many’. Concerning my presumed ‘sunniness’ vision about the ‘ultimate reformability of our liberal democracies’, as Green writes, I have to say that I do not see many more alternatives to the following two: either we try to do our best to reform our democracies in order to prevent them from becoming what they are becoming, namely unresponsive oligarchies, or we simply accept that democracy is, after all, a political ideal that cannot be realized, and in the end an empty word. I think that democracy is not the same as socialism, and we should not identify its procedural conditions with the social conditions they may require in some circumstances. Democracy is the name of a political order. Moreover, it is tolerant towards economic inequalities if and until these inequalities do not compromise the equal political power of the citizens. Democracy is thus not such a perfectly egalitarian system and does not denote a social system. Its crucial assumption is that the political game is open to all citizens. According to a purely political procedural conception, democracy is selfenforcing only if, because of the factual distribution of power in society, the political players prefer to play by its rules of the game. This means that democracy will only be installed if the disenfranchised are strong enough to either conquer it through revolution, or force its granting through reforms. This also means that it will only be consolidated – that is, operate effectively without relapsing into violence or alternative political regimes – if the numerical minority is strong enough to have an effective chance of eventually becoming a majority. It seems evident that democratic emergence and consolidation are easier when power relations are more evenly distributed such that no minority is in permanent

opposition, but has a real chance of obtaining power in the future. However, it is not entirely clear that, in situations where this is not the case, democracy itself does not have any power to make its widening or consolidation more likely. It seems plausible to argue that, in contexts of an uneven distribution of power, the granting of political rights to some (more powerful) disenfranchised might change the expectations of other (weaker) disenfranchised, making them willing to organize and fight for their enfranchisement. This does not mean that institutions in themselves will change the weakness of the disenfranchised, but they may change their incentives or payoffs for mobilizing, which might in turn lead them to become stronger. It also seems plausible to argue that, in contexts of uneven power relations, weak democracies may become stronger at least in part as a result of the operation of democratic institutions and political liberty. As per Amartya Sen, people cannot even conceive their economic needs until, through free and open discussion, they can figure out what is feasible for them to claim and do. Democracy can thus inject or provoke rather than follow economic development. Hence, ‘people in economic need also need a political voice. Democracy is not a luxury that can await the arrival of general prosperity … there is a very little evidence that poor people, given the choice, prefer to reject democracy’ (Sen, 2001: 13).2 In both cases, what would seem to be at work is the equalizing force of democracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville argued, once democratization starts, it can hardly be stopped because it gives people a sense of entitlement that pushes them to fight for the acquisition of political rights similar to those other individuals have, and to obtain similar benefits from them. Equality, Tocqueville pointed out – following a long and honourable tradition from Aristotle and Machiavelli – is a strong emotion akin to envy that drives people to attain what others have if there are nadia urbinati

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reasons to believe that they deserve them as much. That is precisely the type of reason that democracy gives when it identifies freedom as the justification for the participation in political decision making (and its benefits) of all those who may be affected by its decisions. This is akin to Machiavelli’s insightful conception of political liberty as an institutional order that ought to protect the open game of politics from the threats to liberty that are caused by social and economic inequalities. Yet, democracy does not conceive the solution of those threats to be the elimination of inequalities. Rather, the solution consists in making those inequalities (and actually the potentate of the few) unable to curtail the liberty of the people. A healthy democracy not only authorizes the people to choose and kick out elected officers, but also imagines and creates new institutions that, if needed, can prevent the reactive power of the people from becoming meaningless. Democracy requires a permanent institutional maintenance in order to be true to equal liberty, its foundation. A diarchic democracy indicates that, although constitutionalized law is in place, equal political liberty is not a given but the object of a permanent struggle: it is a promise and a premise at the same time. Green argues that, if we start from the empirical fact that ‘private property and the family make it so that we will always have an element of unfairness in our social life’, then we will have either of two fatal forms of democracy: sometimes populist or plebiscitarian, and sometime more oligarchic. I do not agree we should start from the assumption that the empirical fact is the norm that democracy should reflect. In this somehow crude realism it seems that the empirical is opaque, given that we have to adapt. Perhaps Kant was right in arguing that the real without the ideal is blind, because how can we even speak of ‘inequality’ and ‘unfairness’ if we assume that the real is what it is? On the

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other hand, the ideal is not the name of a utopia or a perfect reality we dream of but the name of a principled criterion that allows us to judge and change reality. A crude realism would amount to the acceptance that democracy is simply a myth and politics is the power of the stronger: the pendulum would thus turn some time to the rule of the many and at other times to that of the few. If democracy is simply the mirror of the social given, then of course it would follow the logic of strongest instead of contesting and containing the strongest: thus when the plebs are hungry, democracy is primed to take a plebiscitarian and populist form, and when the plebs are more satisfied, democracy is primed to take a liberal-democratic form. I would call Green’s a Thrasymachus approach, or truly Schumpeterian. Diarchic democracy is meant to be an answer to this very successful conception. McCormick points finally to the style and character of my book, a work, he says, that is polemical and somehow ungenerous towards the authors it discusses and criticizes. I must confess that this criticism surprises me, for two reasons at least. First of all because it comes from what I regard as a maestro of polemical style, who constructed his reinterpretation of republicanism and Machiavelli’s in particular out of a strong polemic with the Cambridge School.3 Second, I am not sure I would adopt McCormick’s chastising of a method that it would be more correct to call counter-argumentative rather than polemical. It is thus unclear why he identifies the critical engagement with ideas as polemics. In the critical chapters of my book I do not assault my interlocutors. Rather, I isolate some ideas that can give a sense of their broader trajectory and of my critical examination. I show that there is a plurality of interpretations of democracy – for instance, the deliberative and the Schumpeterian readings – and that this plurality makes

classical definitions unsatisfactory. Highlighting the plurality of interpretations and showing how the epistemic, the populist and the plebiscitarian proposals are not diseases, but possible facial expressions of democracy, is what I am trying to do. Certainly, squeezing the critical reconstruction and interpretation of a broad and complex current of thought into one single chapter carries the risk of simplifying positions and being, in this sense, not sufficiently generous. Yet my goal was not that of making a synopsis or commentary of existing positions but of sketching some distinguished interpretative currents. I shall try to explain the sense of my counter-argumentative method by elucidating the meaning of the title of my book. The ‘figure’ is a peculiar analogy, very different, for instance, from the analogy of ‘health’. The latter is classical in the literature on democracy and primed to bring us easily to the issue of ‘the crisis of democracy’. In the book, I want to resist this because crisis is not an anomaly in democracy, a political system in which citizens devise procedures and institutions to deal with critical breaks of consensus and the need to make authoritative decisions. As I presume that democracy entails crisis, I avoid using the classical medical analogy and opt instead for a disfigure, where democracy’s flourishing form is made of individual secret ballot, majority rule and institutions consistent with the principle of basic political equality (of vote and voice). The various constitutional orders that democracy adopted throughout its history are mutations of this recognizable physiognomy. As said, the mutations I analyze are internal to the diarchic nature of democracy. Given this premise, I start by criticizing the epistemic theory of democracy. To make my case strong I concentrate on one or few authors and distil from their main works the nucleus of their theory, which is the following: pure procedural

theories of democracy fail to establish a moral duty to obey collective decisions, because such a duty can stem only from the presumption that political outcomes correspond to an objective standard of normative ‘truth’. The word ‘true’ is the core of my objection, which intends to reclaim the specificity of political deliberation (hence of the verisimilar), and the reason why democracy needs a public arena within which each feels free to participate and treats others as equals, and in which the sources of opinions and information can lead each to make up his or her mind, and change it endlessly. Liberty is the motor of this mechanism rather than the search for truth. The epistemic rendering of procedural democracy mirrors two tendencies well established in political theory: the identification of legitimacy with unanimity, and the identification of rationality with a narrow model of a yes/no verdict. Yet we do not need unanimity to have legitimacy based on consent. What we need is an institutional arrangement that allows us to practice a deliberative search for answers to the problems we devise, knowing that no answer is the last one. We need it because, and insofar as, we accept that our opinions are uncertain, incomplete, incoherent and actually conflicting as they are based on cognitive differences and even contradictions. The idea of limited rationality is betrayed by the epistemic twist. Politics as well as discussion presume a model of rationality that is endogenously discursive and in need of openness and freedom, because its goal is not ‘truth’ in the epistemic sense (in the book I thus refer to the classical view of politics as rhetorical in character). The same argument that works for democracy works for representation, which cannot exist if we exclude the public process of opinion formation and communication among citizens. This is the figure of democracy as diarchy and of the representative form of politics as well. nadia urbinati

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Valuing democratic procedures because they keep open the possibility of renewing the debate and dissent openly and freely contradicts the epistemic approach insofar as it claims that liberty, rather than the search for truth, is the motor of this system. This criticism does not seem to be unfair. The same perspective orients my criticism of populism, which, like epistemic interpretation, selects a goal of political action that is not liberty. The goal of populism is to overcome the distance between institutions and opinions so as to achieve the unity of the populous. But politics as public discussion presumes a model of rationality that is essentially discursive and, for this reason, is in need of being kept open to diversity not only as a departing point but also as a point of arrival: within a democratic community there are differences of visions and values that will never be solved in one final solution. Liberty and pluralism are thus endogenous to democracy. As Manin has explained, democracy includes dissent (the principle of majority presupposes that of opposition or minority), and this contradicts not only all kinds of epistemic visions but also the ambitions of populism. If populism in power is capable of keeping faith with the criteria of pluralism and dissent, then it accepts the foundation of representative democracy and is nothing else than a more intense form of majority rule – a broader majority that may sometimes tend to be consensual. But then, how can we distinguish populism from democracy? What is it that makes populism specific and not simply a more intense majority? This important question, which I discuss in the book, does not seem to attract my populist critics, presumably because they are not interested in understanding populism in relation to democratic procedures. They propose to see populism as more than a conjugation of the majority rule or a more intense majoritarian democracy. They see

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populism as a regime that breaks with the individualistic foundations of constitutional democracy. Yet, if this is the character of populism, we have to admit that it has the ambition of being a government of the majority against the minority, not merely of aiming at a more intense majority. If populists are not content with a procedural definition of democracy it is because they think of it as the most effective way of shattering the foundations of constitutional democracy. This proves how fraught is the relationship between, on one hand, populism and, on the other, individual rights and pluralism. McCormick criticizes me for not acknowledging that populism had various forms. Yet I devote several pages to make the distinction between popular movements and popular regimes, and I acknowledge a variety of populisms within the history of democracy starting with the case of the Unites States, which was the cradle of populism as an example of democratization of a republican aristocracy. McCormick is more interested in discussing my interpretation of the Roman republic, which I deem a crucible of the central themes and terms of populism: the centrality of the plebiscite over the individual vote; the anti-individualistic interpretation of democracy as a regime of the plebs; Caesarism and politics as a game of propaganda held by a leader in order to conquer the audience and embody it. Certainly, Athens is a school of democracy more than Rome is because of its individualistic rendering of political equality and participation, which entailed, among other things, one central assembly of equal voters rather than several assemblies in which citizens were gathered according to census, residence, military roles and so on. The Roman republic did not consider political equality a principle, but a defect, and in fact not all citizens enjoyed the equal opportunity to compete, and access to the magistracies and politics was truly the business of the few. Whatever the historical reconstruction, the politics of

the masses that populism signifies, as Laclau (2005) recognized, can find important inspirations in the history of the Roman republic. McCormick acknowledges that populism contemplates bad examples in its complex experiences, but invites me to pay attention to the good examples instead. But if we want to understand populism, we should look at its problems and what can go wrong. By studying the negative we can better see the collision of populism with constitutional democracy. McCormick writes: ‘Urbinati worries that there is no accountability mechanism built into the logic of populism, such that the many – and more likely, its demagogues – will use appeals to the existential legitimacy of “the people” as justifications for abrogating democratic constitutional norms. But this is overly alarmist’. I ask: Why is my interpretation ‘overly alarmist’? What does ‘overly’ mean in this context? What is the limit of alarmism so that we do not worry about populism? The negative experiences of populism should make us reflect on one question at least: is there an exit from a populist regime that is equally peaceful and as easy as an ordinary transition from one majority to another one? This is not a question of how alarmist we should be, but of how much in tune with democratic procedures populism is. This alarmism is justified since, as said before, populism is not content with adopting majority rule or having a more intense majority; it aims instead at twisting it so as to make the government the exclusive expression of the majority. This makes it unfriendly towards the numerical opposition, ready to use the institutions to favour its constituency only and, moreover, a corrupting use of state power. In addition, the ambiguous relation with majority rule reveals its illiberal interpretation of democracy, which tends to treat the majority/opposition dialectics as the sign of a conflict that needs to be overcome so

as to merge all the claims and components of the nation into one homogenous identity. This is what the French Front National, the Italian Northern League and the Hungarian Fidesz propose today when they oppose the sovereignty of the nation against its internal minorities. The last case is perhaps the most eloquent demonstration of the bad potentials of populism. On 11 March 2013, the Hungarian Parliament, with the Fidesz as its majority party, approved changes to the constitution that curtailed the power of the Constitutional Court and the extension of civil rights that fostered a majoritarian democracy, a renewed old version of the ‘tyranny of the elected majority’. Among the twenty-two modified articles, there are some that make it easier for the government to limit free speech and freedom of political association, some that criminalize homeless people sleeping in public spaces, some that forbid students from emigrating within 10 years of their graduation from public universities, and some that subvert the constitutive principles of liberal democracy such as the separation of powers and constitutional control on lawmaking. Indeed some articles take away from the Constitutional Court the power to intervene on the content of constitutional reforms and annul the validity of the Courts’ previous decisions. In addressing the (mild) questions raised by the European Union, Viktor Orbán, the leader of Fidesz and the main inspirer of the reform, said, when introducing the Parliamentary meeting, that he would approve the amendments to the constitution, and that ‘the people are concerned with electricity bills, not the constitution’. In Hungary, the process of constitutional revision was orchestrated and managed by political parties and the press. These intermediary bodies took upon themselves the extraordinary power of replacing the citizens in the most important decision process, that of changing the rules of the game. Hungary’s is a recent story of majority party occupation of the nadia urbinati

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state with the help of an orchestrated propaganda that makes minorities a scapegoat of the social and economic distress of the nation. This is a story of bad populism. Of course, populist politics is, as McCormick observes, a sign of people’s distress and suffering. Democracy seems timid and weak before the growth of

economic inequality and the decline of welfare states. Populism is a sign of this weakness, although one has reasons to doubt it can cure it and solve the issue of economic inequality without violating the equality of rights and discriminating against the minority, be it numerical, economic, cultural or national.

Notes 1 Reasoning from the same premises, Fisher Ames had argued few years before Paine that it was incorrect to think of representation in terms of a ‘copy’ or even an ‘image’ because the representatives did not ‘reflect’ the opinions of the delegates as if they were a mirror. ‘The representation of the people is something more than the people’ because it puts into motion something that does not exist. It is the filtering work of social interests thanks to which nobody votes ‘for their own indemnity’ or decides ‘by surprise’ or the opinion of the moment (Bailyn, 1992: vol. 1, 892). 2 On this rendering of democratic proceduralism, see Saffon and Urbinati (2013). 3 I have in mind not only McCormick’s (2011) book Machiavellian Democracy, but also his article ‘Machiavelli and Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s “Guicciardinian Moments” ’ (McCormick, 2003).

References Bailyn, B. (ed.) (1992) The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification. 2 vols, New York: The Library of America. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Manin, B. (1997) The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormick, J.P. (2003) ‘Machiavelli and republicanism: On the Cambridge school’s “Guicciardinian Moments”’, Political Theory 31(5): 615–43. McCormick, J.P. (2011) Machiavellian Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, T. (1989) ‘The Rights of Man’, in B. Kuklick (ed.) Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saffon, M.P. and Urbinati, N. (2013) ‘Procedural democracy: The bulwark of political equality’, Political Theory 41(3): 441–81. Sen, A. (2001) ‘Democracy is a Universal Value’, in L. Diamond and M.F. Platter (eds.) The Global Divergence of Democracies, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

About the Author Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Her latest book is The Tyranny of the Moderns (Yale University Press, 2015).

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