The principles of representative government / Bernard Manin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Direct democracy and representation: selection of officials in Athens -- 2. The triumph of election. Lot and election in the republican tradition: the lessons of history. The political theory of election and lot in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The triumph of election: consenting to power rather than holding office -- 3. The principle of distinction. England. France. The United States -- 4. A democratic aristocracy. The aristocratic character of election: a pure theory. The two faces of election: the benefits of ambiguity. Election and the principles of modern natural right -- 5. The verdict of the people. Partial independence of representatives. Freedom of public opinion. The repeated character of elections. -- 5. Metamorphoses of representative government. Parliamentarianism. Party democracy. "Audience" democracy.

Bernard Manin's challenging book defines the key features of modern democratic institutions. For us representative government has come to seem inseparable from democracy. But its modern history begins, as Professor Manin shows, as a consciously chosen alternative to popular self-rule. In the debates which led up to the new constitution of the United States, for the first time, a new form of republic was imagined and elaborated, in deliberate contrast to the experiences of ancient republics from Athens to Renaissance Italy.

The balance between aristocratic and democratic components within this novel state form was not, as has been widely supposed, a consequence of a deliberate mystification of its real workings; it was a rationally planned aspect of its basic structure.

Print version record.

English.

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