NOTES - REFERENCES

• 1 : Aristotle defined democracy in contrast to oligarchy, and portrayed it as a system in which offices, deliberative or judiciary, were filled by lot, not election. Hence he could state that democracy means to rule and be ruled in turn. See Aristotle 1995, III: 1275b13-b21; VI: 1317a40-1318a10.
• 2 : "Representation is incompatible with freedom because it delegates and thus alienates political will at the cost of genuine self-government and autonomy" (Barber 1984, 145).
• 3 : For a lucid defense of the realist school, see Sartori [1962] 1987, 102-115.
• 4 : Young refers to Dahl 1989, 225-231.
• 5 : Distinguishing solitude from isolation, Hannah Arendt identified the former with the act of thinking itself, and saw it as a condition within which "I am a friend to myself," where "soundlessness" means intimacy, not however "speechlessness" (Arendt 1978, vol. 1, 184-85).
• 6 : Rousseau did not reject election; in fact, the magistrates of his ideal republic were elected. What he rejected was the delegation of the sovereign power. The rationale for that rested in his distinction between action and the will. The former amounted to an instrumental doing, and thus could be delegated, while the latter amounted to the intention leading and shaping the doing, and thus could not be delegated without undermining the intentional power over the action.
• 7 : "But long debates, dissension, and tumult betoken the ascendance of private interests and the decline of the state" (Rousseau [1762] 1987; book IV, ch. 2).
• 8 : On the relationship between future-present-past in elections see Manin 1997, 178-79.
• 9 : On The role of trust, control and accountability, see Holmes 1988, 195-240; Phillips 1995, 155-58; Manin 1997, 203-4.
• 10 : Thus Holmes correctly remarks that in Mill's representative government the institutional arrangements are not simply "depressants" but also "stimulants," because they guarantee the opposition's ability to express itself freely.
• 11 : "The newspapers and the railroads are solving the problem of bringing the democracy of England to vote, like that of Athens, simultaneously in one agora" (Stuart Mill [1840] 1977, 165).
• 12 : Finley noticed the 'absurdity' of this parallel, because the agora cannot be symbolic, and in fact was not symbolic in Athens. Thus he deemed "a false analogy" that put forward by Mill between the modern public sphere and the ancient ekklesia (Finley 1985, 36).
• 13 : Sartori adds an important corollary: through its intermediary role, he writes, representation "reduces power to less power" in so far as in a representative democracy "nobody is in a position to exercise an absolute (i.e., limitless) power" (Sartori [1962] 1987, 71).
• 14 : The concept of "security for good government" is developed by Mill in review of the first volume of Tocqueville's Democracy in America in 1835 (Mill [1835b] 1977, 71).
• 15 : See also Hamburger 1965, 45-63.
• 16 : "The People," he wrote in 1829, "that is, the Mass of the community, are sometimes called a class; but that is only to distinguish them, like the term Lower Order, from the aristocratic class. In the proper meaning of the term classSee also Hamburger 1965, 45-63.
  "The People," he wrote in 1829, "that is, the Mass of the community, are sometimes called a class; but that is only to distinguish them, like the term Lower Order, from the aristocratic class. In the proper meaning of the term class, it is not applicable to the People. No interest is in common to them, which is not in common to the rest of the community" (James Mill 1878, vol. 2, 187).
• 17 : Carl Schmitt's observation that the theorists of "government by discussion" saw free discussion as an expedient functional to the discovery of "the thruth" is pertinent in relation to James, not John Stuart, Mill (Schmitt [1932] 1994, 2-6).
• 18 : It is astonishing to see that contemporary majoritarians prefer plural voting (that Mill used to protect intellectual minorities) to "favor the members" of "minority" groups over proportionality (Beitz 1989, 157). In so doing they do not acknowledge that it is the "number" that needs to be considered equally, for the majority as well as the minority. "Double" or plural voting for the weak means to accept as a given an unjust electoral system, and then to invoke "fairness" and propose "compensation." Would not it be better to intervene over the cause of the electoral injustice instead of "compensating" its unjust outcome? In Mill's scheme, which is proudly egalitarian, minorities do not ask for "favored" treatments, but for equal treatment.
• 19 : Beitz writes that whereas "the aim of quantitative fairness is to give public recognition to the equal political status of democratic citizens, the aim of qualitative fairness is the promotion of equitable treatment of interests." Hence, he concludes, a system of plural voting is better then a proportional system (Beitz 1989, 156). The flow of Beitz's argument rests on the fact that he identifies proportional representation with the Aristotelian notion of proportional justice. But in spite of their similar name, their logic is different. As Mill well showed, the logic of proportional representation is that of taking seriously the "quantitative fairness" of the "equal political status of democratic citizens." If we do not give to the citizens the chance to chose between more than two choices, we cannot reasonably say that the winner represents the majority of opinions, because the citizens have been forced to adapt their opinions and converge them either on A or B. What we have here is the violation of the "quantitative fairness" principle, because we aggregate preferences that, within a proportional system of counting, would distribute themselves differently. Let us recall Mill's words: proportional representation "secures a representation, in proportion to number, of every division of the electoral body: not two great parties alone" (Mill [1861] 1991, 310).
• 20 : James Madison and Emmanuel-Joseph Siéyès played a crucial role in establishing modern political representation (Manin 1997).
• 21 : On Harrington's rationalist republicanism see Scott 1993, 148-60.
• 22 : When a new law is proposed, if it is a just law, there is no need for discussion, because it expresses what "every body has already felt; and there is no question of either intrigues or eloquence to secure the passage into law of what each has already resolved to do" (Rousseau [1762] 1987, book 4, chapter 2). See also Mitford 1784-1810, vol. 1, 272-75.
• 23 : The representative ought not to "neglect those free and public conferences with his constituents, which, whether he agrees or differs with them, are one of the benefits of representative government" (Mill [1861] 1991, 370).
• 24 : I would say that Mill's vision of the assembly as an agora is what connects Representative Government to On Liberty. Indeed it entails both the Socratic assumption that knowledge is a searching enterprise without an ultimate end and the conviction that consent gives legitimacy to obedience. "To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility" (Mill [1859] 1991, 22).
• 25 : Phillips follows the argument developed by Guiner 1994, 30-7.
• 26 : "Not that the aim of such deliberation is to change citizen preferences by reducing their diversity: the aim is to make collective decisions. Still, one thought behind a deliberative conception is that public reasoning itself can help to reduce the diversity of politically relevant preferences because such preferences are shaped and even formed in the process of public reasoning itself. And if it does help to reduce that diversity, then it mitigates tendencies toward distortion even in strategic communication" (Cohen 1998, 199).
• 27 : I'm referring in particular to Anne Phillips who, in order to amend democratic deliberation of its rationalist limits, proposes a compromise between advocacy and deliberation. However reasonable, this strategy is weak precisely because it upholds the same dichotomy that rationalist theorists make of deliberation and advocacy (Phillips 1995, 161-63).
• 28 : The comparaison of the assembly and the court was made by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (a work Mill very much admired), in which one reads: "Now the listener must necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge, and a judge either of things past or of things to come. For instance, a member of the general assembly is a judge of things to come; the dicast, of things past" (Aristotle 1994, I.iii). Mill's comparison, however, is not wholly correct, first of all because in the legal setting the jury does not share in the case under judgment while the assembly does, and finally because, as Aristotle notices, in the legal setting the judge judges of things past, while a deliberative assembly judges of things to come.
• 29 : However Mill acknowledges that with the improvement of free government, "the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increse: and the well-being of manking may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested" (Mill [1859] 1991, 49).
• 30 : Mill theorized the distinction between cognitive reason and practical wisdom in 1837, when he used the latter to claim a relation between eloquence and poetry (and attempted a parallel between Cicero, Quintilian and Orace on the one side and Bacon, Pascal and Goethe), Mill [1837] 1981, 419-29.
• 31 : Mill was here reporting on the compromising resolutions adopted by the French Chamber of Deputies in 1832 concerning the new corn law proposed by the government. He ended his report with the Aristotelian maxim that politics denotes a condition of possibility, of permanent negotiation among different interpretations of the same fact, when there is never an absolute truth against an absolute wrong.
• 32 : The tripartite division of rhetoric into forensic (by lawyers in the court), deliberative (by orators in the assembly) and display (by orators before the people with no decision-making intention) is made by Aristotle 1994, I.iii. Mill acknowledged Aristotle's Rhetoric, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, and Cicero's Orator as among the most important texts of his intellectual formation (Mill [1873] 1981, 21-27).
• 33 : Pitkin (1967, 24-9) has given an excellent reconstruction of Hobbes' conceptual elaboration.
• 34 : It is interesting to notice that the Romantic notion of the "understanding" was early developed by Giambattista Vico out of the Ciceronian theory of "divination" as a preliminary to the art of eloquence. In his youth Mill was an enthusiastic reader of both Vico and Romantic literature, and also wrote on the relationship and difference between poetry and eloquence (Mill [1833; 1867] 1991, 341-65).
• 35 : This is also the point that has been recently made by Young 1997, 357-58.
• 36 : In a proportional system the representative has more autonomy than in a majoritarian one. Thus, radical democrats have looked at the former with suspicion, though they have revised their position in recent years. This is, for instance, the case of Anne Phillips, who in her 1990's book criticized Bobbio for rejecting the concept of the representative as a delegate, and now acknowledges that "more autonomy for the presentative" needs to be acknowledged in the radical tradition. For advocates to be deliberators, representatives "have to be freed from stricter forms of political accountability;" Phillips, 1995, 56, 156, and 1991, 68-70; Bobbio 1984, 43-62.
• 37 : Both Phillips and Young contribute, I believe, to amending Kymlicka's interpretation in which the difference between group and proportional representation does not emerge clearly (Kymlicka 1995, 133-38).
• 38 : The link between election and choice is effectively discussed by Manin 1997, 132-42.
• 39 : Hegel produced the most consistent theory of corporate versus individual voting (Hegel 1967, #305-311). Mill engaged in a restless polemic against the conservative idea that "not the people, but all the various classes or interests among the people" should be represented (Mill [1835] 1977, 43).
• 40 : Proportional representation, writes Pitkin, "has no room for any kind of representing as acting for; which means that in the political realm it has no room for the creative activities of a representative legislature, the forging of consensus, the formulating of policy, the activity we roughly designate by 'governing'" (Pitkin 1867, 90).
• 41 : If proportional representation is interpreted as a map-making, then the criticism of its being responsible of enacting a process of depersonalization of both the voters and the voted is justified. Indeed it would banish both authorization and accountability; see Kymlicka 1995, 134; and Young 1997, 358-61.
• 42 : As I clarified at the beginning, this does not imply that they should count equally in the moment of decision; the claim that all should have the chance to be heard makes sense if deliberation (discussion) is not identified with decision (voting); see Dunn 1993, 17-19.

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