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 (...) class='Hi'>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. (shrink)

Redirecting attention to Mill as a political thinker, Nadia Urbinati argues that this claim misrepresents Mill's thinking.

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 the context of the ongoing Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this article responds skeptically to the numerous contributions calling for the supplanting of elections by sortition. While lottocracy is proposed as a solution to the flaws of electoral democracy — notably, corruption and violent partisanship — this response focuses on a single theoretical issue: the logic of chance or randomness, which, according to its proponents, should rid politics of corruption and relieve representation of partisanship so as to ultimately prevent the (...) formation of a ruling class separate from the rest of society. The problem with the solution, according to this essay, is that, however useful in many ways, the lottery system of lawmaking is not democratic. (shrink)

Jan-Werner Müller argues convincingly that any talk about institutions (and consequentially of the crisis of democracy today) takes us back to the principles they embody. ‘Return to the first princ...

Open Innovation and Sustainability-Oriented Innovation are undoubtedly two of the most debated topics of the last decades, gaining the interest of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars all over the world. Even if they have been usually described as two independent research fields, there are some emblematic examples presenting interplay and synergy between these topics, represented either by the hybrid perspectives of Open Sustainable Innovation, that is, the Open Innovation approach acting as an enabler of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation, and Sustainable Open Innovation, which (...) instead analyzes how firms developing Sustainability-Oriented Innovation also adopt the Open Innovation approach. On the basis of these two perspectives and through a systematic literature review, this paper investigates the relationships between the Open Innovation and Sustainability-Oriented Innovation approaches and frames these relationships by developing an innovative framework, which highlights the main aspects characterizing the hybrid perspectives of Open Sustainable Innovation and Sustainable Open Innovation. The proposed framework highlights the Open Innovation practices and strategies enabling Sustainability-Oriented Innovation, as well as the contextual factors enabling both practices and strategies for Sustainability-Oriented Innovation. In addition, it shows how firms developing Sustainability-Oriented Innovation have a similar orientation toward the adoption of the Open Innovation approach both in terms of how they engage stakeholders, and the innovation capabilities they develop. Finally, a research agenda identifying the central issues and the key research gaps is offered for further development in future studies. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This article shows through Sismonde de Sismondi’s work how peculiarly modern issues like the revolution, equal political rights (universal suffrage) and an industrial and commercial society contributed to renewing the identity of republicanism. That renewal took place in Europe, after the French Revolution, and in a direct confrontation with democracy rather than liberalism. The problem in relation to which Sismondi reflected on the institutions of political liberty, the republican constitution and the role of individual liberty was the unstoppable growth of (...) equality, political and social. In his work, republicanism was intended as an answer against the emergent democratic transformation of society, with a role of moderating equality, dividing and bridling popular sovereignty and containing the immoderate propensities of democracy. The modern threat to liberty did not originate from the power of the few or of the one, but from that of the many. It originated in the majoritarian principle on which democracy relies necessarily. This principle, the republican Sismondi argued, contains the seed of the suppression of minorities, that is to say of individual liberty. (shrink)

Before proceeding, I would like to clarify briefly two interpretative premises, one methodological and one normative, which sustain my argument. Understanding the transformations facing constitutional democratic societies is a demanding task. These transformations, whose multiple causes are socio-economic not merely political, reflect on the one hand in the decline of mass party form of organization and on the other in the success of populism as not simply a movement of contestation but as a ruling power. In this article, I will (...) suggest that the successes of populism are connected to the decline of organized parties, the pillar of constitutional democracy as it emerged after 1945. It is impossible to predict whether populism will succeed in becoming the new form of democracy. It is, however, certain that contemporary representative governments are facing astonishing mutations and the decline of the party form of representative unification of claims and ideas is one of them. My argument relies upon a phenomenology of populism as a movement that is strong in proportion as organized parties are weak, which actually capitalizes on a revolt against intermediary bodies such as parties. 1. (shrink)

On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Knight, Department of Political Science and the Law School, Duke University; Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University; and Nadia Urbinati, Department of Political Science, Columbia University. We thank the participants for (...) permission to republish their remarks, which they edited for clarity after the fact. (shrink)

Writing a book on populism is a risky task, not only because populism is an ambiguous concept but because the phenomenon itself is impossible to abstract from its environment. Populism is not a typ...

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. (shrink)

This paper analyzes critically the appeal the unpolitical is enjoying among contemporary political philosophers who are democracy's friends. Unlike a radical critique of democracy, what I propose to call "criticism from within," takes the form of dissatisfaction with the erosion of an independent mind and impartial judgment per effect of the partisan character of democratic politics. This paper proposes three main criticisms of the actual trend toward unpolitical views of democracy: the first points to the strategic use of deliberation as (...) an antidote against democratic procedures themselves ; the second to the negative conception of democracy that the unpolitical aspiration makes visible; and the third to the dissolution of political judgment within a model of judgment that is tailored around justice. (shrink)

In a well-reasoned and thought-provoking polemic, respected political theorist Nadia Urbinati explores a profound shift in the ideology of individualism, from the ethical nineteenth-century standard, in which each person cooperates with others as equals for the betterment of their lives and the community, to the contemporary "I don't give a damn" maxim. Identifying this "tyranny of the moderns" as the most radical risk that modern democracy currently faces, the author examines the critical necessity of reestablishing the role of the (...) individual citizen as a free and equal agent of democratic society. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 408-417, September 2019.

In these remarks I will focus mainly on two aspects of the relationship between Hegel and liberalism: representation and public opinion. Although Richard Bourke’s Hegel's World Revolutions devotes...

Nella nuova Italia gli interpreti e i difensori delle civili libertà (l'espressione è di Romagnosi) furono pochi e poco considerati. Tra essi, gli amici e i seguaci radicali e federalisti di Carlo Cattaneo, ma anche un moderato come Pasquale Villari, il maestro di Gaetano Salvemini. Tutti ebbero in comune la condivisione del pensiero filosofico e politico di John Stuart Mill e il proposito di favorirne la diffusione nella cultura del loro tempo. Mill fu uno degli autori più tradotti nell'Italia dell'Ottocento. (...) Se la sua filosofia ebbe pochissima fortuna, il suo liberalismo attraversò invece tutta la classe politica ed intellettuale italiana: fu come un crocevia di strade diverse per provenienza e destinazione. Ciò vale per Francesco Ferrara e per Vilfredo Pareto, per Marco Minghetti e per Luigi Luzzatti, per i liberisti della Società Adamo Smíth e per i vincolisti del Giornale degli economisti. Il confronto con Mill permette di individuare i caratteri della filosofia civile del liberalismo post-unitario, le sue aspirazioni di buon governo e di giustizia, la sua fiducia nella cultura della modernità. La ricostruzione dei dibattiti e delle polemiche che si susseguirono tra gli anni sessanta e settanta sul decentramento, sulla rappresentanza proporzionale, sul suffragio femminile, sui rapporti fra stato e società civile, sul metodo dell'economia politica, sul socialismo e sull'utilitarismo i temi essenziali del liberalismo milliano aiuta a cogliere il significato storico del complesso rapporto tra liberalismo e positivismo in Italia. Ne viene fuori, come mette in rilievo Norberto Bobbio nella prefazione al volume, il carattere tortuoso e difficile del liberalismo italiano; la sua difficoltà a divenire una base effettiva di riferimento del nuovo stato, dei suoi ceti dirigenti, delle sue elite intellettuali. (shrink)