What Is Representation?
What we call representation is nothing else than a means to arrive at this result:—it is not an arithmetical machine employed to collect and count individual wills, but a natural process by which public reason, which alone has a right to govern society, may be extracted from the bosom of society itself. No reason has in fact a right to say beforehand for itself that it is the reason of the community. If it claims to be such, it must prove that it is so, that is to say, it must accredit itself to other individual reasons which are capable of judging it. If we look at facts, we shall find that all institutions, all conditions of the representative system, flow from and return to this point. Election, publicity, and responsibility, are so many tests applied to individual reasons, which in the search for, or the exercise of, power, assume to be interpreters of the reason of the community; so many means of bringing to light the elements of legitimate power, and preventing usurpation.
In this system, it is true,—and the fact arises from the necessity of liberty as actual in the world—that truth and error, perverse and loyal wills, in one word, the good and evil which co-exist and contend in society as in the individual, will most probably express themselves; this is the condition of the world; it is the necessary result of liberty. But against the evil of this there are two guarantees: one is found in the publicity of the struggle, which always gives the right the best chance of success, for it has been recognized in all ages of the world that good is in friendship with the light, while evil ever shelters itself in darkness; this idea, which is common to all the religions of the world, symbolizes and indicates the first of all truths. The second guarantee consists in the determination of a certain amount of capacity to be possessed by those who aspire to exercise any branch of power. In the system of representing wills, nothing could justify such a limitation, for the will exists full and entire in all men, and confers on all an equal right; but the limitation flows necessarily from the principle which attributes power to reason, and not to will.
Summary.
So then,—to review the course we have taken,—the power of man over himself is neither arbitrary nor absolute; as a reasonable being, he is bound to obey reason. The same principle subsists in the relations between man and man: in this case also, power is only legitimate in so far as it is conformed to reason.
Liberty, as existing in the individual man, is the power to conform his will to reason. On this account it is sacred; accordingly the right to liberty, in the relations of man with man, is derived from the right to obey nothing that is not reason.
The guarantees due to liberty in the social state have, therefore, for their aim, to procure indirectly the legitimacy of actual power, that is to say, the conformity of its wills to that reason which ought to govern all wills, those which command as well as those which obey.
Therefore no actual power ought to be absolute, and liberty is guaranteed only in so far as power is bound to prove its legitimacy.
Power proves its legitimacy, that is to say, its conformity to the eternal reason, by making itself recognized and accepted by the free reason of the men over whom it is exercised. This is the object of the representative system.