Nadia Urbinati basic idea is that participation and representation are not alternative forms of democracy, but related forms. Against the widely sustained opinion that representation is supposed to neutralize or minimize political participation, Urbaniti claims that “democracy and representation are complementary rather then antithetical” and that “representation is essential to democracy. She justifies this claim based on three arguments: first, the idea that democratic politics (both direct and representative) is characterized by a vigorous public discourse. The insistence on presence through voice puts Urbinati in the proximity of contemporary theories of deliberative democracy; what characterizes her own theory in comparison with these is her insisting on the centrality of political judgment. The third argument is that “representation highlights the idealizing and judgmental nature of politics”, which Urbinati refers to as an art by which individual transcend the immediacy of their biographical experience and social and cultural belongings and interests, and educate and enlarge their political judgment on their own and other’s opinions.
Comparing to Arendt that is taking a different path than her, Arendt believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a popularity of people “to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each”, is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism, but stands opposed to the principle the guides the acts of destruction that characterize totalitarian systems. Urbinati discusses the importance of political judgment and its connection to aesthetic judgment in an ingenious chapter on Kant’s theory of representation. Representation is thought by Urbinati to possess a connecting role that unifies the citizens and project them into a future-oriented perspective. In my opinion, representation as defined by Urbinati gives way to e new concept (we the people). Usually, theories of democracy describe the people alternatively as the sum of the citizens living in a country at a certain moment (this is notably the perspective of economic or formal theories of democracy) or as the sum of past, present and future generations of citizens. In both cases one incurs theoretical difficulties, since one has to take into account the egoistic, self-centered perspective one has to attribute to the citizens as “atomic units” and explain how such individuals could cooperate with each other; or one has to face the problem of assuming a point of view which does not coincide with that the people actually forming the body of the citizens (a well-known difficulty of for all those who try to understand Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s General Will as opposed the volonté générale de tous).
According to Urbaniti’s concept of representation, it is now possible to merge these two different perspectives: citizens learn to think of their own opinion and interests as something connected to the life of a political body that pre-existed them and that will survive them. The general will is neither the result of compromises achieved by calculations (as the economic theory of democracy or any other theory based on rational choice thinks) nor the expression of an almost mystical body of the nation or of the country, but something that forms and expresses itself through a complex process in which citizens confront themselves and the others with different opinions and points of view. Representation is essential to this process; actually, it is this process, as Urbinati points out: it is a: comprehensive filtering, refining and mediating process of political will formation and expression. It helps to depersonalize claims opinion, which in turn allows citizens to mingle and associate without erasing the partisanship spirit essential to free political competition or obscuring the majority/majority divide”.
Urbinati comes back to the idea that politics is a matter of governing temporality and that representative democracy precisely represents a way than direct, delegated, and plebiscitarian democracy. She tries to revitalize a conception of the political which most contemporary theories (with their “deep rooted rationalist approach to deliberation”) fail to appreciate: the importance of partisanship. Far from seeing in it an obstacle to democracy, she stretches out the reinvigorating role that partisanship may play: “in a society in which citizens are free to express their ideas (and actually are required to express them about lawmakers and sometimes laws), political representation becomes the special terrain in which individual’s social and cultural specificity surfaces rather than congeals under legal status of citizens. It allows keeping the sovereign “in perpetual motion”.
