The People

Canovan, Margaret

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548439.003.0019

Cited by 59 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This indeterminacy has to do with the fact that the people, although presupposed as the only legitimate source of democratic politics, is not really there. There is no unity at the bottom of democracy, only a reference to a people that itself remains divided (Canovan, 2005;Derrida, 2005;Laclau, 2005;Lefort, 1988;Rancière, 1999). This characteristic, which makes critics of democracy like Plato so annoyed and irritated, is ultimately why we need to count.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational Actors in Global Governance

2010

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational Actors in Global Governance

2010

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“…For the purposes of illustrating the difficulties of considering the concept 'mobile peoples' we would need a historical ontology from ancient Greek demos to Roman plebeians to medieval Italian popolo illustrating how various peoples became remainders or residuals of the people. Margaret Canovan (2005) traces precisely this particular history. She reveals a constitutive tension between 'the people' which differentiates itself from the unruly, poor, rapturous and eruptive peoples.…”

Section: What Is the People?mentioning

confidence: 88%

Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Isin

2018

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This essay is an attempt to think 'mobile peoples' as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between 'mobile' and 'peoples', I draw on Ian Hacking's historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes itself as a whole and those peoples that remain as residual parts, I draw on Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau as authors who identified this tension as a fundamental problem of 'Western' political thought. Yet, their inattention to territory draws me to James Scott whose work on early states challenges how we have come to understand the people as sedentary in the first place. His account of how 'barbarians' (mobile peoples) came to be seen as a threat to sedentary peoples enables us to understand that tension. Then a path opens toward thinking about mobile peoples as a political concept.

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“…In seeking to make these ideas more precise, we note that there is a well‐known ambiguity in the way in which ‘the people’ is to be understood (Canovan, 2005). The term ‘people’ can be taken in at least two different senses.…”

Section: From Democratic Values To Axiomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Rule by Majorities Special?

Ward

Weale

2010

Political Studies

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One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue‐by‐issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy‐proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue‐by‐issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered.

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The People

Cited by 59 publications

References 10 publications

Transnational Actors in Global Governance

Transnational Actors in Global Governance

Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Is Rule by Majorities Special?

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