Democracy and the Representation of Difference]
Anne Phillips
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'Simple democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary means. By
ingrafting representation onto democracy, we arrive at a system of government capable of
embracing and confederating aU the various interests and every extent of industry and
population."
'It is on this system that the American government is founded. It is representation
ingrafted upon democracy ... What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude. The
one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration, the model of the
present. It is the easiest of all forms of government to be understood and the most eligible in
practice, and excludes at once the ignorance and insecurity of the hereditary mode, and the
inconveniences of the simple democracy.' (Paine, 1995:232-3)
Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine captures the high hopes then
attached to the development of representative democracy, and the optimism of his analysis strikes
a decisively new note. Some decades earlier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had treated representation
as the antithesis of democracy, but progressive thinkers from the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century were more likely to see it as what made democracy finally possible. It was
partly considerations of equality that inspired admiration for this 'wonder' of the modem world,
for if voting rights were to be extended beyond the propertied classes (by 1789, most American
states had extended their franchise to cover 70-90% of adult white men), it would become
logistically impossible - too inconvenient, to use Paine's term - for all citizens to participate
directly in government. More ambiguously, representation was also being perceived as a way of
reconciling quantity with quality: a way of having democracy without too much of the demos.
In his most cited contribution to The Federalist Papers, James Madison defended the large