Original scientific paper
Rousseau’s Theory of volonté générale as a Postulation of Radical Understanding of Democracy: Return to the Political!
Goran Sunajko
orcid.org/0000-0003-1438-9830
; Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper is based on the recent assumption that the politics and the political are in crisis, which has, at the end of modernity, emerged as the obvious abandonment of traditional understanding of the political and democracy as permanent participation of free and equal citizens in the political process. The author shows that the fundamental cause of the crisis of political is dominance of the liberal theory of political representation. Because it is based on the principle of the transmissible sovereignty, the liberal theory of political representation from Hobbes and Locke onwards has made the man indeed a political subject, but at the same time, it caused his alienation from the political, due to the representatives of the citizens, which instead participate in the political process, so it comes that democracy is reduced to the technical principle of the majority in the elections and the parliamentary process. To such model, the author opposes Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s model of direct democracy, which, besides being based on the refutation of the idea of transmissible sovereignty, therefore representative democracy, opens the way for the re-establishment of the political. The author shows how this procedure, theoretically, can be achieved through Rousseau’s theory of volonté générale.
Keywords
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; democracy; representative democracy; direct democracy; freedom; volonté de btous; volonté générale
Hrčak ID:
132989
URI
Publication date:
26.11.2014.
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