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1 The Mob and the People in Mexico: A Historical Example of the Indeterminacy of Popular Unification How can you tell the people from a mob? For more than two hundred years, this question has gone hand in hand with democratic politics. Ever since Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, we have known that to establish the legitimacy of a democratic state you must first ‘‘distinguish a regular, legitimate act [of the people] from a seditious tumult, and the will of an entire people from the clamors of a faction.’’1 How to tell the people from the mob is an unanswered question in political theory, often dismissed as a concrete historical difficulty rather than a serious philosophical problem. But making this determination is a specific instance of the wider question of what is the nature of the people, a philosophical problem that democratic theory cannot afford to ignore. In this chapter I use a historical example to illustrate that the problem has philosophical import as well as actual political relevance. I draw my example from nineteenth-century Mexico. I move away from the familiar examples of the United States and France to underline that this is a theoretical problem, one that arises in all countries that have tried to justify government using liberal democratic arguments. Moreover, presenting an example that is rare in the political theory literature reminds the reader that the establishment of relatively successful democratic regimes in western Europe and the United States is also a concrete historical experience . For this reason, the generalizations drawn from the American and European experiences should not be taken as neutral points of departure applicable to all cases. This is particularly true concerning the concept 1. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 106. THE MOB AND THE PEOPLE IN MEXICO ● 17 of the people, which Anglo-American democratic theory has traditionally considered a stable background assumption. So I turn to early nineteenthcentury Mexico to illustrate the problem of the indeterminacy of popular unification and to emphasize why it is relevant for any abstract theory of democratic legitimacy. The Vicious Circle That Grounds the State Mexico became an independent country in 1821. Since 1824, most Mexican governments have tried to justify their rule using democratic arguments, but they have generally failed to obtain a solid generalized agreement on their legitimacy. To date, a surprisingly large number of Mexicans continue to doubt the legitimacy of their ruling institutions.2 Why would they do this even when they have good evidence that these institutions follow democratic principles?3 I will argue that one of the main causes of this legitimacy deficit is an internal problem in democratic theory. The problem is that when you try to determine the source of legitimacy in a new state, you get caught in a vicious circle. Where did the legitimacy of the newly created Mexican republic come from? To this question, you might reply that in Mexico, as in any other democratic state, legitimacy comes from the collective decision of citizens, who are the free and equal parties of a social contract. In sum, legitimacy comes from the people. The people’s collective decision, you may say, authorizes the creation of representative governmental institutions. Yet in Mexico it was not clear that such consent could legitimately ground the Mexican republic because, from the beginning, logical difficulties with a democratic legitimization of rule were apparent. For one, before independence there was no people. That is, there was no single, unified population with rights to ground a state.4 In the Spanish colony of New Spain, most individuals were neither 2. Klesner, ‘‘2006 Mexican Election and Its Aftermath.’’ 3. Eisenstadt and Poiré, ‘‘Explaining the Credibility Gap in Mexico’s 2006 Presidential Election.’’ See also Cleary and Stokes, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism. 4. This theoretical problem became obvious after the independence of the new Spanish American republics, but it first appeared during the historical crisis that preceded independence : the abdications of Bayonne, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s pressure, and the constitutional convention in Cádiz. The Spanish people who founded the new legitimacy of the empire was not easy to find. See Chust, ‘‘Legitimidad, representación, y soberanı́a,’’ 232. In Mexican historiography there is much debate on the effects and consequences of the ‘‘first liberalism’’ introduced after the 1808–12 period through the Cádiz Constitution. Yet, independent of the outcome of the first liberalism, the introduction of citizenship could not have settled the...

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