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3 Mechanical and Teleological Conceptions of the People Democratic theories presuppose a demos, a people. But what is a people? Only a few theorists have focused on the concept.1 Yet democratic theory cannot afford to ignore the question of the people’s nature—at least if it is serious about dealing with the problems I have highlighted in the prior chapters. Bringing to light implicit assumptions about the concept of the people helps us understand why traditional theories of popular sovereignty fail to legitimize the state. This examination can also help democratic theory determine what concept of the people—if any—can solve the indeterminacy problem. In the previous chapter, I argued that by a ‘‘democratic people,’’ political theorists generally mean a collection of individuals in a given territory who agree, or would agree, to organize ruling institutions according to liberal democratic principles. This definition reveals that there are two dominant conceptions of the democratic people in current liberal democratic theory. The first conceives of it as an actual group of individuals making a collective decision: those individuals who agree. The second conceives of the democratic people as the hypothetical outcome of a rational consensus: those individuals who would agree. At first glance, it seems that the indeterminacy problem I described in chapter 2 arises only for the first conception. If the actual composition of the people changes, then you cannot show empirically that the people is unified at any given time, and thus the state cannot be legitimate. So it might seem that the second conception can determine 1. Canovan, The People; Laclau, On Populist Reason; Näsström, ‘‘Legitimacy of the People ’’; Smith, Stories of Peoplehood. CONCEPTIONS OF THE PEOPLE ● 59 hypothetically when the state is legitimate because it allows you to appeal to the people even if individuals do not reach a consensus. It is enough to determine rationally that they would do so. If this were the case, you could dismiss indeterminacy as a curiosity rather than a real problem for democratic theory. Yet a closer look reveals that even in this situation the indeterminacy problem still arises. In this chapter, I argue that the indeterminacy problem besets both actual and hypothetical democratic theories, as well as the conceptions of the people they implicitly endorse. These two justificatory theories—actual and hypothetical—may seem very different, but I claim that they both suffer from the same problem: they require popular unification (as a goal or an origin), and thus they demand a unified people at a specific moment in time. For this reason, neither theory can accommodate change in the people or the lack of popular unification. But accommodating these shortfalls is necessary for tackling the indeterminacy problem and legitimizing the state. Thus the current dominant conceptions of the people are not useful for dealing with the problem. Solving it would require more than either institutional mechanisms for producing a unified people or a goal around which individuals could coalesce. Instead, democratic theory requires a people understood as an ongoing process, one propelled by mechanisms and aimed at goals, but fully present even if always incomplete. I make this argument in three parts. In the first part, I examine the conceptions of the people that underlie democratic theories of actual and hypothetical consent, in order to show why they are beset by the same problem. The two conceptions are often held to be very different, since one is empirical while the other is normative. But I claim that both conceptions include normative and empirical elements. They are also held to differ because one is said to be organic (or natural) and the other designed (or artificial). I claim that this is not a good distinction either, because both share organic and designed traits. In the second part, I argue that a more accurate distinction between these two conceptions of the people is one between mechanical and teleological accounts of how a people comes into being. The first conception relies on a mechanism: constitutional and electoral rules that determine which individuals participate and how they stay together as a democratic people. The second conception depends on a teleological account of how the people comes about: it aims at the goal of consensus, or popular unification, which in turn defines what the people is and who could be part of it. In the third part, I claim that both mechanical and teleological accounts of the people...

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