Agents of the People

Abstract

The rise of democracy is one of the great narratives of Western his-tory. The principle of political power originating from the people is so widely held an assumption in modern democratic states that we do not necessarily come to think about the far from self-evident rise of such a notion even in the history of countries that now regard themselves as leading democracies. “Popular sovereignty and representative democ-racy emerged with the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions,” we are apt to think, without delving any deeper into an analysis of the problematic aspects of the rise and association of these originally separate concepts in the eighteenth century.