Reinventing the People
Democratic regimes govern in the name of the People. The idea that
they have of the People is apparently very simple. The People is made up
of individuals, equal among themselves, who would regularly elect their
own representatives, subject to just and unarbitrary laws, equal before
those laws, and free to profess their own faith. Nevertheless, evoking
the People is not enough to make them a political actor, and yet this is
what involuntarily occurred. Once sovereignty had been attributed to
the People, this immediately postulated an intricate tangle of problems.
These were destined to weigh on representative regimes first, and on
democratic ones later. How these problems have been solved? The point
is that the People have been since always a crucial stake of political
struggle. Each party is willing to design the People according to its
preferences. One of the main tools used to shape the People is political
representation. But there are many others. For instance educational
policies. But the most important tool is the itself definition of the People.
This paper underlines the most recent ones, which were adopted in the
second half of XXth century: the definition of the People as made of
taxpayers, consumers, and stake-holders.