The concept of representative democracy in Esteban Echeverría

Abstract

We developed the concept of representative democracy in Esteban Echeverría, as result of an heterogeneous and unsystematic reading of some authors as diverse as François Guizot, Théodore Jouffroy who share, nevertheless, a common capacitary vision of politics. Their differences put in tention the concepts of “capacity” and “equality” in Echeverría’s “representative democratie”. From Guizot, he takes representation as exercise of sovereignty moderated in reason, from Jouffroy, the idea of natural faculties as the foundation of democratic equality. Thus the concept is an original synthesis knotting in meaning popular sovereignty as the foundation of modern political power, sovereignty of reason as an exercise of political authority, and political capacity as a natural and dinamic principle of representative government.