POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN THE VIEWS OF LATE 18TH- AND EARLY 19TH-CENTURY FRENCH LIBERAL PHILOSOPHERS

Abstract

Background. The characteristics and evolution of early modern philosophers' views on the concept of the people as a political subject, in relation to sovereignty, nominal representation, and political representation, have been explored.

Methods. To achieve the stated objective, the historical-genetic method was employed to trace the evolution of conceptions of the people as a subject of power in early modern political theories. The comparative legal method enabled juxtaposing the concepts of sovereignty and popular representation in the works of T. Hobbes, B. Spinoza, and S. Pufendorf, thereby identifying both shared elements and differences in their interpretations of the social contract. The structural-functional approach was applied to analyze the internal logic of theoretical models of the state, the people, and power as interrelated elements of a unified political whole. The application of these methods enabled tracing the transformation of the concept of the people from a corporate unity to a bearer of constituent power and a subject of political representation.

Results. The contribution of Protestant tyrannicides to the political ontology of the subjectivity of the people has been highlighted. The characteristics and key differences in the views of Western European philosophers regarding the concept of the people, its nature, and the relationship between a unified "political body" and a mere aggregate of individuals; the role in state-building and the establishment of forms of governance; and mechanisms of representation have been demonstrated. It was established that in resistance theory (Monarchomach) literature, the people were conceived as a corporate unity – the owner of the state; in Hobbes, as a political totality represented in a single person; in Spinoza, as a multitude that retains participation in the exercise of power; and in Pufendorf, as a juridical person that delegates, but does not lose, supreme authority.

Conclusions. The main achievement of early modern political theories was that they, using secularized theological concepts combined with established legal terminology, provided sources of supreme authority and natural law with an otherworldly, earthly character. The early modern era created its own mythology of the subjectivity of the people, its representation, which would later be used during the Enlightenment to forge the people into a single sovereign political actor and to justify the principles of political representation.