Excerpt

At its foundations, politics is about representation, and this has never been more pertinent than since the rise of nationalism, which developed historically not so much as a political goal in itself but as a by-product of democracy. By undermining the power of the monarch, the American and French Revolutions initiated a move toward popular sovereignty that created the prospect of majority rule, which in turn immediately raised the question of the character of this majority. As opposed to a feudal system in which sovereignty was distributed across different levels of society, the new ideal of popular sovereignty posited a…