The modern republic in front of democracy: government of laws and popular sovereignty

Abstract

Although the republican and the democratic traditions are historically and conceptually interrelated, we can identify a particular tension between the basic principles of each of them, namely a discrepancy between the rule of law and people sovereignty. As a consequence, an important trouble emerges around the way of combining the democratic principle of people decision with the requirement that governments follow both rational and impartial norms in order to guarantee individual rights. The article approaches this issue by taking into account the debates emerged at the time of the American and French revolutions respectively. Those debates allow us to combine topics such as people sovereignty and representation, or civic virtues and interests, all of which provide interesting insights to the current reflection on democracy.