That acts of democratic representation participate in creating the interests for which legislators and other officials purport merely to stand gives rise to the “constituency paradox.” I elucidate this paradox through a critical reading of Hanna Pitkin's The Concept of Representation, together with her classic study of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and Justice. Pitkin's core insight into democratic representation is that democratic representation is “quasi-performative”: an activity that mobilizes constituencies by the interests it claims in their name. I develop this insight together with its implications for contemporary scholarship on the political effects of economic equality. I conclude by arguing that the fundamental democratic deficiency of the US political system goes much deeper than its disproportionate responsiveness to wealthy interests; it is a matter of system biases that foster the formation and expression of those interests, while mitigating against mobilization by those Americans who want inequality to be reduced.

This article analyzes what I term “the dilemma of democratic competence,” which emerges when researchers find their expectations regarding democratic responsiveness to be in conflict with their findings regarding the context dependency of individual preferences. I attribute this dilemma to scholars' normative expectations, rather than to deficiencies of mass democratic politics. I propose a mobilization conception of political representation and develop a systemic understanding of reflexivity as the measure of its legitimacy. This article thus contributes to the emergent normative argument that political representation is intrinsic to democratic government, and links that claim to empirical research on political preference formation.

Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. By Ira Katznelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208p. $29.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This eloquent volume, which originated as Columbia University's Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures in 1997–98, has a dual mission. The first is personal. It is a “critical homage” to the post–World War II scholars who were Ira Katznelson's teachers. Practicing their craft “in the midst of a moment stamped by the greatest shocks and stresses the Enlightenment tradition had ever faced,” these scholars produced a powerful revision of American Enlightenment liberalism that Katznelson believes could serve as a guidepost for today (p. 157). Confronting the “twentieth-century compound of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust,” they would neither simply reaffirm the faith in reason and science as secular grounds of moral progress nor simply repudiate ideals of autonomy and freedom as “mere fantasy or, worse, the main source of radical evil” (pp. 33, 39). They “sought instead to renew and protect the Enlightenment's heritage by appropriating and transforming social science, history, and the study of public policy” so as to provide illumination in the face of desolation (p. xiii). Katznelson's principal aim is to show how the work of this group might make possible a subtle intervention into “today's fervent but thin controversies about social inquiry and the status of Enlightenment” (p. xv).

Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise is two novels in one: a story of wifely virtue and a counterstory of women's friendship. Whereas the virtue story exemplifies what feminist readers since Mary WoRstonecraft have considered to be the most oppressive of Rousseau's prescriptions for women, the friendship counterstory questions the ethical foundations and social manifestations of the model of patriarchal authority that Rousseau ordinarily defends. In this essay, I read the novel with an eye for both stories and the tension between them.