Das Symbolische, das Imaginäre und die Demokratie

Democracy is more than a means of electing governments; it also represents a particular way of imagining and experiencing politics as a liberal and unobstructed domain. Democratic representation expresses this and employs symbols in order to do so. This book examines this mechanism and is the first to address the theory of political representation from the point of view of symbolism and the imaginary. It traces the transformations in political representation after the democratic revolutions and analyses the symbolic meaning of the body, for one of democracy’s principal innovations was to forego using the human body to symbolise its ideology.