131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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In democracy the citizen even agrees to the law that is against his own will, for the law is the
General Will and, in turn, the will of the free citizen. Thus a citizen never really gives his
consent to a specific content but rather in abstracto to the result that evolves out of the
general will, and he votes only so that the votes out of which one can know this general will
can be calculated. If the result deviates from the intention of those individuals voting, then
the outvoted know that they have mistaken the content of the general will: "This only proves
that I have made a mistake, and that what I believed to be the General Will, was not so." 13
And because, as Rousseau emphatically continues, the general will conforms to true freedom,
then the outvoted were not free. With this Jacobin logic one can, it is well known, justify the
rule of a minority over the majority, even while appealing to democracy. But the essence of
the democratic principle is preserved, namely, the assertion of an identity between law and
the people's will. For an abstract logic it really makes no difference whether one identifies the
will of the majority or the will of the minority with the will of the people if it can never be
the absolutely unanimous will of all citizens (including those not eligible to vote).
If the franchise is given to an increasing number of people in an ever-broader extension, then
that is a symptom of the endeavor to realize the identity between state and people; at its basis
there is a particular conception about the preconditions on which one accepts this identity as
real. But that does not change anything about the fundamental conception that all democratic
arguments rest logically on a series of identities. In this series belong the identity of governed
and governing, sovereign and subject, the identity of the subject and object of state authority,
the identity of the people with their representatives in parliament, the identity of the state and
the current voting population, the identity of the state and the law, and finally an identity of
the quantitative (the numerical majority or unanimity) with the qualitative (the justice of the
laws).
All of these identities are not palpable reality, but rest on a recognition of the identity. It is
not a matter of something actually equal
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