131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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legally, politically, or sociologically, but rather of identifications. Extension of the suffrage,
the reduction of electoral terms of office, the introduction and extension of referenda and
initiatives—in short, everything that one identifies as an institution of direct democracy or a
tendency toward it and all those things which, as has just been mentioned, are governed by
the notion of an identity—are in consequence democratic. But they can never reach an
absolute, direct identity that is actually present at every moment. A distance always remains
between real equality and the results of identification. The will of the people is of course
always identical with the will of the people, whether a decision comes from the yes or no of
millions of voting papers, or from a single individual who has the will of the people even
without a ballot, or from the people acclaiming in some way. Everything depends on how the
will of the people is formed. The ancient dialectic in the theory of the will of the people has
still not been resolved: The minority might express the true will of the people; the people can
be deceived, and one has long been familiar with the techniques of propaganda and the
manipulation of public opinion. This dialectic is as old as democracy itself and does not in
any way begin with Rousseau or the Jacobins. Even at the beginning of modern democracy
one comes across the remarkable contradiction that the radical democrats understood their
democratic radicalism as a selection criterion that distinguished them from others as the true
representatives of the people's will. From this there arose in practice an extremely
undemocratic exclusivity, because only the representatives of true democracy were granted
political rights. At the same time a new aristocracy emerged. It is an old sociological
phenomenon that repeats itself in every revolution; it did not appear first with the November
socialists of 1918, but showed itself everywhere in 1848 in those who were called "old
republicans." 14 It is entirely consistent to maintain that democracy can only be introduced for
a people who really think democratically. The first direct democracy of the modern period,
the Levellers of the Puritan Revolution, were not able to escape
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