What is representative democracy? Is it aim to restrict or to promote popular rule?

Résumé du document

One may accept, as Dahl did, that representative democracy is a means to democratise a government. Yet, representative democracy is far from being a true democracy, both restricting and promoting popular rule.
The concept of representative democracy derived from the criticism of absolutism, held by the liberal philosophers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Representative democracy fully theorized in the 20th century was first aim to promote popular rule. Yet, that particular form of democracy is nothing but a compromise between a true democracy- that is the power of the many- and an oligarchic government- that is the power of the few. Representative democracy also restrict popular rule ...

Extraits

[...] If morality is believed to be objective, it signifies that an unjust law cannot be applied. Then, its legal validity looses all its sense, since that law no longer binds people. In addition, if morality is thought to be subjective, as I maintain it is, does this mean that every law become optional, that people can choose to break the laws they think to be unfair according to their personal moral preferences? It leads to the entirely dissolution of the system of law! [...]

[...] In other words, law is outcome of decisions between individuals at a determinate time, for a determinate purpose” (Tebbit). Legal validity resides in the source of the law, and not in the norm's content. Legal positivism has attacked natural law by supporting two different claims: first, the social thesis in opposition which the assumption that law is discovered rather than made, secondly the separation thesis, which stresses the contingent connection between law and morality. If neither the natural law theory nor the legal positivism seems more convincing, a “third can be considered. [...]

[...] Finnis held a substantive neo-naturalist theory, in which an “unjust law can be legally valid, but cannot provide an adequate justification for use of the state coercive power, and is hence not obligatory in the fullest sense” (iep.utm.edu). For Finnis, what law is and what law ought to be is a unique question: an unjust law is a law which fails to realize the moral ideals implicit in the concept of law, and thereby fails to fully oblige the citizen. What does it mean a non fully-obliged law? [...]

[...] The introduction of the notion of fairness in a legal system is either necessary or vital. If law is a social fact, it is also the means by which individual rights are protected. What law is and what law ought to be are two aspects of the concept of law which have to be analysed. What law ought to be is a political matter, involving political conflicts, so it has to be clarified in being recognised by the rule of recognition. [...]

[...] A norm is valid if it conformes with the “secondary rules”, and especially with the rule of recognition, which is the actual rule of society as the French Constitution of the fifth republic. In other words, say that a given rule is valid is to recognize it as passing all the tests provided by the rule of recognition” (Hart). * The norm's content cannot render any putative norm legally valid. Yet, Hart agreed that “laws must have a bare minimum of moral content if they are to serve their functions as laws at (Tebbit). [...]