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Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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main problem with this account is that it assumes that a group has a<br />

capacity to act prior to the action of its representatives, which is very<br />

unusual in the case of groups.<br />

Second, one possible candidate for overcoming these problems<br />

comes from the legal model of a ‘trust’. In common law, a trust is an<br />

arrangement whereby property is managed by an entity – the trustee<br />

– for the benefit of another entity – the beneficiary – without the latter<br />

being said to own the property in question. This is achieved through<br />

the creation of a legal fiction: representatives act in the group’s name<br />

and on its behalf, in accordance with rules that treat the group as if it<br />

were a principal. Trustees act independently, but in the interest of their<br />

beneficiaries without having to be given any direct orders or directives.<br />

[23] In other words, even though the corporation cannot act on its<br />

own, its representatives (or ‘officers’) can act for it. The idea is that the<br />

representatives act in the best interests of the corporation. But what if<br />

they <strong>do</strong>n’t? Whose responsibility is it to ensure they <strong>do</strong> act in the interests<br />

of the corporation? The answers to these questions are not clear,<br />

but this form of group representation highlights the fact that groups<br />

can have identities and interests of their own that are separate from<br />

those of their individual members, and these identities and interests<br />

are not only given agency by the representatives in question, but they<br />

are also often directly determined by the representatives without any<br />

recourse to collectivized reason. The problem with this model is that<br />

the rules of representation that allow the group to act as an artificial<br />

principal have to be external to the group, since the group cannot act<br />

without its representative.<br />

A third form of representation <strong>do</strong>es not depend upon this condition:<br />

that of the identification of interests or identities. Here an individual or<br />

group of individuals can bring forward a claim to represent a group,<br />

evidence for which is found in her or their capacity to attract a following,<br />

for example NGO representation; or a group can make someone or<br />

group into their representative because they identify with something<br />

they stand for based, say, on commonality of class, employment and<br />

so on, for example the representation common amongst national<br />

137<br />

FREEDOM, POWER AND<br />

REPRESENTATION<br />

Lawrence Hamilton<br />

23<br />

Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, ed. Runciman and Ryan (CUP 2003).

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