Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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).