Jean-Jacques Rousseau, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Sovereignty cannot be alienated; it cannot be represented; the moment the people delegate the exercise of sovereign authority to representatives, sovereignty has been surrendered.1 The English think themselves free; they are free only at the moment of election, and between elections they are nothing. The legislator is not a representative of the people but the people themselves assembled as legislative body.2
Government — the executive power that applies the laws the people have enacted — may take various forms (democratic, aristocratic, monarchical) according to the conditions of the state, but legislative sovereignty must always remain in the hands of the people directly.3 The small-republic ideal of the Social Contract — Geneva, Sparta, republican Rome, the Swiss cantons — is not utopian nostalgia; it is the recognition that legitimate political authority requires the citizen-body to be small enough, equal enough, and morally formed enough that it can deliberate as a body.
The Constitutional Project for Corsica and the Considerations on the Government of Poland show the doctrine applied to concrete cases at the limits of what scale and existing institutions permit. Where the conditions for direct popular sovereignty fail, what remains is not a different but legitimate political form; what remains is the form of unfreedom dressed up as freedom that modern centralized states have made permanent.45
However this may be, the instant a People chooses Representatives, it is no longer free; it no longer exists. All things considered, I do not see that it is henceforth possible for the Sovereign to preserve the exercise of its rights among us unless the City is very small. But if it is very small, will it be subjugated? No.Social Contract and Political Writings, pp. 194–195
Waning of love of fatherland, the activity of private interest, the immenseness of States, conquests, the abuse of the Government have led to the invention of using Deputies or Representatives of the people in the Nation's assemblies. It is what people in certain countries dare to call the Third Estate. Thus the private interest of two orders is ranked first and second; the public interest is merely third.Social Contract and Political Writings, pp. 192–193
Here, then, is a third relation in which the assembled people can be considered—as magistrate or executor of the law that it has declared in its capacity as sovereign. We shall examine whether it is possible for the people to divest itself of its right of sovereignty in order to vest that right in one or more men.Emile, or On Education, pp. 469–470
Once all these motives no longer exist, it must be expected that the King, or the Senate, or both of them together, will make great eorts to free themselves from the Diets and make them as rare as they can. That is above all what must be forestalled and prevented. The means proposed is the only one, it is simple and cannot fail to be eective.Plan for Perpetual Peace and Government of Poland, p. 189
It would be reckless of me to guarantee its success, although I do not doubt it. If there is some better means, take it. But whatever it is, consider that your serfs are men like you, that they have in them the stu to become everything that you are: first work to bring it into play, and do not enfranchise their bodies until after having enfranchised their souls.Plan for Perpetual Peace and Government of Poland, p. 186
The critique of representation has been intensely contested in modern reception. The mainstream reading of the doctrine has been to treat it as institutionally impossible at the scale of the modern nation-state and therefore as nostalgia; the Cohen reading takes the question 'a Democrat after all?' seriously and concludes affirmatively; the contemporary radical-democratic tradition (Castoriadis, Bookchin, the participatory-democracy line) has reanimated the position. The Talmon totalitarian- democracy reading mistakes the doctrine for its opposite.