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The majoritarian conception of democracy implies that counter-majoritarian institutions such as federalism—and even representative institutions—are derogations from democracy. The majoritarian conception is mistaken for two reasons. First, it is incoherent: majoritarianism ultimately stands against one of democracy's core normative commitments—namely, political equality. Second, majoritarianism is premised on a mistaken view of power, which fails to account for the power of numbers and thereby fails to explain the inequality faced by members of persistent minorities. Although strict majority rule serves the democratic values of political agency and equality as interpreted by a set of formal conditions, an adequate conception of power shows why in real-world conditions formal-procedural inequalities, instantiated by counter-majoritarian institutions such as federalism, are sometimes required to serve democratic equality.

There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to power-over-others. According to another, the core notion is power-to-effect-outcomes, to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct notion: power-despite-resistance. Fourth, the widespread assumption that social power presupposes the capacity to overcome resistance is false: social power includes the capacity to effect outcomes with others' assistance. Fifth, power-with can be exercised via joint intentional action, strategic coordination and non-strategic coordination. Sixth, agential social power is best analysed as a capacity to effect outcomes, with the assistance of others, despite the resistance of yet others. Seventh, power-over and power-with are not mutually exclusive: each can ground the other.

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people's political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people's political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the "political" turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada's Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, religion's freedom from coercion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes's 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of thepolitiquetradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere's religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity—visibility and representativeness—that enabled early modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.

Cultural–nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: Their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a prepolitical, in principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation's prepolitical culture, but it cannot fix cultural–national boundaries prepolitically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is ultimately legitimized prepolitically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a prepolitical ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory.

Hobbesian war primarily arises not because material resources are scarce; or because humans ruthlessly seek survival before all else; or because we are naturally selfish, competitive, or aggressive brutes. Rather, it arises because we are fragile, fearful, impressionable, and psychologically prickly creatures susceptible to ideological manipulation, whose anger can become irrationally inflamed by even trivial slights to our glory. The primary source of war, according to Hobbes, isdisagreement, because we read into it the most inflammatory signs of contempt. Both cause and remedy are therefore primarily ideological: The Leviathan's primary function is to settle the meaning of the most controversial words implicated in social life, minimize public disagreement, neutralize glory, magnify the fear of death, and root out subversive doctrines. Managing interstate conflict, in turn, requires not only coercive power, but also the soft power required to shape characters and defuse the effects of status competition.