This contribution develops two objections to Hans Lindahl’s legal philosophy, as exhibited in
his Authority and the Globalization of Inclusion and Exclusion. First, his conception of constituent
power overstates the necessity of violence in initiating collective action. Second, his rejection
of the distinction between participatory and representative democracy on the grounds that
participation is representation is misleading, and compromises our ability to differentiate qualitatively
among various forms of (purportedly) democratic involvement. Both problems stem
from the same root. They result from conflating two distinct senses of ‘representation’: actingfor-
someone (or representative agency) and portraying-something-as-something (or representation-
as).
