Mass politics traded individual agency for collective power through delegation

Evidence

The words “the Left” really meant something important. People wanted to defend their own interests, to make their voices heard, and the way to achieve that—aside from strikes or protests—was to delegate, to hand oneself over to the “representatives of the working class” and to political leaders whose decisions were thus implicitly accepted and whose discourses you learned and repeated. This required a transfer of agency but guaranteed in return a modicum of collective power. Unlike the monads that people our public sphere, an arena for individual self-expression in which representative institutions appear intrinsically suspect, Eribon’s parents became political subjects by putting themselves “into the hands of the party spokespersons, through whom workers, the ‘working class,’ came to exist as an organized group, as a class that was aware of itself as such.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 118

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets the baseline contrast: delegation-based subjects vs. today’s ‘monads’ — groundwork for what hyperpolitics lacks.
• XREF: connects to: Political power arises between citizens acting together, not individually — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 135; Twentieth-century power equalization resulted from collective action and policy inventions — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface:…, 23