« The various nations or social and economic groups who organize themselves “democratically” have the same subject, ‘the people’, only in the abstract. In concreto the masses are sociologically and psychologically heterogeneous. A democracy can be militarist or pacifist, absolutist or liberal, centralized or decentralized, progressive or reactionary, and again different at different times without ceasing to be a democracy. From these facts it stands to reason that one cannot give democracy content by means of a transfer into the economic sphere. What remains then of democracy? For its definition, one has a string of identities. It belongs to the essence of democracy that every and all decisions which are taken are only valid for those who themselves decide. That the outvoted minority must be ignored in this only causes theoretical and superficial difficulties. In reality even this rests on the identity that constantly recurs in democratic logic and on the essential democratic argument–as will be seen immediately–that the will of the outvoted minority is in truth identical with the will of the majority. Rousseau’s frequently cited arguments in Contrat social are fundamental for democratic thought and ultimately conform to an ancient tradition. It is to be found almost literally in Locke: In democracy the citizen even agrees to the law that is against his own will, for the law is the General WIll and, in turn, the will of the free citizen. Thus a citizen never really gives his consent to a specific content but rather in abstracto to the result that evolves out of the general will, and he votes only so that the votes out of which one can know the general will can be calculated. If the result deviates from the intention of those individuals voting, then the outvoted know that they have mistaken the content of the general will: “This only proves that I have made a mistake, and that what I believed to be the General Will, was not so.” And because, as Rousseau emphatically continues, the general will conform so to true freedom, then the outvoted were not free. With this Jacobin logic one can, it is well known, justify the rule of a minority over the majority, even while appealing to democracy. But the essence of the democratic principle is preserved, namely, the assertion of an identity between law and the people’s will. For an abstract logic it really makes no difference whether one identifies the will of the majority or the will of the minority with the will of the people if it can never be the absolutely unanimous will of all citizens (including those not eligible to vote). »

–Carl Schmitt | The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy