Abstract

But the action of the common people is always either too remiss or too violent. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms they overturn all before them; and sometimes with a hundred thousand feet they creep like insects.Late modernity, when things and people are so fluid and fast until they stop, is a time of unsettled democratic identities. A well-known image of Magritte's, entitled La folie des grandeurs, or Megalomania, depicts a female torso in three stacked hollow segments of inclining scale, the top fitting into the middle fitting into the bottom. This headless and limbless body set against Magritte's trademark blue sky is more suitable in some respects as a symbol of contemporary democracy than Montesquieu's ..