The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom – it makes possible surveillance states and totalitarian regimes – but this danger, we are always assured, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it’s generally felt they really should be. Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we
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