Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagination a picture of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereignty making the state.” But this too concealed a deeper, harder reality. The “spectacle of ‘free men’ going to the polls to determine by their personal volitions the political forms under which they should live” was an illusion. For the very technological and industrial forces that dissolved the hold of traditional communities formed a structure of power that governed people’s lives in ways beyond the reach of individual choice or acts of consent.
