The tercentenary celebrations of Rousseau's birth in 2012 coincided all over the world with some deep anxieties concerning the fate of representative democracy, present and future, as a form of government. This was rejected by Rousseau as unfit to respect popular sovereignty; but he was sceptic about pure or direct democracy as well, for "there never has been a real democracy, and there never will be". We may suppose, by bringing Rousseau back to life, that he would reject again - like he did in his crude analysis of the Genevan oligarchy and in his criticism of the British constitution - all existing forms of representative democracy as mystifications of the "general will", now put under the pressure of the omnipotent media. However, he would not accept to consider his own model of the State as a pure backward utopia, like many of his critics affirmed; he would rather use again his firm judgement criteria to disapprove all kind of mystifications of the general will by means of the video-or web-mock "direct democracy".
