This Reddit post, The Unfortunate truth: There is no "people" to rebel, got me thinking about the "we" and how it works. The We is a point of elocution; it is a subject-position from which one addresses others.
Anyone who tries to speak for others is playing a dangerous game, because we risk erasing or misrepresenting others and their perspectives. This is the challenge of representational politics: Speaking for others, even many different others at once, in a way they feel accurately presences their perspective (i.e., with fidelity).
| Date | Author / text | Locus | What it contributes to the problem of “we” |
|---|---|---|---|
| c. 3200 BCE onward | Earliest Mesopotamian writing | Sumer / Akkad | Earliest writing is largely administrative; the first durable collective voice is institutional before it is philosophical. The primordial “we” is the granary, palace, temple, tax-roll, and command apparatus. oai_citation:1‡University Blog Service |
| 3rd–2nd millennium BCE | Royal inscriptions (Mesopotamian / Near Eastern) | Ancient Near East | The earliest political “we” is often a sovereign we: ruler and polity fused. The collective speaks through the king, not through reciprocal consent. This is the archaic model later theories either refine or revolt against. oai_citation:2‡Project Gutenberg |
| c. 7th–5th century BCE | Hebrew Bible / Deuteronomic covenantal tradition | Ancient Israel | A people can be constituted not merely by co-residence but by covenant, law, memory, and election. The “we” here is sacred-juridical: a people addressed as one because bound by a shared command and story. oai_citation:3‡Encyclopedia Britannica |
| 5th–3rd century BCE | Confucius, Analects | China | Collective order is not grounded in abstract sovereignty but in ritual, exemplarity, rectification of names, and cultivated relation. The polity’s “we” is made through proper roles and moral performance, not merely decree. oai_citation:4‡Asia for Educators |
| 431 BCE | Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Oration | Athens | One of the foundational texts of the civic-rhetorical we. Pericles does not merely describe Athens; he performs it, praising the city so that citizens may hear themselves as a single political subject. oai_citation:5‡Human Rights Library |
| 4th century BCE | Aristotle, Politics | Greece | Asks who should rule: one, few, or many. Crucial because he grants the multitude a claim to judgment and rule under some conditions. The “we” becomes a constitutional problem, not merely an oratorical flourish. oai_citation:6‡Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
| late Republic onward | SPQR / Roman republican formula | Rome | “The Senate and People of Rome” crystallizes a split collective subject: the people do not speak in a raw immediacy but through formal organs. Roman politics makes visible a durable problem: the people require mediation to appear. oai_citation:7‡Cambridge University Press & Assessment |
| early 5th century CE | Augustine, City of God | Late antiquity | Reorients the question by showing that multiple “we’s” can coexist and rival one another. Political belonging is no longer ultimate; earthly and heavenly cities are formed by different loves. oai_citation:8‡The Gospel Coalition |
| 1324 | Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis | Medieval Europe | A hinge text. The legislator is “the people or the whole body of citizens or its weightier part.” Here the people become a juridical source of law, though still requiring institutional articulation. oai_citation:9‡Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
| medieval / early modern doctrine; synthesized 1957 | The king’s two bodies (Kantorowicz on the tradition) | Europe | Shows how polities are personified through legal fictions. The ruler’s body and the body politic are distinguished so that the collective can persist beyond any mortal bearer. A classic genealogy of corporate political personhood. oai_citation:10‡Wikipedia |
| 1651 | Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan | England | Monumental for the formula that a multitude united in one person becomes a commonwealth. The “we” is manufactured by authorization: individuals covenant to let one representative bear their person. oai_citation:11‡Project Gutenberg |
| 1762 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract | Geneva / France | Rejects mere representation as sufficient for sovereignty and centers the general will. The true political “we” is not any aggregate opinion, nor any ruler’s speech, but what each would will as a member of the whole. oai_citation:12‡Marxists Internet Archive |
| 1903 | W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk | United States | Essential because it shows that the “we” can be internally riven. Double consciousness means a subordinated people may be forced to see itself through another’s gaze; collective voice is therefore never innocent. oai_citation:13‡Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
| 1945 | Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives | United States | One of the sharpest accounts of how “we” is rhetorically fabricated. Burke’s concept of identification shows that collectivity is built through consubstantiality, shared symbols, common enemies, and persuasive alignment. oai_citation:14‡Wikipedia |
| 1958 | Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language” | France | Indispensable for the pronoun question itself. Personal pronouns are not ordinary names; they are positions in discourse. This is where the problem becomes properly linguistic: “we” is not a thing but an act of enunciation. oai_citation:15‡web.vu.lt |
| 1958 / 1963 | Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition / On Revolution | Germany / U.S. | The political “we” is born neither from fusion nor biology but from plurality and acting in concert. Power arises when people gather, speak, promise, and sustain a shared world. oai_citation:16‡Pensar el Espacio Público |
| 1967 | Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation | U.S. | Still the unavoidable reference on what it means to “speak for.” She clarifies representation as making present, and distinguishes forms of authorization, accountability, and substantive acting-for. oai_citation:17‡Google Books |
| 1960s–present | Collective intentionality (Searle, Gilbert, Tuomela, Bratman) | Analytic philosophy | Moves the issue into philosophy of mind and action: what is a we-intention? Can groups intend, believe, or act, or is all so-called collective agency reducible to interlocked individual states? Gilbert’s plural subject and Tuomela/Searle/Bratman are central here. oai_citation:18‡Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
| 1961 | Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth | Martinique / Algeria | A ferocious warning that “the people” can be invoked and betrayed at once. National consciousness may emancipate, but it may also be captured by a national bourgeoisie; not everyone who says “we the people” speaks from the people. oai_citation:19‡Marxists Internet Archive |
| 1983 | Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities | Global nationalism studies | Canonical on large-scale modern “we’s.” Nations are imagined political communities: people who will never know most fellow-members nonetheless imagine a horizontal comradeship, largely through print and media circulation. oai_citation:20‡LitCharts |
| 1988 | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” | Postcolonial theory | Crucial for the phrase speaking for. Spivak famously distinguishes two senses of representation, political speaking-for and aesthetic/theoretical re-presentation, and shows how elite mediation can efface the subaltern. oai_citation:21‡Void Network |
| 1991 | Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” | Feminist / decolonial theory | A direct answer to your question. Legitimacy depends not on purity but on location, effects, accountability, and discursive practice. The issue is not simply whether one may speak, but what one’s speaking does. oai_citation:22‡WSU Web |
| 2000 | Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy / “Representation and Social Perspective” | Democratic theory | Argues that inclusion requires attention to social perspective without collapsing persons into essences. The “we” of democracy must be structured so that marginalized standpoints are not ventriloquized away. oai_citation:23‡OUP Academic |
| 2002 | Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics | Public sphere theory | A public is not simply there; it is brought into being by address and circulation. A “we” can therefore be textual, recursive, and self-organizing: a public exists because discourse hails it and people take up that hail. oai_citation:24‡Google Books |
| 2005 | Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason | Political theory | Perhaps the boldest modern thesis: the people are constructed, not discovered. Populist reason works by linking demands into a chain of equivalence until “the people” emerge as a political subject. oai_citation:25‡Void Network |
| 2015 | Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly | Contemporary political theory | Extends performativity from speech to gathered bodies. Sometimes the “we” speaks not first by proposition but by appearing together, exposing precarity, persistence, and interdependence in public space. oai_citation:26‡JSTOR |
[ChatGPT's] compression of the whole tradition:
| Question | Strongest answer across the canon |
|---|---|
| Who speaks for the we? | Historically: kings, priests, magistrates, assemblies, representatives, parties, publics, movements, and media. Normatively: no one by mere self-appointment; one speaks for a “we” only through some combination of authorization, uptake, accountability, and demonstrable linkage to those named. oai_citation:27‡Project Gutenberg |
| How is the we constructed? | By covenant, law, ritual, common memory, war, print/media circulation, naming, boundary-drawing, representation, shared action, and rhetorical identification. It is never merely found; it is always partly made. oai_citation:28‡Encyclopedia Britannica |
| Who is allowed to say “we”? | The sharpest modern answer is restrictive: those who claim a collective voice must show their position, expose their mediation, remain corrigible, and avoid effacing internal differences. Spivak, Alcoff, Young, and Butler are the crucial correctives to older sovereign and national models. oai_citation:29‡Void Network |