ple (all contracts are between legal equals), and the emergence of citizenship (based on the principle of individualism). Apart from the idea of a  direct-access society, homogeneous time is a prerequisite for imagining th  totality of individual lives that comprise a (national) community in vitick?  there are no privileged persons or events, and therefore no mediations. This  makes the sources of political legitimacy in a modern direct-access, temporally homogeneous state radically different from the sources in a traditional temporally and politically mediated one. “Traditional despotisms  could ask of people only that they remain passive and obey the laws,” he  writes. “A democracy, ancient or modern, has to ask more. It requires that  its members be motivated to make the necessary contributions: of treasure  (in taxes), sometimes blood (in war), and always some degree of participation in the process of governance. A free society has to substitute for despotic enforcement a certain degree of self-enforcement. Where this fails,  the system is in danger.””  Is this account persuasive? Some doubts arise at this point. Surely,  the payment of taxes and induction into the army depend not on selfenforcement but on enforcement by the state? “Some degree” of participation in governance (by which Taylor means taking part in elections  once every four or five years) explicitly refers to a statistical measure of the  entire population and not to a measure of how strong individual motivation is. It depends, therefore, on the political skill with which large numbers are managed— including the organization and financing of electoral  campaigns—rather than on the ethics of individual self-discipline. The  distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation alate! but the statecraft that  uses “self-discipline” and “participation, ’ ’ “law” and “economy” as elements of political strategy. In spite of the reference to “democracy, ancient  or modern,” which suggests a comparability of political predicaments, the  problems and resources of modern society are utterly different from those  of a Greek polis. Indeed Taylor’s statement about participation is not, so  one could argue, the way.most individuals in modern state-administered  populations. justify governance: It is the way ideologicalspokespersons>  theorize “political legitimacy.” If the system is in danger it is not because  of an absence of self-enforcement by citizens. Most politicians are aware  that “the system is in danger” when the general population ceases to enjoy  any,sense of prosperity, when the regime is felt to be thoroughly unresponsive to the governed, and when the state security apparatuses are  grossly inefficient. Policing techniques and an economy that avoids disappointing too many in the general population too seriously are more important than self-discipline as an autonomous factor.  In today’s liberal democracies a strong case can be made for the the- sis that there is less and less of a direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives—that the latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a cultur- ally differentiated and economically polarized electorate. And the absence of a direct reflection of the citizen in his political representation is not com- pensated for through the various extra-parliamentary institutions con- nected to governance. On the contrary. The influence of pressure groups on government decisions is more often than not far greater than is warranted by the proportion of the electorate whose interests they directly promote (for example, the Farmers Union in Britain; AIPAC and the oil lobby in the United States). Opinion polls, continuously monitoring the fragile col- lective views of citizens, keep the government informed about public sentiment between elections, and enable it to anticipate or influence opinion independently of the electoral mandate. Finally, the mass media, increas- ingly owned by conglomerates and often cooperating with the state, medi- ate the political reactions of the public and its sense of guarantee and threat. Thus in crucial ways this is not at all a direct-access society.? There is no space in which all citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another. The existence of negotiation in public life is confined to such elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary legisla- tors, and business leaders. The ordinary citizen does not participate in the process of formulating policy options as these elites do—his or her partic- ipation in periodic elections does not even guarantee that the policies voted for will be adhered to.  The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated through constructed images. When Taylor says that a modern democracy must acquire a healthy dose of nationalist sentiment‘ he refers to the na- tional media— including national education—that is charged with culti3. See the interesting article by Bernard Manin, “The Metamorphoses of Representative Government,” Economy and Society, vol. 23, no. 2, May 1994. 4. “In other words, the modern democratic state needs a healthy degree of what used to be called patriotism, a strong sense of identification with the polity, and a willingness to give of oneself for its sake” (Taylor, p. 44). TRANSLATE IT INTO CHINESE