68

Representation is a fiction; not a fact. It therefore makes no sense to ask whether estates really represented the whole country or not. Rather, from a historical perspective, we have to ask who used the fiction of representation, as well as why and with what success. In the single principalities of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, “Landstände” – provincial nobles, cities, and ecclesiastical corporations – were said to “represent the whole country” (of Saxony, Hesse, Bavaria, Pomerania, etc.). The article analyses what German scholars of public law exactly meant by using that phrase throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It tries to show that there was a significant change in the end of the eighteenth century; the notion of representation changed from repraesentatio identitatis to representation of the people by mandate – a new standard the “Landstände” were neither able nor willing to meet.