This article investigates the legitimacy building process concerning the representation in the civil society. Based on the recognition theory, the author defends the importance of the subjective experiences for a well-succeeded identification of different forms of injustice. Firstly, the author contends that the subjective experience, although being regarded as a necessary and irreplaceable source of intelligibility of injustice, cannot become a reliable source of justification in the public sphere. Secondly, the author investigates different forms of representation which become overlapped in the civil sphere and the need to articulate them with electoral representation and traditional dynamics of representative politics. Finally, the author discusses some manner to institutionalize the representation coming from civil society participation, in order to produce democratic effects in the organization of social life.
Representation; Civil society; Public sphere; Associativism