Vox populi, vox Dei: The ‘People’ as an agent of linguistic norm

Le peuple, the ‘people’ is a collective noun difficult to define, because it changes its value according to place, time and political regime. The history of the notion shows that it oscillates between the social and moral concept of populace, the political concept of nation and the economical concept of working class. In the present paper, it is also given a linguistic content in so far as it refers to a linguistic community of variable extent in which an individual makes a projection of his relationship to other individuals in order to constitute a representation of a whole which then reflects back onto each individual. The inclusion of the concept of the people among linguistic categories dealing with agentivity presupposes a theoretical engagement for the existence of hypostasized concepts that transcend the heterogeneity of sociological variables. Precedence is thus given to a ‘linguistic’ principle which stresses equality of individuals in front of language in such a way that they are made to speak by the same mouth, that of a collective, abstracted personage to whom each individual has given a mandate to express his opinions and will somehow by proxy.