The paper examines crises of representation across the West in the early twentieth century. While the representative democracy became synonymous with the democracy itself, the nature and pertinence of representation vis-a-vis democracy remains questionable. The mass democracy, or, at least, its precocious expectation raised questions, like how the representation should be conducted and what are actually represented. Further development of capitalist and industrialized economy increasingly polarized politics, making democratic representation more unstable and problematic. The crisis of representation manifested itself in different ways: in the election of 1912, the United States underwent a fourway presidential election, which ironically led to the consolidation of twoparty system and the restricted political imagination; France experimented with proportional representation, which was not materialized in any meaningful way, and resorted back to bloc politics; Germany attempted a radical democratic reconceptualization, only with the eventual disaster. As long as representation remains fundamental means of democracy today, revisiting its past crises is very much current and pertinent, which informs us of the very nature of representation.