I'm going to live forever, cancer-free; part of a continuing series

via Pejman Yousefzadeh, the latest in the parade of good news about the health benefits of the nectar of the gods.

A cup of joe a day may help keep skin cancer away: A new study shows that caffeine helps kill off human cells damaged by ultraviolet light, one of the key triggers of several types of skin cancer.

The finding, detailed in Feb. 26 online issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, could one day lead to the development of caffeine creams or ointments to help reverse the effects of UV damage in humans and prevent some skin cancers.

Nonmelanoma skin cancers, which rarely metastasize or cause death, are the most common form of cancer in humans, with more than 1 million new cases occurring each year in the United States alone. (Melanoma is, however, one of the deadlier cancers.)

Exposure to ultraviolet light is one of the most important factors in causing nonmelanoma cancers. The rays cause DNA damage to skin cells, which then mutate or become cancerous.

Several studies have shown that people who regularly drink coffee or tea seem to have lower incidences of nonmelanoma skin cancers. One recent study of more than 90,000 Caucasian women found that with each additional cup of caffeinated coffee consumed, there was an associated 5 percent decreased risk of developing one of these skin cancers (decaf coffee had no effect).

CREUM postdoc

Le Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CREUM) est heureux d’offrir, pour l’année académique 2009-2010, plusieurs bourses de séjour post-doctorales d’une valeur maximale de 27,000$. La durée du stage pourra varier en fonction du dossier soumis et de la nature de la recherche.

La mission du CREUM est de contribuer à la recherche interdisciplinaire et à la qualité de la formation dans les domaines de l’éthique fondamentale et appliquée.

Nous encourageons les applications qui proviennent de chercheurs oeuvrant dans les axes de recherche principaux du CRÉUM : éthique fondamentale, éthique et politique, éthique et santé, éthique et économie, éthique et environnement.

Nous recevons également les candidatures provenant de disciplines diverses, pourvu que leur sujet de recherche soit en rapport direct avec des problématiques éthiques.

L’Université de Montréal est une institution francophone. Les candidats doivent avoir une maîtrise du français qui leur permette de participer aux activités du Centre.

Les chercheurs intéressés doivent soumettre leur candidature avant le 30 avril 2009.

Le centre de recherche en éthique offrira aux candidats choisis :

Pour les boursiers post-doctoraux ayant terminé leur doctorat depuis moins de cinq ans :

* Une bourse post-doctorale de 3 000$ par mois ;
* Un poste de travail individuel pour chacun des boursiers post-doctoraux du CREUM ;
* L’accès aux infrastructures de l’Université de Montréal (bibliothèques, centre sportif, etc.) ;
* De l’assistance pour l’organisation matérielle du séjour.

En retour, les boursiers s’engagent à :

* Mener un projet de recherche conforme à celui soumis lors de leur candidature ;
* Participer aux activités organisées par le Centre (conférences, séminaires, colloques) ;
* Effectuer une présentation de leurs travaux en cours dans le cadre de séminaires ou de workshops organisés par le Centre.

Les dossiers seront évalués selon :

* La nature des projets de recherche et leur pertinence dans le cadre de la mission du CREUM ;
* La qualité de la recherche précédente et la capacité du candidat de bénéficier des activités du Centre.

Les candidats doivent soumettre les documents suivants au CREUM :

* Un curriculum vitae ;
* Un texte académique (publication ou travail) écrit dans le courant des trois dernières années ;
* Un projet de recherche de 1500 mots ou moins ;
* Deux lettres de référence (envoyées directement au CREUM avant la date limite) ;
* Un relevé de notes des études doctorales (s’il y a lieu) ;
* Le formulaire de candidature ci-inclus dûment rempli télécharger ici.

La date limite pour la réception des candidatures est le 30 avril 2009.
Nous encourageons les candidatures faisant l’objet d’un partenariat entre le CRÉUM et d’autres Centre de recherche ou institution universitaire.

Veuillez envoyer votre dossier à l’adresse suivante :

Daniel M. Weinstock, directeur
Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM)
Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville
Montreal (Quebec)
Canada H3C 3J7

Grade Expectations

Hmm. This NYT piece and Michelle Cottle's follow-up both seem a bit overwrought to me.

Yes, of course, grades are earned by performance, not deserved by effort. And, yes, of course, "I showed up for class and did the reading" doesn't count as spectacular effort anyways; that's the beginning of trying, not the end.

On the other hand: in any field of endeavor, "But I tried very hard!" is the first response to being told that you didn't do a good job. It's not strictly speaking relevant, but it's part of how a person defends him- or herself, and tried to redeem his or her standing in the eyes of the other person. If you really make it the grounds of an appeal of a grade, of course, that's a silly mistake. But the mere fact that you can find some undergrad sentences that express a sense of desert and entitlement doesn't mean that there's some new crisis wave of such things. I can "kids these days!" with the best of them, but Professor Marshal Grossman's complaint that "Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before" is utterly banal and trivial. Of course they do. Of course college is a new experience and there's a shock to the system compared with high school. Of course that's especially true for a college with competitive admission, when high schools are basically just admission-by-geography. The perennial condition of the 18-year-old college frosh does not make for a deep anomaly to explain in terms of the last generation's parenting skills, etc., etc.

Grossman and Cottle are both saying the sorts of things professors say to each other all the time, but it's trivial-level grumbling, on a par with saying "hot enough for you?" in the summer. (See also: Rate Your Students, passim.)

Maybe I'm undersensitive to such things, because the truth is I've experienced *very* little grade-grubbing during my academic life, despite being a medium-hard grader. I do believe that women faculty get hit with grade appeals more often than men, so at least on that front I've been unfairly insulated from the problem to the extent that there is a problem. And I have some other reasons to think that my experience isn't totally representative. But at the end of the day: I like undergrads, and in my experience they try to do well. To the extent that they don't understand what it means to do well, I think they respond well to having it explained to them. Making fun of them, by name, in the pages of the New York Times doesn't seem to me like the way to go. Neither does the Allan Bloom/ Harvey Mansfield approach of elevating "Kids these days!" into social criticism.

(I'm sure that there have been other days in my scholarly career when I would have written a "Go Grossman!" post. But the mood passes-- and grownups are supposed to know how to let a mood pass without committing it to print at other people's expense.)

Elsewhere

Lots of great and interesting stuff on traditional themes of interest around here.

Will Wilkinson on inequality and American exceptionalism... and race.

Many people on liberaltarianism; Ross Douthat, twice; Reihan Salam; Will, and again (I especially like that last post); Ilya Somin; Virginia Postrel.

A characteristically epic and rich post from Russell Arben Fox on some of his own favorite themes, some of which he and I have discussed from time to time (and I chip in in comments there). A sample:

The point is, I suspect, that trying to extricate liberal ideas in all their varieties from any political argument that doesn't address capitalism (and the mostly or at least increasingly democratic forms of modern life it presumes to be valuable) itself directly is probably always going to end up failing. Burke himself, who is usually held as the very font of modern conservatism, was a liberal, or at least was liberal; as Jacob Levy (among others) has persuasively argued, Burke was a Whig whose "pluralist liberalism" led him to greatly respect the "ancient liberties--of churches, guilds, parlements, provinces, cities, nobles, and all the rest--[that] provided a place to stand against absolutism." So from the beginning, any conservatism which speaks of liberty in the context of modern democratic capitalism--the arena within which different groups (the small platoons!) as we know them today can form and seek the freedom and power to live their lives as they see fit in the first place--is going to be, at most, a form of liberalism, one that is, as Alasdair MacIntyre once put it, a "conservative liberalism," a liberalism more pluralist in its devotions, more sensitive to history and less rational in its ambitions, but a liberalism nonetheless.

Now in some ways this is obviously a kind of silly point to make. Political theorists like Jacob and Patrick (and, sometimes, me) can argue all we like about the conceptual and/or historical connections between Burke and other early modern liberals, but in historical fact it is the conservatives--certainly at least since Russell Kirk--that have seen in Burke's appreciation of tradition and natural limits a conservative response to Rousseau and thus to all the revolutionary or egalitarian implications of liberalism. And, of course, the liberal reading of Burke can itself be contested: the man did rhapsodize about how moved he was by the glorious presence of Marie Antoinette, after all. So (perhaps to allude back to the aforementioned debate between Patrick and Damon) there are elements of a fundamentally illiberal appreciation of authority in his thought. Still, overall, I think the general point stands: every successful modern conservative political argument has been, to a degree, in the same position as that which Michael Walzer once famously said about the relevance of communitarianism to our modern liberal world (about which, more here); namely, that it is, however interesting and important an ideology, nonetheless parasitic on liberalism, a "recurrent critique," at best.

So does this mean that Patrick's search for a conservatism that can truly be tried and made fruitful is, in the end, in vain? Not necessarily--it just means that one needs to get clear on what it is you're searching for, and think again about where to find it and what one hopes to accomplish There are different sorts of recurrent critiques, after all.

Read the whole thing.

Pettit and His Critics

Pettit and His Critics

Saturday 14 March 2009

Research Beehive room 2.21
Old Library Building
Newcastle University

Philip Pettit is one of the most significant moral and political philosophers today. This conference will bring together new work on Pettit’s many philosophical contributions by three philosophers—Thom Brooks (Newcastle), Cecile Laborde (University College London), and Michael Ridge (Edinburgh)—with replies to each by Philip Pettit.


Program

10.30-11.00am
Registration (tea/coffee)

11.00-12.30pm
Speaker: Michael Ridge (Edinburgh)
An Opportunity for Expressivists?
Sincerity, Belief Expression and Ecumenical Expressivism
Respondent: Philip Pettit (Princeton)

12.30-1.15pm
Lunch

1.15-2.45pm
Speaker: Thom Brooks (Newcastle)
Moral and Political Freedom
Respondent: Philip Pettit (Princeton)

2.45-3.00pm
Tea/coffee

3.00-4.30pm
Speaker: Cecile Laborde (UCL)
Tbc
Respondent: Philip Pettit (Princeton)

I don't know...

How one could possibly determine what the best John Holbo post at Crooked Timber is. But if the question is "what's the best John Holbo post-plus-ensuing-comments-thread, I think we may have an all-time winner: Lewd and Prude, riffing on the old Amartya Sen argument about the impossibility of a Paretian liberal and the parable of Lewd and Prude

But what really impresses me is the story itself. It’s timeless and speaks to all ages and sexes and classes of society. Why has no one developed it? I want Lewd vs. Prude comics. In each installment, Lewd acquires a new pornographic novel and, with child-like enthusiasm, attempts to get Prude to read it. Meanwhile, Prude is busy trying to destroy it – burn it, dynamite it, bury it, sink it beneath the waves, send it by post to Australia. But the efforts on both sides invariably cancel out. In the final panel, Prude sits down to read. Again.

We could have “Lewd and Prude on Holiday”, “Lewd and Prude Go Ballooning”, “Lewd and Prude at Baffin Bay”, “Lewd and Prude in the Big City”, “Lewd and Prude at Sea”, “Lewd and Prude and the Doctor’s Orders”, “Lewd and Prude at the Opera”. (I think comics would be best, but mere prose may, just may, be a match for such high occasions.)

It will be much better than “Spy vs. Spy”, because Lewd and Prude obviously have a somewhat dysfunctional, asymmetric-yet-mutual love. It’s like “Krazy Kat”, with a pornographic novel playing the role of the thrown brick. And yet: this brick will have subtly different moral properties! Will there be some sort of Offica Pup figure? Perhaps a pained, Millian liberal who can see it is all going nowhere very impressive. But this will be Offica Pup without a jail, because – strictly – there is no inconsistency with liberalism. (How sublime!)

That's brilliant enough, as one would expect from John playing with this kind of material. But you've got to read the comments and see what Rich Pulasky gets up to.

I haven't had time

to blog about the connections between our partisanship symposium and the Senate's silly display of bipartisanship for its own sake. But see: Ross Douthat, djw, Matt Yglesias, etc.

Liberaltarianism, west coast edition, continued

(See earlier posts here, here, here, and here.)

Josh Cohen has posted the text of his remarks from the Stanford panel. (via Henry Farrell.)

Yay...

for choice of law and legal pluralism.

I've long since...

stopped reading David Brooks' columns as a matter of course. (Indeed, I stopped reading all NYT op-ed columnists during the TimeSelect era, and have only resumed reading Kristof on anything like a regular basis.) But I agree with Noam; passages like this are why Brooks was put on this earth.

Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are.

Rosenblum symposium elsewhere

Nancy Rosenblum is engaged in another symposium on her partisanship thesis elsewhere, over at the admirable Cato Unbound. (Hat tip to its admirable editor, Will Wilkinson.) Responses are forthcoming from Brink Lindsey, Henry Farrell, and James Fishkin.

UpdateAll of us here except for Andrew Rehfeld were basically on board with Rosenblum's thesis, so readers might be especially interested in this dissent by Lindsey. Then see Henry Farrell's reply.

On the Side of Angels symposium
22. Nadia Urbinati: Pluralism and Parties continued

In comments here, Paul Gowder asks

“On your final point, can you say more about how you get from pluralism to parties? Can one have pluralism that is not merely a "social given," but is also not instantiated in political parties as such? Perhaps, say, citizens could come to the table with ideologies (drawn from their Rawlsish comprehensive doctrines), and those ideologies could permit them to be understood as bodies of interest and permit a representative to say that she stands in a certain relation to those bodies ("I'm sympathetic to the Catholics"), but without the voters being organized into parties?”

(See also his post here.)

My answer:

Cultural and social pluralism is not the same as party pluralism, and this distinction is very important.

John Rawls described the “depth” and “breadth” of overlapping consensus – what Hegel would call the “constitutional ethos” -- in the following terms:

“…once a constitutional consensus is in place, political groups must enter the public forum of political discussion and appeal to other groups who do not share their comprehensive doctrine. This fact makes it rational for them to move out of the narrower circle of their own views and to develop political conceptions in terms of which they can explain and justify their preferred policies to a wider public so as to put together a majority.”

Political groups (parties) articulate the “general” view from peripheral or civil association kinds of viewpoints. Parties are partial-yet-communal associations and essential points of reference that allow citizens and representatives to recognize one another (and the others,) form alliances, and moreover situate ideologically the compromises they are ready to make. As Pitkin wrote, “But in fact, one of the most important features of representative government is its capacity for resolving the conflicting claims of the parts, on the basis of their common interest in the welfare of the whole.” Representation is the institution that allows civil society (in all its components) to identify itself politically and to influence the political direction of the country. Its ambivalent nature –social and political, particular and general-- determines its inevitable link to participation.

Political representation transforms and expands politics insofar as it does not simply allow the social to be translated into the political; it also facilitates the formation of political groups and identities. Hence Hegel could write that representation brings dissent into politics because in politicizing the social sphere it brings plurality and difference into the public, and Weber could accentuate that the political aspect of voting lies in the chance the citizens have to transcend their social being by their own doing, that is to say to act independently of their social identity and become themselves representatives of their political community.

It might be useful to recall Tocqueville’s prescient diagnosis of the two forms of associations democratic citizens tend to create: civil associations that bind (and divide) individuals according to their specific and most of the time uni-dimensional interests or opinions; and party associations that bind (and divide) citizens along the lines of their evaluative interpretations of matters that are general, or of “equal importance for all parts of the country.” The former produce fragmentation “ad infinitum about questions of detail” that can hardly have a general breadth since the life of civil associations depends on the relative closure of their borders. The latter interrupts fragmentation, not however by imposing homogeneity or concealing difference (making the whole society in the image of one party), but by creating new forms of “difference” between citizens. Political partisanship both brings people together and separates them on issues that are general in their rich and implications. The function of parties goes well beyond the instrumental one of providing organization and resources for political personnel rotation and the peaceful resolution of succession claims. Their function is above all that of “integrating the multitude” by unifying people’s ideas and interests and of making the sovereign permanently present as an agent of extra-state influence and oversight.

Cited Texts:

Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. “The English Reform Bill,” in Political Writings, Trans. T.M. Knox, 295-330. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Concept of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. J.P. Mayer. New York: Harper Perennial, 1969.

Nadia Urbinati

On the Side of Angels symposium
23. Jacob T. Levy: Exclusions from government

Our symposium was scheduled to end yesterday, and Nancy Rosenblum is hereby released if she wants-- she's been writing full responses to every set of comments all week. But I've heard from a few commentators that they have things they'd still like to say, and I do too, so I'll keep the shop open for a while.

I had meant to make a few substantive posts in response to On the Side of Angels, but the time spent juggling the postings and so on took away from planned commenting time. So, even recognizing the possibility that Rosenblum may not have time to keep responding, here's the first of the leftover points I had meant to develop.

The final full chapter of the book examines, sceptically, arguments for "banning parties, outlawing political practices, and disqualifying certain partisans from participation in elections and government." Those last two words led me to expect something that I didn't find in the chapter. Rosenblum offers a careful examination of arguments about parties associated with political violence; parties that aren't really parties but are masks for some other kind of political organization; parties that incite hatred; parties that threaten the existential identity of the state, e.g. by supporting separatism or minority rights; and parties that are controlled from outside the polity. As always, both in this book and in Membership and Morals, Rosenblum is suspicious of the quick urge to suppress pluralism and dissent, and she offers good arguments as to why the boundaries around democratic contestation should not be drawn so narrowly as many in the "militant democracy" literature have thought.

I especially value this chapter because it both recognizes that many political parties aren't the parties of political theories (liberal, socialist, communist) but rather the parties of a religious or ethnocultural group, and argues against the delegitimation of such parties that's common in both majoritarian politics and democratic theory. (I once wrote in a symposium on Membership and Morals that I wished it had paid more attention to specifically cultural pluralism; Angels does so, and I'm glad to see it.)

But the chapter is centrally an argument against banning parties and prohibiting participation. It's the political-theory equivalent of a First Amendment argument. And I wonder what Rosenblum thinks about the alternative, the option I was waiting to see her examine: legally permitting parties to campaign, compete, win elections, and hold seats, but creating a taboo around their participation in government.

In parliamentary systems this means a taboo around forming a coalition government with them, or perhaps even a coalition government dependent on their passive support. Arab parties are normally allowed to contest elections and hold seats in the Israeli Knesset; but there is a powerful political norm that a legitimate government must command a Jewish majority, a majority of seats in the Knesset without depending on the Arab parties. The Bloc Quebecois has never entered into a coalition government in Canada, and during our recent constitutional crisis when there was a chance of a Liberal-NDP coalition displacing the ruling Conservatives, the Conservatives made great political hay out of the fact that the coalition would have been dependent on the votes of the Bloc (which nonetheless would not have been a partner in it). Post-totalitarian parties in Europe, sometimes post-Communist and sometimes post-Fascist, have often taboo in some countries and at some times.

On the one hand, such taboos might inhibit the important and beneficial process Rosenblum describes in the case of Christian Democrats: the normalization and liberalization and reconciliation to a constitutional order of a bloc that otherwise stands outside of it. On the other hand: voluntary isolation and rejection and shunning is the appropriate liberal response to things that should not be banned but nonetheless are beyond the pale. When a center-right party cedes power rather than join a coalition with fascists, or a center-left party does so rather than join with communists, are they acting as good partisans on Rosenblum's understanding, or bad ones? What about taboos around ethnic and religious parties?

I can think of prudential arguments on both sides. On the one hand, a taboo provides an incentive for reform in a particular direction; when a communist party breaks with Moscow and reorganizes itself as a democratic socialist party, when a separatist party becomes just an ethnic-regionalist party, when a fascist party becomes just a party of the right, the taboo could be relaxed. On the other hand, the isolation could itself discourage such reform because the party leadership never acquires the discipline of responsible party government. A taboo could provide voters with an incentive to support a more moderate party, one within the acceptable boundaries; or it could contribute to their further alienation from the system.

And I can think of other reasons on both sides, too: the argument from the right of the voters to be represented, and the argument that we'll likely get fewer bans and more respect for free speech precisely insofar as the threatening parties are sure not to govern. But I can't think of a general way to balance these considerations, even though the case seems to call for a general norm, and I wonder whether Rosenblum can.

On the Side of Angels symposium: contents so far

Jacob Levy, Prologue
Jacob Levy, Introduction (and introductions)
1. Nancy Rosenblum, Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation, Part I
2. Nancy Rosenblum, Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation, Part II
3. Nancy Rosenblum, The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’, Part I: Independence
4. Nancy Rosenblum, The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’, Part II: Moments of Appreciation of Partisanship
5. Nadia Urbinati, A third tradition of anti-partyism
6. Nadia Urbinati, Parties are not an option in representative democracy
7. Melissa Schwartzberg, The development of parties' programs
8. Mara Marin, Holism and the Public Interest
9. Henry Farrell, Comparative questions
10. Patrick Deneen, Progressivism and Partisans
11. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Schwartzberg
12. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Marin
13. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Urbinati
14. Andrew Rehfeld, What About Interest Groups?
15. Andrew Rehfeld, Regulated Conflict and a “proto-Millian” defense of parties or “Vote for me, I’ve probably got the right answers.”
16. Andrew Rehfeld, Institutional responses
17. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Deneen
18. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Farrell
19. Jacob T. Levy, Anti-partyism and presidentialism
20. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Levy
21. Nancy Rosenblum, Response to Rehfeld

On the Side of Angels symposium
21. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Rehfeld

Prof. Rehfeld’s exuberant self-description as a die-hard antipartisan echoes the “divine right to bolt” from parties often touted as the right path for sensible citizens. I have failed to convert him, not surprisingly given his avowed contempt for partisans (“politically detached ignoramuses”) and his attraction to impartiality. I can’t quite tell whether his response is partly playful or entirely sober; in any case, I have enjoyed grappling with it.

Consider a moderate position that antiparty theorists might take. If we understand the value of parties in a proto-Millian sense of shaping lines of political division and staging the battle we can assign partisans a modest role. We could reluctantly concede that democracy needs just enough partisans to “man” the parties. Ardent partisans may not be deliberative personally but at the level of the polity they are the agents of “trial by discussion”. For the rest and for the most part, on this view, democracy needs open-minded Independents to adjudicate among them. Even this grudging, truncated view concedes something important to party leaders and to activists in the electorate. It is, however, more than Rehfeld would allow. He admits (for reasons not entirely clear) that citizens will be and should be partisan -- by which he means they will have conflicting interests and opinions, they will be partisans of a cause, say, but he concedes nothing to real partisans ((“party id”; attachment to others in a party that contests elections and takes responsibility for governing).

Rehfeld’s diffuse notion of partisanship does not accept my case for real partisanship as the distinctive political identity of representative democracy. He certainly does not accept the moral claims I make for partisans who try to make parties comprehensive, inclusive, and compromising. I won’t repeat my assessment of the minimal case for real partisanship: the comparative knowledgability and engagement of partisans (Rehfeld rejects – or ignores -- empirical work on party id).

His witty characterization of Millian partisan officials who do not claim to be on the side of the angels but rather present themselves as only “probably right” is not what I commend. I assess with care the Humean notion that partisans can be injected with “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism” and hesitation – instants in which they appreciate that the other side is sometimes in the right and assume the pose of the impartial observer. Hume’s prescriptions are too stringent and phenomenologically alien to partisanship. My modest ethic of partisanship suffices. It stands opposed to Rehfeld’s independent, impartial, “professional” legislator. (I leave aside the question who elects these types?)


Rehfeld’s chief concern is to dispose altogether of any role for parties and partisans in organizing legislatures and in representation – it is a frontal challenge to Prof. Urbinati’s argument in this blog. He would divorce partisanship from the business of decision-making. What about all these interest and advocacy groups that are allowed, even encouraged, to lobby legislators? The problem of differential resources and organization arises in earnest here. It is not clear that Rehfeld wants to empower these advocates, these partisans without party – only that his professional legislators are an audience for their more or less organized voices.

In any case, it seems to me that what Rehfeld does is extend the institutional ambition of deliberative democratic theorists. They have typically focused on “deliberative polls” or “citizen juries” that do not make binding decisions, where the force of their judgments comes solely from the moral authority of popular deliberation based on full information. Or, deliberative institutionalists propose courts or nonpartisan expert commissions to substitute for decision-making by elected representatives in certain areas (districting, say). Or, like Philip Pettit, they propose nonpartisan popular mechanisms to review, contest, and emend egregious democratic political decisions. Rehfeld would bring impartial deliberation into the heart of government decision-making tout court.

Think about his legislature. Rehfeld does not address the question of how interests and opinions are consolidated, if only temporarily, into coherent, principles or consistent policy positions. From early on, parties have served that purpose; their importance in government for setting agendas and regulating rivalry (in contrast to party in the electorate) has gone largely undisputed. The profusion of interest and advocacy groups lobbying legislators (can we call them representatives?) he proposes is a recipe for chaos and for much more short-term and strategic alliances than presently exist. It is bound, I would argue, to result in the formation of parties – though this time caucuses within legislatures rather than large-scale comprehensive ones tied to the electorate.

Rehfeld assumes, I assume, that his model would produce better decisions – better in the sense of untainted by special pleading and directed impartially at the common good. This assumption even on his own terms is dubious, and as a theoretical matter goes to the heart of long-standing debates in political philosophy that I cannot review here. In “Correcting the System” I try to systematically distinguish nonpartisanship and types of impartiality. One problem with impartiality as a regulative ideal is, again, that we do not have standards for the relevant universe of alternative proposals and reasons. It is still less clear what “professional” adds to the characterization of legislators as nonpartisan or impartial. In any case, it does not seem that Rehfeld holds a strong epistemic view of democracy; rather, he aims to correct for the worst prejudices and naked self-serving. The attempt to draw a bright line between interests and passions on the one hand and reasonable or impartial evaluation on the other is one of the heroic endeavors of contemporary political theory. Angels is an extended answer to this antipolitical ideal.

Under what circumstances are Rehfeld’s concerns proportionate to extra-party correctives? One is when parties and their partisan officials are systemically corrupt so that all legislation is rightly understood as log-rolling for purposes of re-election or group self-serving, that is, when deliberation within and among parties about burdens, benefits, and the general interest does not occur or cannot explain any outcomes. The other is when parties are entrenched, so that the possibility of accountability and of change among parties (including new party-building) is impossible. These circumstances call for the intervention of nonpartisan commissions or courts, perhaps. But that is a far cry from Rehfeld’s legislature. I would have said his legislature of saints, but he is modest and calls it a legislature of professionals.

Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
20. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Levy

Jacob offers an interesting speculation: that presidentialism with its promise of representing the nation as a whole expresses and fuels anti-partyism even if does not cause it. I think that whether and when the president-above-party exists (or is proffered as an ideal) is contingent and not a systemic constant. Historically, American presidents have been among the great party-builders (Jefferson and Van Buren, for starters). Institutionally, presidents are the heads of their parties and whether government is unified or divided their agendas are typically identified as partisan. In fact, it is the failure to enact the periodic rhetoric of standing above partisanship (except occasionally in matters of foreign policy and national security) that is striking, and expected. Inaugural addresses are momentarily anti-political in that they mark an instant in which – despite the presumptive wounds of political contest – citizens acknowledge their unity. This is an important ritual but it is less peculiarly anti-partisan than a reminder that political divisions do not entail a fatally divided nation. Again, presidential self-presentation, policy, and public reaction are variable and I would not tie anti-partyism to this institutional arrangement.

The roots of anti-partyism, as my first essay suggests, are deeper philosophically and culturally. The element of holist anti-partyism that interests me most in the American context is the tendency of majoritarianism to slip over into the majority as the nation. I discuss this dynamic in some detail in Chapter 1 of Angels. Majoritarianism by definition acknowledges pluralism and is anti-holist, but often enough the majority is taken temporarily as the whole – legally and rhetorically. That seems to me to be what presidents do: claim a majoritarian mandate for their admittedly partisan agendas. This is something short of true plebiscitarian democracy. It is not anti-party.

Bipartisanship of the sort touted during the 2008 presidential campaign and repeated by President Obama today is something else again. Senators Obama and McCain promised to govern in a bipartisan fashion. Both offered a track record of bucking their own party as a qualification for leadership. What should we make of this improbable self-distancing of our national leaders from their own parties? Again, I think it is explained by the moment and not by political structures. Antiparty sentiments have been fired up by several decades during which parties appeared to want to destroy one another as an effective and legitimate opposition, were hubristic in their claim to represent the nation as a whole rather than just a part, and where intransigence had become a virtue. Bipartisanship does not erase divides but promises compromisingness as partisans give up something of their principle or pay some material cost in order to get the public business done. Bipartisanship is different, or so it seems, from consensus or nation-as-a-whole, which is appropriately rare. At its best, compromise within and across party lines is the heart of democratic politics; it is not raw opportunism and is not morally compromising. It would be better if President Obama articulated and abided by an ethic of partisanship rather than implicitly conceding the moral high ground to Independents.

Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
19. Jacob T. Levy: Anti-partyism and presidentialism

I have already paid my compliments to On the Side of Angels and praised its methodological contributions in particular; I think it has set an excellent new example for political theory’s engagement with political science. Just as the “moments” of moral-psychology realism in her last book, Membership and Morals, made an important contribution understanding freedom of association as a theme in social theory, not just in abstract rights-theory, so does her serious and extended treatment of the political science of elections and parties in On the Side of Angels promise to improve the way we do democratic theory. And one thing worth noting early on is that Angels is an outgrowth of Membership, though she makes little of this in the book. Having written on the liberal theory of intermediate associations in civil society, Rosenblum seems to have noticed how little political parties figured in that literature; and she rapidly staked out the striking and provocative position that “among the associations of civil society, political parties are primus inter parus.” And Angels bring the same spirit of appreciation for real pluralism and disagreement to the special case of political parties that Membership brought to the general case of associations.


(Disclosure: as noted in the comments section of this post, it’s probably no accident that I’m a fan of Rosenblum’s methods and approaches, as she was my advisor and most important teacher as an undergraduate at Brown. On the other hand, not only do I not think that our areas of substantive or methodological agreement were things that she taught in the classroom back then; it’s not clear to me that she had yet worked out the methodology that she would go on to develop for Membership back in 1990-92.)


So much for throat-clearing. Angels brought the following questions to my mind.


1) In the developed west., how distinctively American is anti-partyism today, and might it be related to presidentialism? I noted in a prologue to the symposium that some descendant of anti-partyism seemed to be an especially strong trope in presidential inaugural addresses. (I think that it’s primarily the second “Glorious Tradition” of anti-partyism, that which accepts pluralism while disdaining zealotry; but I think that it partakes of the first as well. It’s not just “We Republicans respect you Federalists and will treat with you fairly rather than in a spirit of enmity;” it’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”) It seems to me that this is in part the appropriate transition from candidate to official, from party leader to head of government.


But it’s in part also about the ascension to being head of state the figure who is supposed to rise about political divisions in order to symbolize a unified nation, as a constitutional monarch in a parliamentary democracy is supposed to do. (The neutral head of state set above responsible party government was developed in fits and starts in England in the 18th century but was, I think, first fully theorized by Constant in France in the 19th. As it happens, France is now unusually among European democracies not to have a head-of-state who set apart from ordinary politics, whether a constitutional monarch or, as in Germany, a President who is not part of government.) And it’s a way for the President who is both head of state and head of government to contrast himself with the legislature, which in its nature is divided on party lines.


The attempt by the executive to reach around the supposed grandees of legislatures and courts to a putatively-unified People against is a worrisome feature in constitutional states. When the one offers the many an alliance against the few, he does not do so for the benefit of the many. And anti-partyism is an important weapon in the hands of plebiscitary executives who seek to do away with constitutional and legislative checks on their power. (Hugo Chavez is the obvious case.) In a more limited way, it seems to me that American presidential-antipartyism typically tends toward the delegitimation of Congress, and sometimes of the states as well—only the President speaks for the unified whole of society. But of course, qua head of government, he doesn’t; he just holds power over the whole of society.

I speculate that anti-partyism can be institutionally-specific, and is often strongest in an independent executive. Constitutionalists and liberals have good reason to be wary of an especially powerful independent executive; the founding core values of constitutionalism included checking that kind of executive power with habeas corpus and related rights against arbitrary imprisonment and punishment. But, if Jeremy Waldron is right that the legislature is the core institution of democracy, then democrats also have a strong reason to be concerned; antipartyism will typically be a means by which legislatures are delegitimated.

So for this post, I’ll offer these three hunches: the special link of antipartyism with presidential systems, its differential impact on the perceived legitimacy of the legislature, or the special problem that impact would have for constitutional democracies.

Jacob T. Levy

On the Side of Angels symposium
18. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Farrell


Henry Farrell invites me to jump right across the fuzzy boundary between theory and empirical social science and to join him on the other side. Angels is not a work in comparative politics, though I try to indicate the scope of my key arguments. Two things stand out at first blush when it comes to European party politics. One is the importance of parties for reconciling anti-democratic groups to constitutional democracy. Farrell points to social democratic parties insisting on the political efficacy of electoral politics and holding out the promise that their party can redeem democracy. This is a good illustration, though perhaps the key example is Christian Democratic parties, which had to contend with the anti-democratic force of the papacy and which successfully brought Catholics into the democratic fold. (In my final chapter I discuss Turkey in this context, and religious parties there.)

The second striking thing about European parties in contrast to the American case is the way in which party identity has been tied historically to claiming a location on a finely grained political spectrum, so that my norms of inclusiveness and comprehensiveness are enacted, where they are, at the level of government formation not within parties and among partisans. This has given rise to a continuation of one of the traditions of antipartyism that sees parties as fatally divisive – the instability of governments, the shifting coalitions, and the sheer paralysis of governments is more characteristic of European systems than the U.S.; it has produced a distinctive antiparty literature from Schmitt to contemporary constitutional attempts to circumscribe parties. But there is some evidence of the emergence of “umbrella” parties, of Green parties, say, expanding from original focus on ecology to more full-blown national agendas.

Farrell’s fascinating application of partisanship to the EU is worth fleshing out, and I am persuaded that there is an article waiting to be written that applies some of the defenses of partisanship to this case. The EU example also raises anew anti-party arguments of an anti-political stripe that value above all expert and judicial decision-making. A related set of questions, which I take up only briefly, is justification for “outside” support for national parties in this era of diasporae and boundary crossings.

All that said, my discussion of anti-partyism is rooted in political theory, and I’ll note one difference and one commonality between American and continental thought. The difference is this: the honorific “Independent” does seem to be peculiarly American. Antipartyism is widespread, and antipartisanship is a phenomenon in all advanced democracies, but as I show, “Independent” has roots in American political culture past and present and this distinctive political identity has no counterpart elsewhere. The commonality is also clear: a good deal of European political theory exhibits the same tendency as American theory to focus on deliberation as deracinated judgment that eschews interest, prejudice, and passion for public reason and disinterested consideration of the common good. The explicit divide between deliberation and partisanship is there, and should be contested. There is also a recurrent preference on the part of “left” theorists to focus on social movements, civil society groups, and other informal if agonistic modes of political contestation. Among theorists of multiculturalism, for example, the norms and avenues for accommodation explicitly eschew partisanship, and “a dialogically constituted multicultural society” (p. 455) is said to emerge from venues such as consultative councils, not from democratic party politics. It is the European right that has seized on parties, reviving the anti-party fears of the last generation.

Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
17. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Deneen


Patrick Deneen and I share the view that the roots of many contemporary antiparty arguments in the U.S. are found in the Progressive era. It seems that we understand and evaluate the origins differently. Deneen sets up a contest between ethnic party politics (or, by implication, any from of solidaristic or identity-based partisanship) on the one hand and liberal individualism (“unemcumbered, monadic, rational individuals) with its notion of partisanship based on national interests. I’m not sure who is caught up in this schematic? Was Dewey a proponent of monadic individuals? Opponents of parties were often motivated not by a liberal ideal (as defined by Deneen) but by prejudice and sheer moral revulsion (“male suffrage meant “an invasion of peasants…an ignorant proletariat”, or “a nightmare of domination by Irish, black, and Chinese immigrants” (p. 181). Class and race were at work and contests among elites and the reduction to competing ideologies is a truncated view. Progressives typically subscribed neither to a “monadic” view of citizens nor to a politics of interest. Good progressives like Jane Addams had a sympathetic understanding of “Why the Ward Boss Rules”, and her account of neighborhood organization, patronage, and spoils is crucial to understanding this era. Or take Mary Follett, whose notion of group formation and group opinion fits neither Deneen’s “tribal” nor “liberal” category, and whose work I discuss as a crucial antecedent to the sort of antipartyism that looks to civil society groups as an antidote. I do not see what is gained by representing anti-partyism as a defense of some set of liberal assumptions.

Deneen asks what side I would be on in the Progressive charge against parties and partisanship? I have something to say in defense of corrupt, ethnic and community based parties the Progressives despised, and I draw on recent historical scholarship here. Among other things, parties as membership groups incorporated whole sections of the population into democratic politics and the system of patronage and spoils was important in the evolution of the national party system Deneen points to. We should not take charges of “backwardness”and “recidivism” at face value. In response I would also say that Angels is a critical challenge to progressive notions of “good government” and defining institutions -- with special attention to the most important on-going antiparty reform: open primary elections.

More generally, I explore in Angels the relation between party identity as a potentially profound form of political identity and other, social (“tribal” in Deneen’s terms) identities. This is a fascinating business – partisanship is not a simple reflection of some other deeper identity, I argue, but it is only sometimes an original one. Again, the group/individual, solidarity/interest schema does not do justice to what is most interesting about partisanship.

My praise of party and elements of an ethic of partisanship, Deneen writes, is made within the comfort of the liberal paradigm. It is made within the comfort of a stable constitutional democracy, yes. It is liberal insofar as liberalism is defined by an appreciation of pluralism and is friendly to freedom of association and its political expressions. That said, Angels has a lot to say about third parties, ideological and regional and religious parties, and about partisanship rooted in identity groups. I defend these against attempts to ban them or to legislate (as we have in the U.S.) a system that makes the formation of multiple parties and fusion parties a practical impossibility. I discuss at some length parties that challenge both liberal and democratic norms. My arguments for an ethic of partisanship today do not ignore the dynamics of party development and party-building, and they are not intended to “hollow out” devotions to the local and particular.

Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
16. Andrew Rehfeld: Institutional responses

Rosenblum’s defense of parties and partisanship leads us to figure out how representatives can be both advocates and deliberators at the same time. What really emerges is an endorsement of a juridical system applied to politics in which advocacy and deliberative judgment are separated in different locations rather than collapsed. The question then becomes what institutional structures can create a robust deliberative sphere that gives rise to many points of view, but that allows each member also to be independent enough to listen and change their mind. I think this is in the spirit of Rosenblum’s suggestions, but it is not clear to me that stronger partisanship alone is the solution. Instead, I think the solution is to separate the advocacy from the decision making itself in different kinds of ways.

In my last posting I mentioned one way to do this: create a professional legislature that was not based on parties, and let political parties be really big collections of interest groups that stay out of government. This is not a fully worked out view but it hints at what’s needed. Interestingly, both Mill and in our own day, Thomas Christiano have institutional fixes generally along these lines. Indeed, they point to what I would say was the biggest disappointment to me about Rosenblum’s work: it oversimplifies the role of institutional design.

Mill envisioned that in close votes in Parliament there would be enough members with sufficient judgment and independence who could decide the merits of the issue absent prior partisan commitments. Relying on the Hare system also meant that candidates would run on personal platforms rather than be mired in partisan politics. As Rosenblum well explains in more length in the book, Mill did not foresee the kind of robust partisanship that Rosenblum is promoting and what she properly terms “proto-Millian”. Rather, the electoral system would permit non-partisans running on the strength of their character, or intellect (or any other feature) to enter politics and temper the whole.

But I think by relying primarily on the logic of Liberty rather than the institutionalism of Considerations on Representative Government, Rosenblum missed Mill’s important solution to the problems of parties and partisanship within a legislature: representatives, in Mill’s view, would not be the authors of legislation. Instead, representatives were to debate on the issues, set agendas and vote up and down on legislation written by professionals serving on a “commission on legislation.” This commission, filled by experts, would craft the best solution to the problems that the members of parliament identified. There are all sorts of reasons to question whether such a solution would actually remain independent. But the point is, Mill had envisioned a far more robust institutional response to the problems of parties, by separating the battle of principles from the business of legislation.

Tom Christiano, in his terrific Rule of the Many, institutionally separates the set of general principles from actual policy. Parties would take fixed positions on general principles, what he calls “the aims of society” that citizens would debate and express their preferences for. Once elected, legislators would not be expected to compromise or deliberate about these aims, but rather deliberate and are flexible about the means by which they are achieved. In such a case they might have to give up their first best way of achieving the aims for which their parties stand, but as advocates for those aims (rather than particular policies) they would be in the best position to do that. They are thus “mandated” to follow their principles for which they are advocates, but fully independent (as proper deliberators must be) to decide what is the best way to achieve them given the constraints of other partisans with different, non-flexible aims in the legislature as well.

Whether or not either of these or some other institutional fix is practicable, they are ways of providing “voice without earplugs” because they involve separating out the advocacy from the deliberative and decision-making function. Without such a separation, I don’t see how a defense of partisanship can stand, except as a defense of a principle that participants themselves cannot endorse.

Andrew Rehfeld

On the Side of Angels symposium
15. Andrew Rehfeld: Regulated Conflict and a “proto-Millian” defense of parties or “Vote for me, I’ve probably got the right answers.”

In my first post I argued that we might get more of Rosenblum’s beneifts of partisanship without the costs, by thinking about “interest groups” as the proper outlet for partisanship, and then structuring government to be an independent, non-partisan body. This view contrasts with the practical fact that many, perhaps most, interest groups align very closely with existing political parties. In this post I want to make clear why I don’t think Rosenblum’s argument is ultimately successful at the level of legislative political parties. In my final post, I’ll offer some ideas about what we might do to counteract the problems.

In her defesnse of parties, Rosenblum counters the anti-party argument that parties aim at partial good. Rosenblum does not reject this, but rather notes that from these partial views can emerge a whole, if debate is structured in a proto-Millian way to make sure a trial of ideas alighting on a better solution emerges from this conflict. Further, parties bring real advocates to debate their position, not just those of the devil. As she quotes Mill, “objections have force when they come “from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their utmost for them.” The “contestation,” she writes, “corrects error…Without party rivalry, ‘trial by discussion’ cannot be meaningful.”

Thus for contestation to happen in the right way we need parties that have these two features to them: a) their members believe their view is best for all; and b) they must be open to changing their minds about what is best for all.

Now if “partyism” means that parties are partial, only hubristically saying they are promoting the common good, then it is unclear how a Millian clash of ideas is happening at all. Such parties are compromising and trading off to get as much as they can for their own group. Participants do not come ready to engage in a principled discourse about the whole, they come ready to seek their own goods for their own members. And this is very much the character of contemporary political deliberation, no less so than in the United States. Indeed, it describes the logic of classic pluralism as articulated by Dahl and Truman.

But this is not Rosenblum’s defense, and for good reason. Parties themselves are not actually partial in the sense of advocating for a part of the whole; they are by and large committed to a view of what would be best for the whole. And this is not just a “hubristic” posturing as Rosenblum describes in her first posting (although it can be that too). All partisanship is based on a clash between different views about what would be good for all that organize the political party itself: Green principles; Labour principles; Democratic, and Republican party ideals. The Democrats in the United States, believe we would all be better if we followed their programs, as does the Labour party in Israel believe that country would do better if it followed theirs. (I thus must also disagree with her contention in her first post that it is individual partisans who try to proselytize and seek new recruits. In my own experience, my very partisan neighbors are least likely to try to get new recruits to believe as they do. Far more likely are the Democrats and Republicans as parties going to cast about seeking new converts by framing their arguments in the broadest possible way.)

But if partyism is defended on the lines of a Millian debate arising between parties who advocate for what they believe is best for all (a), the second problem emerges that is at odds with (b), the view that party members should be open to changing their mind. For if they were open to changing their minds, they would not be the kinds of strong advocates that Rosenblum is envisioning necessary for a Millian outcom. Rather, party members would have to hold this far more tepid view: “well, before the clash of ideas happens within the legislature, we Republicans believe that taxes should go down; but of course we can’t really endorse that until we hear what the other side has to say.”

Now I think that’s a perfectly reasonable position to take, but no politician is likely to be relected on such a platform “Vote for Us, we’ve probably got the best ideas, but we’ll just have to wait and see!” But that position is what’s at the core of Mill’s view that Rosenblum plays on—it is no longer quite the pro-party, rough-and-tumble, clash-of-ideas-by-true-believers-to-see-which-one-actually-emerges-as-best. Or if that’s what Rosenblum means, it is not clear it connects with any parties of which I am aware.

In my final posting I will turn to institutional solutions that might achieve Rosenblum’s goals of deliberative advocacy and partisanship.


Andrew Rehfeld

On the Side of Angels symposium
14. Andrew Rehfeld: What about interest groups?

Nancy Rosenblum’s book is a welcome counter-weight to recent trends in deliberative theory and the resurgence of republicanism (ala Pettit) that have tended to minimize the role of political parties. The emergence of Barack Obama as possibly a “post-partisan” president continues that trend in the real world. What Rosenblum’s work has done is renew arguments that offer a stronger version and defense of party’s and partisanship. It is a work of political theory in its synthetic best: sensitive to history, philosophically interesting, empirically aware and with implications for political action. It is a subtle work, brimming with insight and I’m delighted to engage this rewarding work.

My delight stems in large part because I’m kind of a diehard anti-party, and anti-partisan, kind of guy. My loathing to both strands comes from the kind of cognitive shut down I see among partisans. Rather than exhibit some ideal point of Millian advocacy that Rosenblum describes, these partisans are unable to listen to other arguments at all. In fact, it is not so much that they believe what they do that I think is the problem, but rather that their beliefs about politics are fixed to a party leadership that then shapes and in no small part determines what they ought to be. The Yellow Dog Democrat is the perfect example.

In more theoretical terms, partisanship and partyism as Rosenblum has defended it here is self-contradictory, for it relies on a value for the system that none of the participants themselves can endorse. Further, what Rosenblum’s defense, based on Millian principles of contestation, would require is not what now exists, but what I have elsewhere called “voice without earplugs,” that is a way to structure the legislature so that many views can be promoted even as those expressing them are open to changing their own minds. Finally, I think Rosenblum has ignored the role of institutions to help channel and develop the proper role of parties and partisanship within the system. What emerges in her treatment is a defense of a system in which advocacy of partial views is the governing principle in order that partiality not be the governing principle!

Parties and partisans, but what about interest groups?

Rosenblum’s distinction between partisanship and partyism is really helpful. As Rosenblum demonstrates, the view that independents are ideal observers weighing carefully each side of the argument is bogus: they are rather “politically detached” ignoramuses (my term) who would prefer to watch TV than engage their fellow citizen in debate, and this should alone should temper our enthusiasm for them. But it is not clear to me whether partisan engagement by citizens on the issues is based on reasoned judgment which later turns into advocacy (the Millian model perhaps) as much as it is determined by family or cultural upbringing. In any case, being a partisan is likely to cause citizens to connect with others and engage with the issues and that alone is a good thing.

But here, I think I would advocate partisanship (“identification with others in a political association”) without parties (which is exactly what Madison’s ideal was). In large part, this is because partisanship among citizens appears far more like religious belief than it does reasoned civic discourse generating community and a commitment to the life of the polis. So we might say that partisanship is inevitable among citizens in a large representative government, and it does have some nice political consequences in terms of building community, etc. But it does not follow that the community it fosters or the views it generates among its partisans are worth channeling into the legislature. In which case, we might endorse partisanship as a check on abuses of government (since engaged citizens on either side are more likely to resist abuse) than a non-partisan citizenry. But at the same time we’d want to structure the legislature and government itself to resist the underlying partisanship. (I’ll return to that theme in another posting.)

What this raises is whether the very helpful analytic distinction between “partisanship” and “partyism,” is sufficient to get the benefits without the costs. I think it would be helpful to consider “interest groups” as a third location of partisanship, in way that would give the benefits of partisanship an outlet (by having citizens involved in issues about which they care) and to have them possibly managed by an independent, non-partisan legislature. Ideally, individuals interested in politics and policy would have to make a choice: are they committed to policy ideals as represented by their supported interest groups, or are they interested in impartial governing? Indeed, the recent “ethics” rules issued in Obama’s first days as President that restrict lobbying by former members of his staff have much of this flavor to it. It is not that Obama objects in principles to lobbying and interest group partisanship, per se. Rather, it is that his role in government is to be the adjudicator and not a partisan. This is rough—obviously Obama is a Democrat. But it hints at a way we might get the benefits of partisanship without the negatives of party in government.

Partisanship, as Rosenblum has set it out, thus depends on governing party’s, rather than merely organized interest groups. I would encourage us to think about this differently, that the benefits that Rosenblum defends for partisanship might be gotten without legislative political parties. What we need—for reasons I’ll pursue in my next post—is a way to separate the legislative effects of parties (which I think contra Rosenblum may only be a second best solution) from the positive citizen effects of partisanship.


Andrew Rehfeld

On the Side of Angels symposium
13. Nancy Rosenblum: response to Urbinati

Nadia Urbinati has offered two wonderfully reflective responses to Angels. Representative government, she insists, makes parties essential. I trace philosophical accounts of this insistence in the history of political thought in “Moments of Appreciation”. I’m grateful for Urbinati’s extension of the idea in her reconstruction of contemporary representation. She reinforces the point that modern parties are more than convenient vehicles for conducting elections or for organizing governments; they are creative in constructing lines of political division. Urbinati adds that ideally parties are stable institutions that create on-going connections between partisans and representatives. They are communicative forums. They are unique institutions for insuring that representatives are responsive to citizens. Urbinati rightly sees parties as deflating notions of accountability that focus on principal/agent mechanisms or contractual formalism. Parties create and sustain political relations apart from electoral moments. Of course, this sensitive rendering of political partisanship depends on parties that are not ephemeral, or short-term alliances among officials. It emphasizes civilian partisans – parties as in a sense membership groups.

Urbinati notices the enduring tension between the partisan and partial character of representation and acting in the national interest. In some systems like the U.S. this is further complicated by the fact that representatives are bound to serve their districts as a whole, including nonpartisans and supporters of the opposition. This results in tortuous accounts of representation as seen in Supreme Court opinions, which I discuss. Urbinati makes the important point that “partisanship is a process of unification not an act of unity”. Partisan representation suspends these elements; it is the unique institution of representative democracy and partisanship the distinctive democratic political identity.

I want to respond as well to Urbinati’s sensitive discussion of anti-politics. She rightly points out that I identify two “glorious traditions” of antipartyism in the history of political thought: holism, which is anti-political (or an exploitation of party designed to put an end to parties and politics) and another which accepts pluralism and political conflict but rejects parties as the institutional form in which divisions are played out. To these she adds a post-democratic form of anti-partyism that like holism is anti-political, but without holism’s philosophic foundations. This is less an additional category, I think, than an episodic feature of democratic anti-partyism overall. Urbinati focuses on contemporary deliberative democratic theory, which identifies good citizenship with judgment rather than passion or interest, or partisanship. This is of course one of the main themes of Angels, and I probe it in detail in the chapter “Correcting the System”. Like Urbinati, I argue that this rejection of partisanship is a recipe for disempowerment. My only quibble with her treatment is her suggestion that apathy is the outcome of antipartyism. True, partisanship is linked to political engagement and excitation. But other forms of participation – advocacy groups or social movements – are equally engaging, if short-lived. The characteristic outcome of this form of antipartyism is less apathy than revulsion at politics tout court. It results in the view that pragmatic problem-solving can replace politics. Its familiar expression is a “just fix it” state of mind that takes the prosaic popular form of impatience with government but is also articulated in expert and elite theory. Putting political decision-making in partisan arenas off onto courts and agencies is a self-protective move on the part of elected officials in the face of public revulsion. It is also an ineliminable part of advanced political economy where problems seem politically intractable; John Dunn’s The Cunning of Unreason captures this moment. All this makes parties and partisanship more, not less, imperative, and it makes a defense of political, partisan democracy both necessary and difficult.

Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
12. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Marin

I take just one exception to Prof. Marin’s probing comments: at the outset she seems to assign to parties attributes that I assign to partisans – and then only to partisans who fit my account of ethical partisanship. Many institutional features of parties are a response to the formal and political requirements of specific electoral systems – a point to which I return in answer to Prof. Marin’s question about proportional representation. Within those constraints, whether parties are inclusive, comprehensive, and compromising is the result of decisions by party leaders, activists, and “civilian” partisans. I try to take care not to animate the institution!

Prof. Marin’s argument is that in appreciating partisans who aim at inclusiveness and comprehensiveness I invoke a “public, collective `we`”. That is correct: partisanship, I suggest at some length, is a shared political identity that can be usefully understood in terms of identity politics. It is also true that one reason for valuing partisanship is its potential for articulating a general conception of the public interest. Of course, partisans do not always attempt this, and may fail when they do. And the connection between political identity and articulating an account of the general interest is important: partisans situate themselves in a system of political opposition, and their programs and candidates serve a notion of the public interest (when they do) that is contested. The important point for me is that only partisans active in party politics make this attempt because it is in the context of elections and partisan governing that open, conscious appeals are made to the great body of citizens. Other forms of political action fall short on this account, and although individual Independents may conceive a comprehensive account of the public agenda they are scattered elements who have neither means nor intention to articulate their ideas as part of a program of political action. Prof. Marin concludes that there is a tension between the value I place on parties play as carriers of comparatively comprehensive accounts of the public interest and my criticism of the anti-party tradition I call “holism”.

My first response is to say that we should take holism seriously as a philosophical and political position. If we do, it is not hard to see “what about holism is responsible for its antiparty tendencies”. Partisan advocates for a contested conception of the public interest are anathema to holism. Properly understood holism is anti-political. It is typically utopian in its vision of perfect unity. Every strain of philosophical and political holism shares a rejection of pluralism and of political partiality and parts. All social and political groups threaten the unity and integrity of political order, on the holist view, but because parties have partiality and opposition as their aim, they stand out as the most morally and politically unabidable. Holists cast parties as parts against rather than parts of the whole. That parties may contest notion of the public interest rather than partial interests makes them no less particularist. For holists, the common good cannot be identified or instituted by means of a dialectic of party conflict. Nothing is more antithetical to holism than James Bryce’s observation that a party system “stimulates the political interest of the people, which is kept alive by this perpetual agitation.”

My second response is to say that in any political society that accepts pluralism, parties and partisans are the indispensable, committed agents of responsible democratic pluralism. They are unique in this, which is why I refer to partisanship as the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy. The most important and defining characteristic of partisanship – more important than the ethical elements of inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and compromisingness – is that even though partisans speak to the public at large and often wish they could claim to speak for everyone, they know they do not represent the whole. Divisions and partiality are not lost sight of. The chastening knowledge is always there. To say the obvious, yes, partisans want to win “the moral ascendancy that comes from earning the approval of the great body of the people”. But it is a defining characteristic of parties in democracy and the heart of the moral distinctiveness of partisanship that any majority, or supermajority, or consensual mandate is temporary and revocable. Partisanship is imbued with this truth about democratic politics as the inseparable from the act of drawing significant lines of division, and with an acceptance of the vicissitudes of pluralism. This is the discipline and the creativity of partisanship.

Prof. Marin ends with an institutional challenge. Do the elements of my ethic of partisanship argue against proportional representation, where parties are less likely to be inclusive and their objectives comprehensive. I have no simple answer to this fair question. Proportional systems with many small parties that are effectively single interest or identity groups or that occupy a tiny piece of the ideological spectrum obstruct the sort of democratic deliberation that can arise in party politics. Their partisans speak to narrow constituencies, their agendas are typically truncated, and inclusiveness and compromise take place at the level of government formation and ministerial decisions, and are often fragile and temporary. But within the constraints of electoral systems, often enough parties that begin as narrowly sectarian become more inclusive – consider European Christian Democratic parties. In short, the applicability of the elements of my ethic of partisanship to PR is variable and depends in part on the specifics of electoral systems that are beyond the scope of this project. That said, I do suggest that inclusive umbrella parties (or electoral districts that require segmented religious or ethnic parties to appeal beyond their group) are more likely to develop comprehensive agendas and to broadcast reasons to wide swaths of the voting population. Even so, there is no assurance: “narrow-casting” is a regrettable feature of the national electoral behavior of American umbrella parties, for example. The impetus must come from partisans themselves, hence my attention the ethical dimension to partisanship.


Nancy Rosenblum

On the Side of Angels symposium
11. Nancy Rosenblum: Response to Melissa Schwartzberg

Professor Schwartzberg rightly observes that parties (I would add party systems) do not necessarily operate in a way that enhances deliberation or political participation. The extreme case of course is charlatan parties -- parties that do not intend to respect election results or that intend if successful to subvert democratic norms. I devote one chapter of On the Side of the Angels to the subject of banning parties. I look at parties that are avowedly anti-democratic or that challenge the secular or egalitarian character of democratic society. The orthodox justifications for “militant democracy” and the criminalization of parties with antidemocratic ideologies are only part of the story. The challenges posed by parties have changed since World War II; the justifications that can reasonably be offered for outlawing religious or ethnic parties, for example, are an increasingly important theme in modern constitutionalism and a neglected aspect of democratic theory.

Prof. Schwartzberg’s concern is parties that respect democratic norms and institutions but that in the course of formulating issues, creating lines of division, staging the battle, selecting and simplifying agendas and arguments are insufficiently responsive to groups that desire a hearing and influence. Of course, the important reductivist business of parties is matched on the other side by the business of adding new issues and partisan voices – a quick look at changes in both the constituencies and issues identified with Democratic and Republican parties over the last few decades is a simple case in point. We have been more attentive to exclusion than we have been to the difficult business of creating political order out of the mass of ideas, programs, and personalities that flood political life and demand attention. Prof. Schwartzberg’s concern is the opposite: the perils of reductivism, the fact that parties may obstruct popular “civilian” partisan in-put in the construction of platforms, policies, and agendas, and in the selection of candidates. (They may also, of course, narrow the range of arguments that are brought to bear in advancing agreed-on agendas and candidacies.)

I don’t see a contradiction between Schwartzberg’s best-case scenario and her concern that agendas and candidates are generated by internal conflicts among leaders and activists. For one thing, this seems to me to be a matter of degree. Party activists are typically members of interest and advocacy groups, and bring these perspectives to bear on internal party politics, so that by itself the amount of “grass-root” participation does not determine the breadth of considerations that go into programs and priorities. Mass participation is not the only way to insure that the common recognizable interests of ordinary citizens are taken into account. Besides, there are practical limits to just how inclusive party organizations should be during the different stages of the electoral process and in the party-building stages in between elections. (I assess legal requirements for democratic decision-making within parties, and attempts to mandate open or non-partisan primaries to enhance participation.) That said, in many democracies and certainly in the U.S., parties organize not only national elections but also elections and governing at the state and sometimes local levels so that even if we count just party activists, that adds up to a considerable number of citizens, and a manifestly diverse group as any caucus-goer knows. Moreover, large-scale partisan participation (and recruitment of partisans) is typically episodic – as we know, events and candidates can open the gates to activism. The most important thing to say in response to Prof. Schwartzberg’s reasonable concern is that only partisans are motivated to take part in the business of shaping political lines of division and the arguments that explain those divisions; the push for inclusive deliberation must come from them.

There are two cases where Prof. Schwartzberg’s concerns about reducing the voices in party deliberations point to more serious challenges to my appreciation of parties and partisanship. One is when parties or a segment of a party is captured by a particular set of donors or moneyed interests. This was Ostrogorski’s preoccupation: “organization reached its climax: from a broker in offices it rose to a trafficker in political influence….”. Where there is systemic corruption, the formal and informal activities of partisans are not decisive in shaping critical aspects of the party agenda, choosing specific candidates, or directing the actions of partisans in office. I discuss this complex subject in “The Anxiety of Influence”.

The other way in which parties can obstruct best-case deliberation is when particular groups are excluded from the ambit of every party; whether on account of prejudice or because their electoral influence is judged insignificant and not worth mobilizing. Prof. Schwartzberg proposes that this exclusion is a source of disaffected independence, and that I should take this into account in my severe criticism of Independents. The causes of disaffection and political detachment are not well known, and have more important sources than inhospitable political parties. In any case, that is an empirical question I am not equipped to answer here. But I can that the Independents that concern me (and that have the solicitude of most political theorists) are not non-voting sufferers of anomie, but proud anti-partisans who look down on partisans for moral reasons and who identify Independence with epistemic high ground. Of course, the response to exclusion from party life does not have to be political detachment. Historically, third parties and fusion parties in the U.S. have been formed to represent regional or ideological or identity groups, and they have often been taken up and absorbed by major parties over time. Robust parties are remarkably changeable institutions.

As this suggests, the problem that interests me in Prof. Schwartberg’s remarks is whether the response to captured parties or exclusionary parties is an attempt to create another party or a resort to other forms of political influence and agitation. My appreciation of parties entails a double contrast: first, partisanship in contrast to vaunted Independence, and second, partisanship in contrast to activism via interest and advocacy groups, social movements, and so on. All sorts of political organizations serve important democratic purposes, of course. But if we value these other forms over parties and partisanship, we are liable to misunderstand and even detract from the distinctive purposes (including the deliberative purposes) that are served if they are served at all only by parties and electoral politics.

One last observation. Both Profs. Schwartzberg and Marin focused on my brief for the potential of parties as deliberative agents and arenas. True, one of my concerns has been to bring parties and partisanship into the ambit of the dominant deliberative strain of democratic theory, where they have been ignored or depreciated. But that is just one of my objectives. The elements of an ethic of partisanship I propose serve other democratic purposes besides deliberation. And the overarching reason for appreciating parties and partisanship has to do with acceptance of political pluralism and contestation. Partisanship, to repeat, is the only political identity that does not see pluralism and political conflict as a bow to necessity, a pragmatic recognition of the inevitability of disagreement. It requires severe self-discipline to acknowledge that my party’s status is just one part of a permanently pluralist politics, and the provisional nature of being in the majority, or governing, or for that matter being in the minority. In short, partisanship accepts the regulated rivalry that defines democratic politics.

Nancy Rosenblum