On the Side of Angels symposium
6. Nadia Urbinati: Parties are not an Option in Representative Democracy
Rosenblum’s defense of the morality of the political party and partisanship represents a seminal contribution to both democratic theory and political theory. Resuming Ignazio Silone’s maxim that the crucial political judgment is “the choice of comrades”, not of independent bystanders, Rosenblum links partisanship to citizens’ participation and political responsibility. This is her central thesis: “Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and compromisingness set the contours for the best possible partisanship. They enable the distinctive work of partisans: drawing the lines of division and shaping the system of conflict that orders democratic deliberation and decision. Among the political identities that democracy generates, only partisanship has this potential.” Partisanship is an indispensable mean to regulate political conflict in peaceful manner, recognize political pluralism, and generate political agendas and political identities. These are compelling arguments, essential to the understanding of political action in democratic society, both inside and outside of the institutions. Drawing on my book on representative democracy, I would propose an additional argument that may stress Rosenblum’s thesis: representative democracy makes parties essential.
Representative democracy reveals the limits of a conception of politics as an individual-to-individual relation between the candidate and the electors sealed by elections. It reveals the limits of a conception that rests on the formalistic element of authorization (voting) and a juridical (as private) interpretation of representation as agent/principal relation. A democratic theory of representation compels us to go beyond the intermittent and discrete series of electoral instants (sovereign as the authorizing will) and investigate the continuum of influence and power created and recreated by political judgment and the way this diversified power relates to representative institutions. Augustine Cochin wrote years ago that “a people of electors by itself is not capable of initiative, but at most of consent;” yet a representative democracy is not a “crowd of inorganic voters.” Political parties and movements are the means citizens create to give their political presence an effective and persistent character through time. Their strength and social rootedness signal the strength of democratic representation.
Moreover, since representation functions politically (to make laws) in a collective and public setting and since laws cannot be treated like contractual agreements because they impose their authority on all indiscriminately, not just on those who agree with them or those whose ideas are represented by the majority, it is extremely important that we abandon the logic of the contract in interpreting representation.
However, that representation cannot be regulated and checked like a 'contract' between a principal and an agent does not mean that citizens can only check representatives through elections. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to say that representation cannot be a contract. Yet just because political representation can only exist in the juridical form of a non-legally bounded contract of mandate, some other form of ‘political’ mandate is needed to check representatives. The very fact that representatives play an active (legislative) role implies that they are not independent of the electors; it implies a political kind of 'mandate.'
The seed of the democratic character of representation germinates from the paradox that although a representative is supposed to deliberate about things that affect all members of the polity, she is also supposed to have a sympathetic relation to a part (the part that votes for her). In substance, a relation of ideological sympathy and communication between the representative and her electors is necessary and can occur only because political representation excludes legal mandate and is not a contract. The sympathetic relation of the representative to the part that voted for her is and must only be a matter of opinions or ideas, an informal and thus not authoritative kind of relation. This means however that the representative is not politically autonomous from her electors although she must be legally autonomous. Party is the political link of interdependence between citizens and elected representatives.
In democratic politics, representation is not "acting in the place of somebody," but more precisely, being in a political relation of sympathetic similarity or communication with those in the place of whom the representatives act in the legislature (from here citizens’ quest of representativity comes). The assumption of this (idealized or ideological) kind of sympathy (which is the foundation of the advocacy aspect of representation) is reflected in the statute that regulates how the deputies vote in the representative assembly. Except in clearly specified cases (which pertain to decrees, not laws), the voting record must be made public. Electors need to know what the representatives do and say and how they vote in the assembly because they need to compare representatives judgment to their own judgment.
That a political representative is required to share her ideas only with her electors, not with the whole nation as a homogeneous body, entails that representation is itself a denial of plebiscitarian and populist democracy (a homogeneous identification of the body politics with one leader). Indeed, in order to acquire the moral and political legitimacy to make laws for all it must articulate pluralism but not superimpose an unreflective unity over an indistinct mass of individuals. It is thus important to make clear that representation is a process of unification not an act of unity that erases pluralism. As such, it presupposes and fosters pluralism, one that is not a mere social given but a political construction made by free citizens in their conflicting divisions or sympathetic alliances. Representative democracy is based on political parties and partisanship.
Nadia Urbinati
Monday, January 26, 2009
On the Side of Angels symposium
5. Nadia Urbinati: A Third Tradition of Anti-Partyism
Against the current: this would be my blurb for Nancy L. Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, a fresh and bold attempt to subvert the “canonical” opposition to “parties as institutions and moral disdain for partisans” in the history of political thought. More than that, Rosenblum’s book is a timely and praiseworthy vindication of the value and uniqueness of democratic politics, the true Cinderella in contemporary democratic theory’s turn to cognitivism and the obsession with truth.
On the Side of the Angels wants to rescue “from futility” the positive role of political party “in the long history of antipartyism” that has marked the renaissance of democracy in modern world. Rosenblum reconstructs two “Glorious Traditions” of antipartyism: the holistic one and the pragmatic one. The former is radically hostile to pluralism; it can be either hierarchical and communitarian or egalitarian but is decisively anti-democratic (the Platonist tradition and reactionary tradition, from Rousseau to de Maistre fit this description). The latter is instead realist in accepting social pluralism but still resilient in justifying partisanship (Hume and Madison fit this description). Few are the modern authors on the side of the angels; among them Burke, Hegel, Tocqueville, and moreover John Stuart Mill who, although did not praise parties, grasped the dialectics of opposite visions of society (Progressive and Conservative) in representative government. We owe Mill the point that “without party rivalry, ‘trial by discussion’ cannot be meaningful,” writes Rosenblum. Developing from Mill’s proto-partytism, Rosenblum offers two strong and persuasive arguments in defense of partisan politics: that parties shape political conflict as no other collective actors can do, and that their decline or even absence in contemporary democracy signals a crisis of democratic politics.
I would propose to integrate Rosenblum’s two antiparty traditions with a third one: the myth of the unpolitical and even the anti-political. Whereas the former two traditions belonged to or were born from within a pre-democratic society, this new antiparty tradition is instead the offspring of a mature democratic society, and the expression of contemporary democratic theory. Strain of politicization is not new to critics of democracy. Beginning with early nineteenth century and as a reaction against the political process of emancipation started with the French revolution, it crossed the works of several generations of communitarians, anti-rationalists and anti-egalitarians. Burke and de Maistre, the founding fathers of modern anti-democracy, were critical of popular assemblies mainly because elections dethroned competence and virtue from politics and made the latter an arena of competing interests, in which all issues became relative in value and subjected to the volatile opinion of numerical majorities.
Yet contemporary’s strain of partisanship is more intriguing than the traditional anti-democratic lamentation because is made in the name of, not against democracy’s values. Criticism of democracy’s vocation to engender partisanship is to be found in Philip Pettit’s work and, although to a lesser degree, in Pierre Rosanvallon’s. Democratic institutions (a “system whereby the collective will of the people rules,” Pettit writes) are fueled by the “politics of passion” to narrow which proponents of unpolitical democracy see only one remedy: containing politics altogether while expanding deliberative fora and committees of experts, and moreover instituting adversarial practices of judicial contestation, solutions that are not democratic in character because not based on majority rule. From here comes, Rosanvallon has argued, “the growing importance we must recognize to the development of new modes of intermediary structuring of actions of surveillance by means of militant yet not partisan organizations.”
In contemporary democracy, the working force against partisanship is thus judgment, a faculty that plays a negative role, as that of monitoring and censuring. Judgment acquired momentum in the second half of the twenty-century, in coincidence with the consolidation of constitutional democracy, the technological revolution of the means of information and communication, and the expansion of civil society, domestically and globally. In representative democracy, the actor of negative politics is not the citizen-elector but the citizen-judge through an uninterrupted work of public scrutiny that is and remains informal although extremely influential. Judgment is the site of counter-politics; is located in civil political society as a permanent work of evaluation and criticism of politique politisée.
Yet the citizen-judge wants to make power more transparent and impartial, not more affordable or widespread. Unlike with the citizen-elector or the political participant, the goal of the citizen-judge is to devise institutions and rules that can in the long run make political participation less needed and thus partisanship less pronounced and relevant. Apathy seems to be the final outcome of this new trend of democratic antipartitism and antipartisanship. In Rosenblum’s words, the strategy of contemporary political philosophers “to sever deliberation from partisanship” is primed to foster an attitude that is inimical to democracy, which is unavoidably political because makes all issues an object of public talk and all values a matter of opinion.
Works cited:
Philip Pettit, “Depoliticizing Democracy”, Ratio Juris, 17 (March 2004): 52-65.
Philip Pettit, “Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory,” in Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. James S. Fishkin et Peter Laslett, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003.
Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie. La politique à l’âge de la défiance. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Nadia Urbinati
5. Nadia Urbinati: A Third Tradition of Anti-Partyism
Against the current: this would be my blurb for Nancy L. Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, a fresh and bold attempt to subvert the “canonical” opposition to “parties as institutions and moral disdain for partisans” in the history of political thought. More than that, Rosenblum’s book is a timely and praiseworthy vindication of the value and uniqueness of democratic politics, the true Cinderella in contemporary democratic theory’s turn to cognitivism and the obsession with truth.
On the Side of the Angels wants to rescue “from futility” the positive role of political party “in the long history of antipartyism” that has marked the renaissance of democracy in modern world. Rosenblum reconstructs two “Glorious Traditions” of antipartyism: the holistic one and the pragmatic one. The former is radically hostile to pluralism; it can be either hierarchical and communitarian or egalitarian but is decisively anti-democratic (the Platonist tradition and reactionary tradition, from Rousseau to de Maistre fit this description). The latter is instead realist in accepting social pluralism but still resilient in justifying partisanship (Hume and Madison fit this description). Few are the modern authors on the side of the angels; among them Burke, Hegel, Tocqueville, and moreover John Stuart Mill who, although did not praise parties, grasped the dialectics of opposite visions of society (Progressive and Conservative) in representative government. We owe Mill the point that “without party rivalry, ‘trial by discussion’ cannot be meaningful,” writes Rosenblum. Developing from Mill’s proto-partytism, Rosenblum offers two strong and persuasive arguments in defense of partisan politics: that parties shape political conflict as no other collective actors can do, and that their decline or even absence in contemporary democracy signals a crisis of democratic politics.
I would propose to integrate Rosenblum’s two antiparty traditions with a third one: the myth of the unpolitical and even the anti-political. Whereas the former two traditions belonged to or were born from within a pre-democratic society, this new antiparty tradition is instead the offspring of a mature democratic society, and the expression of contemporary democratic theory. Strain of politicization is not new to critics of democracy. Beginning with early nineteenth century and as a reaction against the political process of emancipation started with the French revolution, it crossed the works of several generations of communitarians, anti-rationalists and anti-egalitarians. Burke and de Maistre, the founding fathers of modern anti-democracy, were critical of popular assemblies mainly because elections dethroned competence and virtue from politics and made the latter an arena of competing interests, in which all issues became relative in value and subjected to the volatile opinion of numerical majorities.
Yet contemporary’s strain of partisanship is more intriguing than the traditional anti-democratic lamentation because is made in the name of, not against democracy’s values. Criticism of democracy’s vocation to engender partisanship is to be found in Philip Pettit’s work and, although to a lesser degree, in Pierre Rosanvallon’s. Democratic institutions (a “system whereby the collective will of the people rules,” Pettit writes) are fueled by the “politics of passion” to narrow which proponents of unpolitical democracy see only one remedy: containing politics altogether while expanding deliberative fora and committees of experts, and moreover instituting adversarial practices of judicial contestation, solutions that are not democratic in character because not based on majority rule. From here comes, Rosanvallon has argued, “the growing importance we must recognize to the development of new modes of intermediary structuring of actions of surveillance by means of militant yet not partisan organizations.”
In contemporary democracy, the working force against partisanship is thus judgment, a faculty that plays a negative role, as that of monitoring and censuring. Judgment acquired momentum in the second half of the twenty-century, in coincidence with the consolidation of constitutional democracy, the technological revolution of the means of information and communication, and the expansion of civil society, domestically and globally. In representative democracy, the actor of negative politics is not the citizen-elector but the citizen-judge through an uninterrupted work of public scrutiny that is and remains informal although extremely influential. Judgment is the site of counter-politics; is located in civil political society as a permanent work of evaluation and criticism of politique politisée.
Yet the citizen-judge wants to make power more transparent and impartial, not more affordable or widespread. Unlike with the citizen-elector or the political participant, the goal of the citizen-judge is to devise institutions and rules that can in the long run make political participation less needed and thus partisanship less pronounced and relevant. Apathy seems to be the final outcome of this new trend of democratic antipartitism and antipartisanship. In Rosenblum’s words, the strategy of contemporary political philosophers “to sever deliberation from partisanship” is primed to foster an attitude that is inimical to democracy, which is unavoidably political because makes all issues an object of public talk and all values a matter of opinion.
Works cited:
Philip Pettit, “Depoliticizing Democracy”, Ratio Juris, 17 (March 2004): 52-65.
Philip Pettit, “Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory,” in Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. James S. Fishkin et Peter Laslett, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003.
Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie. La politique à l’âge de la défiance. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Nadia Urbinati
On the Side of Angels symposium
4. Nancy Rosenblum: "The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’," Part II: Moments of Appreciation of Partisanship
(See Part I here)
Now for three notes of appreciation for partisanship, corresponding to the elements of my proposed ethic of partisanship.
1. Inclusiveness. The first is the inclusive character of party id, which is characteristic though not unique to partisanship in the U.S.. That is, identification with Democrats or Republicans from Florida to California, and at every level of government. No other political identity is shared by so many segments of the population as measured by SES or religion. Nor are partisans clumped tightly together on an ideological spectrum. This is not to say that all partisans have an especially deep moral commitment to inclusiveness -- only that they are ambitious to be in the majority. Understand, however, that claiming a majority is more than a matter of strategic necessity or institutional design. Partisans want to win elections, but a plurality can suffice. They want to have their policies enacted, but there are other avenues of political efficacy. Rather, partisans want the moral ascendancy that comes from earning the approval of “the great body of the people”. In this respect, inclusiveness is a conscious democratic value.
Party candidates may have short-term strategic interests (or safe seats) that allow them to speak only to “the base”, or to sliver audiences, or even to deliberately depress participation, and activists may demand single-minded attention to one issue and ideological purity. But ordinary civilian partisans aspire to persuade and mobilize as many as possible to identify with them. Their horizon of political expectation extends beyond a single election cycle, and their disposition is to inclusiveness.
2. Comprehensiveness. The second element of an ethic of partisanship, and grounds for appreciation, is attachment to others in a group with responsibility for telling a comprehensive public story about the economic, social, and moral changes of the time, and about national security. Of course, partisans sometimes focus on a specific event and their party’s competence to identify and deal with it. Partisans pursue partial interests, though this is not unreconstructed interest group pluralism since partisans share a complex of concerns and connect particular interests to a more general conception of the public interest.
It would be overstating the case to say that given the comparative comprehensiveness of their concerns partisans assume the obligation Rawls articulated: to advance some conception of the public good that is not ad hoc but situated in the most complete conception of political justice we can advance. It would be understating the case to say that in contrast to members of interest and advocacy groups, including self-styled public interest groups, partisans are not single-issue voters. An important result follows from comprehensiveness: ordinary partisans are rarely extremists because adhering single-mindedly to one single dominating idea has little appeal.
3. Compromisingness. Inclusiveness and a comprehensive account of what needs to be done are only possible if “we partisans” demonstrate the disposition to compromise. When compromise is with fellow partisans it acknowledges the larger “we”. We have only to think of political purists to underscore compromisingness as a moral disposition of ordinary partisans. Purists “cant about principles”. They represent intransigence as a virtue. They do not find failure ignominious. As one Republican sensibly objected, “I did not become a conservative in order to become a radical…”.
Of course, compromise can be evidence of abject pandering or raw opportunism. If you are partisans, you know for yourselves, I suspect, that working out the bounds of reasonable compromise is part of the discipline of partisanship.
Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and compromisingness set the contours for the best possible partisanship. They enable the distinctive work of partisans: drawing the lines of division and shaping the system of conflict that orders democratic deliberation and decision. Among the political identities that democracy generates, only partisanship has this potential.
The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’
This brings me to the overarching achievement of parties and partisanship. We know that in political life partiality and disagreement are inescapable, and so are groups and associations of all kinds organized in opposition to one another. But we tend to forget that political parties and partisanship are not inevitable, and should not be taken for granted. Commitment to political pluralism, to regulated political rivalry, and to shifting responsibility for governing makes party id the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy.
We might think that the vicissitudes of political fortune and the limits of human volition make this existentially true, a felt experience. Or we might say that all citizens in democracy have a part in this; they do, presumptively, formally. But partisans are expressly identified with it. Partisanship is the political identity that does not see political pluralism and conflict as a glum concession to the ineradicable “circumstances of politics”. And while thinking they should speak to everyone, partisans do not imagine they speak for the whole. True, they are on the side of the angels, offering a satisfactory account of what needs to be done. But however ardent and devoid of skepticism, there is this reticence. Partisans do not represent the opposition as a public enemy. They don’t secede, revolt, or withdraw in defeat, and “elections are not followed by waves of suicide.”
Skeptics of my appreciation of partisanship can be forgiven today. For several decades, the leadership of American parties often appears to want to destroy one another as an effective and legitimate opposition – even to the extent of trying to criminalize political differences. They are hubristic, claiming to represent the nation not a part. Intransigence has become a virtue; compromise even with fellow partisans is not in their repertoire; failure is not ignominious even if the public business is not done. The thrust of an ethic of partisanship, of course, is critical as well as appreciative.
These failings do not characterize ordinary partisans, or taint partisanship as a proud political identity. In any event, nonpartisanship cannot sustain democracy and democratic citizenship, and even vaunted bipartisanship is a temporary corrective at best. That is all the more reason for democratic theorists to connect the practice of democratic citizenship with partisanship, and to consider the terms and conditions of better partisanship as seriously as they do impartiality and institutions designed to work without parties or partisans. Political theorists should adopt these orphans of political philosophy and take them in.
Works Cited:
Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs”
Jesse Macy, Political Parties in the United States 1846-1961
Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, “Political Liberalism vs. “The Great Game of Politics””, Perspectives on Politics (March, 2006).
Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals
E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government
Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion
4. Nancy Rosenblum: "The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’," Part II: Moments of Appreciation of Partisanship
(See Part I here)
Now for three notes of appreciation for partisanship, corresponding to the elements of my proposed ethic of partisanship.
1. Inclusiveness. The first is the inclusive character of party id, which is characteristic though not unique to partisanship in the U.S.. That is, identification with Democrats or Republicans from Florida to California, and at every level of government. No other political identity is shared by so many segments of the population as measured by SES or religion. Nor are partisans clumped tightly together on an ideological spectrum. This is not to say that all partisans have an especially deep moral commitment to inclusiveness -- only that they are ambitious to be in the majority. Understand, however, that claiming a majority is more than a matter of strategic necessity or institutional design. Partisans want to win elections, but a plurality can suffice. They want to have their policies enacted, but there are other avenues of political efficacy. Rather, partisans want the moral ascendancy that comes from earning the approval of “the great body of the people”. In this respect, inclusiveness is a conscious democratic value.
Party candidates may have short-term strategic interests (or safe seats) that allow them to speak only to “the base”, or to sliver audiences, or even to deliberately depress participation, and activists may demand single-minded attention to one issue and ideological purity. But ordinary civilian partisans aspire to persuade and mobilize as many as possible to identify with them. Their horizon of political expectation extends beyond a single election cycle, and their disposition is to inclusiveness.
2. Comprehensiveness. The second element of an ethic of partisanship, and grounds for appreciation, is attachment to others in a group with responsibility for telling a comprehensive public story about the economic, social, and moral changes of the time, and about national security. Of course, partisans sometimes focus on a specific event and their party’s competence to identify and deal with it. Partisans pursue partial interests, though this is not unreconstructed interest group pluralism since partisans share a complex of concerns and connect particular interests to a more general conception of the public interest.
It would be overstating the case to say that given the comparative comprehensiveness of their concerns partisans assume the obligation Rawls articulated: to advance some conception of the public good that is not ad hoc but situated in the most complete conception of political justice we can advance. It would be understating the case to say that in contrast to members of interest and advocacy groups, including self-styled public interest groups, partisans are not single-issue voters. An important result follows from comprehensiveness: ordinary partisans are rarely extremists because adhering single-mindedly to one single dominating idea has little appeal.
3. Compromisingness. Inclusiveness and a comprehensive account of what needs to be done are only possible if “we partisans” demonstrate the disposition to compromise. When compromise is with fellow partisans it acknowledges the larger “we”. We have only to think of political purists to underscore compromisingness as a moral disposition of ordinary partisans. Purists “cant about principles”. They represent intransigence as a virtue. They do not find failure ignominious. As one Republican sensibly objected, “I did not become a conservative in order to become a radical…”.
Of course, compromise can be evidence of abject pandering or raw opportunism. If you are partisans, you know for yourselves, I suspect, that working out the bounds of reasonable compromise is part of the discipline of partisanship.
Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and compromisingness set the contours for the best possible partisanship. They enable the distinctive work of partisans: drawing the lines of division and shaping the system of conflict that orders democratic deliberation and decision. Among the political identities that democracy generates, only partisanship has this potential.
The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’
This brings me to the overarching achievement of parties and partisanship. We know that in political life partiality and disagreement are inescapable, and so are groups and associations of all kinds organized in opposition to one another. But we tend to forget that political parties and partisanship are not inevitable, and should not be taken for granted. Commitment to political pluralism, to regulated political rivalry, and to shifting responsibility for governing makes party id the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy.
We might think that the vicissitudes of political fortune and the limits of human volition make this existentially true, a felt experience. Or we might say that all citizens in democracy have a part in this; they do, presumptively, formally. But partisans are expressly identified with it. Partisanship is the political identity that does not see political pluralism and conflict as a glum concession to the ineradicable “circumstances of politics”. And while thinking they should speak to everyone, partisans do not imagine they speak for the whole. True, they are on the side of the angels, offering a satisfactory account of what needs to be done. But however ardent and devoid of skepticism, there is this reticence. Partisans do not represent the opposition as a public enemy. They don’t secede, revolt, or withdraw in defeat, and “elections are not followed by waves of suicide.”
Skeptics of my appreciation of partisanship can be forgiven today. For several decades, the leadership of American parties often appears to want to destroy one another as an effective and legitimate opposition – even to the extent of trying to criminalize political differences. They are hubristic, claiming to represent the nation not a part. Intransigence has become a virtue; compromise even with fellow partisans is not in their repertoire; failure is not ignominious even if the public business is not done. The thrust of an ethic of partisanship, of course, is critical as well as appreciative.
These failings do not characterize ordinary partisans, or taint partisanship as a proud political identity. In any event, nonpartisanship cannot sustain democracy and democratic citizenship, and even vaunted bipartisanship is a temporary corrective at best. That is all the more reason for democratic theorists to connect the practice of democratic citizenship with partisanship, and to consider the terms and conditions of better partisanship as seriously as they do impartiality and institutions designed to work without parties or partisans. Political theorists should adopt these orphans of political philosophy and take them in.
Works Cited:
Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs”
Jesse Macy, Political Parties in the United States 1846-1961
Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, “Political Liberalism vs. “The Great Game of Politics””, Perspectives on Politics (March, 2006).
Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals
E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government
Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion
On the Side of Angels symposium
3. Nancy Rosenblum: "The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’," Part I: Independence
On the Side of the Angels has three purposes. I create a typology of the antiparty arguments that recur in the history of political thought, and identify rare “moments of appreciation”. [Blog #1] I go on to trace the “post-party depression” that accompanied the rise of mass electoral parties in the U.S.. Virtually every contemporary political pathology and scheme for correcting the system by eliminating, circumventing, or containing parties has its roots in Progressive Era, when antipartyism and the ideal of political Independence were at a pitch. I trace this continuity in case law and democratic theory. Finally, drawing on work in political science, I propose grounds for an appreciation of partisanship in democratic politics today, and I outline an ethic of partisanship.
Partisanship needs a moment of appreciation. We recognize “partisan” as invective; the barb comes out of improbable mouths, a virtual reflex. Nothing is clearer than the solicitous attention showered on political Independents, or that they are typically portrayed as partisans’ undisputed moral superiors. Democratic theorists are no exception. Parties are famously “orphans of political philosophy”, and political theorists today continue to ignore or disown them. Sober realists might concede the minimum: that parties are convenient mechanisms for “reducing the transaction costs” of democracy. Perhaps they might be brought to say that while partisans are not admirable, some number of them are indispensable to realize the function of parties. But any concession is pragmatic, unexuberant, unphilosophical, grudging.
The notion commonplace in democratic theory that an “intelligently and progressively democratic” system depends on the ability of its supporters to attain a nonpartisan spirit is exactly wrong. In contrast, I cast partisanship as the characteristic and morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy. I chip away at the moral high ground claimed by Independents, and provide “party id” – ordinary citizens’ identification as a partisan –an iota of dignity. (My focus here is “civilian” partisans, referred to as “the party in the electorate”, though a similar argument applies to partisans in government.)
To make the case, I offer three points each about Independence and partisanship.
1. The Luster of Independence. Declining party identification – a “no preference” response on a survey of political attitudes -- is widespread throughout advanced democracies, but the proud self-designation “Independent” is unique to the U.S.. The peculiar luster of Independence here owes to a civic ideal of self-reliance as a virtue and social condition that preceded organized parties, and was later replanted in the soil of electoral politics. In Judith Shklar’s formulation: citizens [must] “be independent persons in both their political and civil roles, who give and withdraw their votes from their representatives and political parties as they see fit.” From early on partisanship began to be cast as degraded citizenship, as abject dependence rooted in clientelism, capture, or blind loyalty.
To be clear: the core of Independence as a political identity today is antipartisanship, not antipartyism. True, fundamentalist Independents reject party systems per se as too rigid to accommodate political judgment, and others may regret the current configuration of parties. But it is the avowal that she is not a partisan that gives Independence its luster, and explains the apt term “closet partisans” applied to the majority of Independents who end up voting regularly with one party.
2. ‘Escape from the Deadly Groove’
Progressives introduced the influential view that where the partisan is seduced or bought, the Independent is a free agent. The supporters of party organizations were characterized as thoughtless, set in some “deadly groove” and under some affective thrall. Today, the contrast is posed in cognitive as well as moralistic terms. Where partisans are “judgment-impaired”, crippled by perceptual bias, the Independent is a nimble “positive empiricist”, “cognitively mobilized.” These assertions do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. Independents typically know less than strong partisans, and cannot reasonably claim that they bring balanced information to bear. Unanchored, Independent’s considerations are more likely to be chaotic and ad hoc than partisans’. They participate in politics less.
Nonetheless, several heroic representations of Independence are commonplace and need to be disposed of. Escape from the deadly groove does not make the Independent bravely Thoreauian, doing in every case “what I think right”, since she is reduced to choosing among courses set by others. There is no warrant for casting Independents as Humean impartial observers, judicious umpires inclining victory to this side or that “as they think the interests of the country demand”. Nor as sensitive to Mill’s “half-truths” and to the dynamic by which every position derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other.
What if individual Independents were disinterested, or impartial observers and correctors of the deficiencies of every party? Even the ideal Independent lacks the moral distinctiveness of “party id” I turn to shortly, beginning with the fact that Independents are politically detached and weightless.
3. Weightlessness. Partisanship is identification with others in a political association. “We partisans” organize and vote with allies, not alone. Independents are as detached from one another as they are from parties. If Silone is right that the crucial political judgment is “the choice of comrades”, Independents do not make it. They are not sending a coordinated message (even if analysts are in the business of interpreting what their votes meant). Independents do not assume responsibility for the institutions that organize public discussion, elections, and government and are not responsible to other like-minded citizens.
Which is why what Teddy Roosevelt called “mere windy anarchy” is the perennial anxiety of those who imagine Independents as the hope for democratic reform. I’ll give the last word on this point to Edmund Burke, who said it first: “In a connexion, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the publick.”
(Continued in Part II here.
Nancy Rosenblum
3. Nancy Rosenblum: "The Moral Distinctiveness of ‘Party ID’," Part I: Independence
On the Side of the Angels has three purposes. I create a typology of the antiparty arguments that recur in the history of political thought, and identify rare “moments of appreciation”. [Blog #1] I go on to trace the “post-party depression” that accompanied the rise of mass electoral parties in the U.S.. Virtually every contemporary political pathology and scheme for correcting the system by eliminating, circumventing, or containing parties has its roots in Progressive Era, when antipartyism and the ideal of political Independence were at a pitch. I trace this continuity in case law and democratic theory. Finally, drawing on work in political science, I propose grounds for an appreciation of partisanship in democratic politics today, and I outline an ethic of partisanship.
Partisanship needs a moment of appreciation. We recognize “partisan” as invective; the barb comes out of improbable mouths, a virtual reflex. Nothing is clearer than the solicitous attention showered on political Independents, or that they are typically portrayed as partisans’ undisputed moral superiors. Democratic theorists are no exception. Parties are famously “orphans of political philosophy”, and political theorists today continue to ignore or disown them. Sober realists might concede the minimum: that parties are convenient mechanisms for “reducing the transaction costs” of democracy. Perhaps they might be brought to say that while partisans are not admirable, some number of them are indispensable to realize the function of parties. But any concession is pragmatic, unexuberant, unphilosophical, grudging.
The notion commonplace in democratic theory that an “intelligently and progressively democratic” system depends on the ability of its supporters to attain a nonpartisan spirit is exactly wrong. In contrast, I cast partisanship as the characteristic and morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy. I chip away at the moral high ground claimed by Independents, and provide “party id” – ordinary citizens’ identification as a partisan –an iota of dignity. (My focus here is “civilian” partisans, referred to as “the party in the electorate”, though a similar argument applies to partisans in government.)
To make the case, I offer three points each about Independence and partisanship.
1. The Luster of Independence. Declining party identification – a “no preference” response on a survey of political attitudes -- is widespread throughout advanced democracies, but the proud self-designation “Independent” is unique to the U.S.. The peculiar luster of Independence here owes to a civic ideal of self-reliance as a virtue and social condition that preceded organized parties, and was later replanted in the soil of electoral politics. In Judith Shklar’s formulation: citizens [must] “be independent persons in both their political and civil roles, who give and withdraw their votes from their representatives and political parties as they see fit.” From early on partisanship began to be cast as degraded citizenship, as abject dependence rooted in clientelism, capture, or blind loyalty.
To be clear: the core of Independence as a political identity today is antipartisanship, not antipartyism. True, fundamentalist Independents reject party systems per se as too rigid to accommodate political judgment, and others may regret the current configuration of parties. But it is the avowal that she is not a partisan that gives Independence its luster, and explains the apt term “closet partisans” applied to the majority of Independents who end up voting regularly with one party.
2. ‘Escape from the Deadly Groove’
Progressives introduced the influential view that where the partisan is seduced or bought, the Independent is a free agent. The supporters of party organizations were characterized as thoughtless, set in some “deadly groove” and under some affective thrall. Today, the contrast is posed in cognitive as well as moralistic terms. Where partisans are “judgment-impaired”, crippled by perceptual bias, the Independent is a nimble “positive empiricist”, “cognitively mobilized.” These assertions do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. Independents typically know less than strong partisans, and cannot reasonably claim that they bring balanced information to bear. Unanchored, Independent’s considerations are more likely to be chaotic and ad hoc than partisans’. They participate in politics less.
Nonetheless, several heroic representations of Independence are commonplace and need to be disposed of. Escape from the deadly groove does not make the Independent bravely Thoreauian, doing in every case “what I think right”, since she is reduced to choosing among courses set by others. There is no warrant for casting Independents as Humean impartial observers, judicious umpires inclining victory to this side or that “as they think the interests of the country demand”. Nor as sensitive to Mill’s “half-truths” and to the dynamic by which every position derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other.
What if individual Independents were disinterested, or impartial observers and correctors of the deficiencies of every party? Even the ideal Independent lacks the moral distinctiveness of “party id” I turn to shortly, beginning with the fact that Independents are politically detached and weightless.
3. Weightlessness. Partisanship is identification with others in a political association. “We partisans” organize and vote with allies, not alone. Independents are as detached from one another as they are from parties. If Silone is right that the crucial political judgment is “the choice of comrades”, Independents do not make it. They are not sending a coordinated message (even if analysts are in the business of interpreting what their votes meant). Independents do not assume responsibility for the institutions that organize public discussion, elections, and government and are not responsible to other like-minded citizens.
Which is why what Teddy Roosevelt called “mere windy anarchy” is the perennial anxiety of those who imagine Independents as the hope for democratic reform. I’ll give the last word on this point to Edmund Burke, who said it first: “In a connexion, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the publick.”
(Continued in Part II here.
Nancy Rosenblum
On the Side of Angels symposium
2. Nancy Rosenblum: "Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation," Part II
(See Part I here.)
But a third moment of appreciation, a philosophical defense of parties, did depend on the character of the lines of division among parties. Like regulated rivalry and governing, this moment of appreciation assigns the advantages of parties to the very divisiveness that appalls antiparty theorists. Hume’s version of the philosophical moment rests on a stringent ethic of partisanship. Here, as in ethics, Hume assumes the pose of “impartial observer”, the standpoint he took assessing the actions and claims of Whigs and Tories during the Glorious Revolution. “Impartial” is understood relative to the parties; the observer is independent of connections, nonpartisan. But Hume wants to claim more: the position of impartial observer has its own center and ballast -- what he calls “the proper medium”, “extremes of all are to be avoided”. From this standpoint: “Though no one will ever please either faction by moderate opinions, it is there we are most likely to meet with truth and certainty.”
The striking note is that Hume would impress the impartial observer’s perspective on partisans themselves. Partisans might be injected with “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism” and hesitation. Partisans should sometimes exhibit a sense of fallibility and accompanying humility, and should incline to a generous estimate of the opposition’s intentions (“there are on both sides wise men who meant well to their country”). Hume escalates his demands further: partisans must also “persuade each that its antagonist may possibly be sometimes in the right…that neither side are …so fully supported by reason as they endeavor to flatter themselves”. This requires partisans to acknowledge that no one party is in the complete interest of the nation, or even of those who advance it. Hume proposes an ethics of partisanship equivalent to moderation grounded not in pragmatic accommodation or the checking function of opposition but in philosophic insight into parties’ “proper poise and influence”.
Hume’s imperative goes against the grain of actual partisanship. After all, the role of philosophic spectator is phenomenologically alien, and the attitude of hesitation is antithetical to much political action. Generous assumptions about the opposition’s intentions (“wise men who mean well”) are episodic at best. Only sometimes, and only some partisans, stand back from their rightness, and when they do it does not always mean recognizing that other parties share in being right or moderation of a kind “likely to bring truth and certainty”. A less demanding ethics of partisanship is my subject in later posts.
The most enduring philosophical moment of appreciation shares Hume’s assumption that parties’ contributions are complementary, only here, the benefits of opposition do not depend on partisans’ stepping back to become impartial observers. Less stringently, more hopefully, the dynamic of party antagonism does the work. I call this moment proto-Millian.
We are familiar with Mill’s insistence on “the social function of antagonism” and his signature argument about one-sidedness. Truth “is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” Mill erected the philosophical framework of progressive antagonism and insisted that this process requires actual advocates, not devil’s advocates or impartial observers. He explained in On Liberty that objections have force when they come “from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their utmost for them.” But is Mill’s “trial by discussion” a defense of parties?
The claim that contestation corrects error, heightens awareness of arguments for and against propositions, and produces better decisions and more legitimate ones was and remains long-standing enlightenment orthodoxy, but the link between opposition and improvement did not identify political parties as the agents of fruitful antagonism. For example, the most ardent voice of enlightenment, William Godwin, tied social improvement to “communicative politics” (his term) but insisted that the “shibboleth of party has a more powerful tendency, than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs, to render the mind quiescent and stationery”.
This judgment should be familiar, for contemporary political philosophers typically sever deliberation from partisanship. Insofar as “the internal telos of deliberation is consensus”, partisanship is anathema by definition. Deliberative theorists who do not aim at overcoming disagreement nonetheless associate partisanship with “coercion, negotiation, or, in its most discursive form, rhetorical manipulation”. (Gunderson)
We are prodded to ask: when Mill speaks of “The great council of the nation; the place where the opinions which divide the public on great subjects of national interest, meet in a common arena, do battle, and are victorious and vanquished”, does he intend a brief for parties? There are good reasons to think that Mill’s “party of order or stability” and “party of progress or reform” each of which “derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other”, did not refer to actual political associations but to “modes of thinking”, a bow to two seminal minds in philosophy, Bentham and Coleridge. Actually existing parties appalled him. “In the present situation of Great Britain, and of all countries in Europe” parties are incapable of serving as the nation’s “Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinion”.
So I call this moment of appreciation proto-Millian. Mill himself turned to institutional arrangements for antagonism without parties, the most important being his campaign on behalf of proportional representation. A new breed of political men, “hundreds of able men of independent thought” would enter the field and be voted into government, he imagined. Honorable, distinguished men “having sworn allegiance to no political party” would offer themselves in undreamed numbers. In place of party Mill imagined a “personal merit ticket”. But could “hundreds of able men of independent thought” drive improvement on Mill’s own terms? Does independence insure “a serious conflict of opposing reasons” or a real struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners? True, Mill’s nonpartisan men of merit are not Humean impartial observers. But why should we think that Independents would spontaneously fall into complementary camps, partisans of order or progress, rather than promiscuous coalitions? Or that they would provide actual liberal and conservative partisans backbone and muscular reasons? Mill was right to be skeptical that coherent legislation could emerge from “a miscellaneous assembly”, and to approve of “concert and cooperation”. Yet he leaves us to imagine Independents doing the work.
I am wary of the philosophical moment of appreciation if only because a lot is lost if intellectual boredom leads us to take regulated rivalry and responsibility for governing for granted, or if they are overshadowed by the drama of progressive antagonism. Another caveat is that there is no reason to think that principles or values or interests arise in antagonistic pairs, or at all. Finally, the philosophical moment of appreciation invites disappointment: from this perspective, partisans disappoint when they are resistant to “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism”, or when “men not measures” dominate, or when contest leads to stasis or compromise. Indeed, the failed promise fuels ferocious attacks on parties and partisanship, most famously Carl Schmitt’s.
The proto-Millian moment of appreciation can be rescued by restating it more modestly. Parties don’t dependably add up to a comprehensive, philosophically defensible whole and are not complements whose antagonism is dependably countervailing, much less progressive. But parties do draw politically relevant lines of division, reject elements of the others’ account of projects and promises, and accept regulated rivalry as the form in which they are played out. It is enough that party antagonism focuses attention on problems, information and interpretations are brought out, stakes are delineated, points of conflict and commonality are located, the range of possibilities winnowed, and relative competence on different matters is up for judgment. We can preserve the proto-Millian position in paler shades as long as parties create lines of division and define themselves in relation to one another. For, caveats in view, it is still the case that politically salient values, preferences, programs, interest, and principles are unlikely to be cast in terms of Mill’s “serious conflict of opposing reasons” unless partisans do the work of articulating lines of division and advocating on the side of the angels. That is the main point to retain from a pared down proto-Millian position: without party rivalry, “trial by discussion” cannot be meaningful. It will not be if interests and opinions are disorganized and are not brought into opposition, their consequences are not drawn out, argument is evaded. Nor can it be fruitful if the inclusion of interests and opinions is exhaustive and chaotic; parties are about selection and exclusion. Shaping conflict is what parties and partisans do, and what will not be done, certainly not regularly in the way representative democracy requires, without them.
My next entry offers a defense of partisanship, and challenges its indefensible absence from democratic theory today.
Works Cited:
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
Adolf G. Gundersen, “Deliberative Democracy and the Limits of Partisan Politics: Between Athens and Philadelphia,” in Political Theory and Partisan Politics, eds. Edward Portis, Adolf Gundersen, and Ruth Shively.
Hegel, “Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Wurtenberg” in Z.A. Pelcyzynski, ed., Political Writings.
David Hume, “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science” and “Of the Independency of Parliament”Political Essays, ed. Haakonssen.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813, Memorial Edition.
James Madison, “Parties”, in Jack N. Rakove, ed., James Madison: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1999).
Mill, "On Liberty" and “Edinburgh Review”in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson; Considerations on Representative Government.
Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, borrowing from Oakeshott.
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
Nancy Rosenblum
2. Nancy Rosenblum: "Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation," Part II
(See Part I here.)
But a third moment of appreciation, a philosophical defense of parties, did depend on the character of the lines of division among parties. Like regulated rivalry and governing, this moment of appreciation assigns the advantages of parties to the very divisiveness that appalls antiparty theorists. Hume’s version of the philosophical moment rests on a stringent ethic of partisanship. Here, as in ethics, Hume assumes the pose of “impartial observer”, the standpoint he took assessing the actions and claims of Whigs and Tories during the Glorious Revolution. “Impartial” is understood relative to the parties; the observer is independent of connections, nonpartisan. But Hume wants to claim more: the position of impartial observer has its own center and ballast -- what he calls “the proper medium”, “extremes of all are to be avoided”. From this standpoint: “Though no one will ever please either faction by moderate opinions, it is there we are most likely to meet with truth and certainty.”
The striking note is that Hume would impress the impartial observer’s perspective on partisans themselves. Partisans might be injected with “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism” and hesitation. Partisans should sometimes exhibit a sense of fallibility and accompanying humility, and should incline to a generous estimate of the opposition’s intentions (“there are on both sides wise men who meant well to their country”). Hume escalates his demands further: partisans must also “persuade each that its antagonist may possibly be sometimes in the right…that neither side are …so fully supported by reason as they endeavor to flatter themselves”. This requires partisans to acknowledge that no one party is in the complete interest of the nation, or even of those who advance it. Hume proposes an ethics of partisanship equivalent to moderation grounded not in pragmatic accommodation or the checking function of opposition but in philosophic insight into parties’ “proper poise and influence”.
Hume’s imperative goes against the grain of actual partisanship. After all, the role of philosophic spectator is phenomenologically alien, and the attitude of hesitation is antithetical to much political action. Generous assumptions about the opposition’s intentions (“wise men who mean well”) are episodic at best. Only sometimes, and only some partisans, stand back from their rightness, and when they do it does not always mean recognizing that other parties share in being right or moderation of a kind “likely to bring truth and certainty”. A less demanding ethics of partisanship is my subject in later posts.
The most enduring philosophical moment of appreciation shares Hume’s assumption that parties’ contributions are complementary, only here, the benefits of opposition do not depend on partisans’ stepping back to become impartial observers. Less stringently, more hopefully, the dynamic of party antagonism does the work. I call this moment proto-Millian.
We are familiar with Mill’s insistence on “the social function of antagonism” and his signature argument about one-sidedness. Truth “is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” Mill erected the philosophical framework of progressive antagonism and insisted that this process requires actual advocates, not devil’s advocates or impartial observers. He explained in On Liberty that objections have force when they come “from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their utmost for them.” But is Mill’s “trial by discussion” a defense of parties?
The claim that contestation corrects error, heightens awareness of arguments for and against propositions, and produces better decisions and more legitimate ones was and remains long-standing enlightenment orthodoxy, but the link between opposition and improvement did not identify political parties as the agents of fruitful antagonism. For example, the most ardent voice of enlightenment, William Godwin, tied social improvement to “communicative politics” (his term) but insisted that the “shibboleth of party has a more powerful tendency, than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs, to render the mind quiescent and stationery”.
This judgment should be familiar, for contemporary political philosophers typically sever deliberation from partisanship. Insofar as “the internal telos of deliberation is consensus”, partisanship is anathema by definition. Deliberative theorists who do not aim at overcoming disagreement nonetheless associate partisanship with “coercion, negotiation, or, in its most discursive form, rhetorical manipulation”. (Gunderson)
We are prodded to ask: when Mill speaks of “The great council of the nation; the place where the opinions which divide the public on great subjects of national interest, meet in a common arena, do battle, and are victorious and vanquished”, does he intend a brief for parties? There are good reasons to think that Mill’s “party of order or stability” and “party of progress or reform” each of which “derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other”, did not refer to actual political associations but to “modes of thinking”, a bow to two seminal minds in philosophy, Bentham and Coleridge. Actually existing parties appalled him. “In the present situation of Great Britain, and of all countries in Europe” parties are incapable of serving as the nation’s “Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinion”.
So I call this moment of appreciation proto-Millian. Mill himself turned to institutional arrangements for antagonism without parties, the most important being his campaign on behalf of proportional representation. A new breed of political men, “hundreds of able men of independent thought” would enter the field and be voted into government, he imagined. Honorable, distinguished men “having sworn allegiance to no political party” would offer themselves in undreamed numbers. In place of party Mill imagined a “personal merit ticket”. But could “hundreds of able men of independent thought” drive improvement on Mill’s own terms? Does independence insure “a serious conflict of opposing reasons” or a real struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners? True, Mill’s nonpartisan men of merit are not Humean impartial observers. But why should we think that Independents would spontaneously fall into complementary camps, partisans of order or progress, rather than promiscuous coalitions? Or that they would provide actual liberal and conservative partisans backbone and muscular reasons? Mill was right to be skeptical that coherent legislation could emerge from “a miscellaneous assembly”, and to approve of “concert and cooperation”. Yet he leaves us to imagine Independents doing the work.
I am wary of the philosophical moment of appreciation if only because a lot is lost if intellectual boredom leads us to take regulated rivalry and responsibility for governing for granted, or if they are overshadowed by the drama of progressive antagonism. Another caveat is that there is no reason to think that principles or values or interests arise in antagonistic pairs, or at all. Finally, the philosophical moment of appreciation invites disappointment: from this perspective, partisans disappoint when they are resistant to “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism”, or when “men not measures” dominate, or when contest leads to stasis or compromise. Indeed, the failed promise fuels ferocious attacks on parties and partisanship, most famously Carl Schmitt’s.
The proto-Millian moment of appreciation can be rescued by restating it more modestly. Parties don’t dependably add up to a comprehensive, philosophically defensible whole and are not complements whose antagonism is dependably countervailing, much less progressive. But parties do draw politically relevant lines of division, reject elements of the others’ account of projects and promises, and accept regulated rivalry as the form in which they are played out. It is enough that party antagonism focuses attention on problems, information and interpretations are brought out, stakes are delineated, points of conflict and commonality are located, the range of possibilities winnowed, and relative competence on different matters is up for judgment. We can preserve the proto-Millian position in paler shades as long as parties create lines of division and define themselves in relation to one another. For, caveats in view, it is still the case that politically salient values, preferences, programs, interest, and principles are unlikely to be cast in terms of Mill’s “serious conflict of opposing reasons” unless partisans do the work of articulating lines of division and advocating on the side of the angels. That is the main point to retain from a pared down proto-Millian position: without party rivalry, “trial by discussion” cannot be meaningful. It will not be if interests and opinions are disorganized and are not brought into opposition, their consequences are not drawn out, argument is evaded. Nor can it be fruitful if the inclusion of interests and opinions is exhaustive and chaotic; parties are about selection and exclusion. Shaping conflict is what parties and partisans do, and what will not be done, certainly not regularly in the way representative democracy requires, without them.
My next entry offers a defense of partisanship, and challenges its indefensible absence from democratic theory today.
Works Cited:
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
Adolf G. Gundersen, “Deliberative Democracy and the Limits of Partisan Politics: Between Athens and Philadelphia,” in Political Theory and Partisan Politics, eds. Edward Portis, Adolf Gundersen, and Ruth Shively.
Hegel, “Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Wurtenberg” in Z.A. Pelcyzynski, ed., Political Writings.
David Hume, “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science” and “Of the Independency of Parliament”Political Essays, ed. Haakonssen.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813, Memorial Edition.
James Madison, “Parties”, in Jack N. Rakove, ed., James Madison: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1999).
Mill, "On Liberty" and “Edinburgh Review”in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson; Considerations on Representative Government.
Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, borrowing from Oakeshott.
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
Nancy Rosenblum
On the Side of Angels symposium
1. Nancy Rosenblum: "Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation," Part I
In political theory today, political parties and their partisan supporters are disparaged if not actively despised. They always have been. The canonical history of political thought is a record of relentless opposition to parties as institutions and moral disdain for partisans. Parties do have one classic defender, Edmund Burke. Of whom William Goldsmith wrote in 1774 “Here lies our good Edmund. Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind. And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.” On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship is my analysis of antipartyism and attempt at rehabilitation.
To begin, I’ll introduce two high points on my map of the terrain, two “Glorious Traditions” of antipartyism. The character and purpose of political parties vary over time and political contexts, of course, but if “party” lacks institutional coherence, aversions to parties are surprisingly steady. The first glorious tradition of antipartyism insists that political society should be integral and that divisions are unwholesome. The formulations are familiar – an organic body politic, an indivisible nation or people, unitary royal or popular sovereignty, a general will that cannot err, one determinable common good. “Holism” can be hierarchical or communitarian and egalitarian. From a holist perspective, every partial group and association fosters particularist interests and opinions. No form of pluralism is benign. Parts just are partial, and every organized interest and opinion is an actual or latent political party. Because parties’ raison d’etre is partiality and conflict, they are particularly anathema -- parts against not of the whole. This aversion is with us still.
The second glorious tradition of antipartyism accepts pluralism and partiality, and incorporates social and political parts into the frame of government. It is one thing to accommodate divisions in a system of representation (as in the mixed constitution or corporatism), however, and another to organize party conflict within or among them. “In all civilized societies, distinctions are various and unavoidable”, Madison wrote to Jefferson, but the logic of pluralism does not extend to parties. What earns the accusatory label “party” is turning acceptable divisions into warring factions, or inventing needless, novel divisions as an excuse for contesting for power. Partisans are passionate zealots, extremists, begetters of “extraordinary ferment” and “violent animosities”. Partisans, Hume wrote, suffer “madness of heart”.
In this tradition of antipartyism, in contrast to holism, however, reconciliation to parties is conceivable. For here, parties are less symptoms of deeper intolerable division than causes and drivers of arrant divisiveness, disrupters of political equilibrium. They can conceivably be tempered and put to use. We see this in the half-way house status of the party of constitutional necessity that David Hume identified with the fortunate parties of the Glorious Revolution. Constitutional necessity was the judgment partisans passed on their own activity, of course, before parties became respectable. Partisan association was temporary, a dangerous instrument political men must occasionally employ for the public good. The halfway house party of necessity with its disclaimers of partisanship is still with us: a nonpartisan party uniting people of all views in defense of the neglected national interest; an honorable party of independents; a party to transcend parties.
A set of recurrent themes marks the long course of the antiparty tradition that sees parties as fatally divisive, among them grim explanations for the ubiquity and irrepressibility of parties. Finally, there were so many causes there seemed to be no cause and we can almost see Madison throwing up his hands when he wrote, “A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them.” Another constant theme is party archetypes, as in Jefferson’s “the terms whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history.” Both themes had a critical thrust, but they could be inverted and recast as appreciative of parties. For example, it is not hard to see that with a half conceptual turn it would be possible to represent parties as antagonistic but necessary elements of a reasonable political order – party of order/party of progress, say, so that parties appear as philosophically defensible parts whose dynamic is mutually corrective, even progressive. Similarly, the charge that parties not only exploit deep divisions but also invent conflicts (“the smallest appearance of real difference suffices”) contains the insight that parties create rather than simply mirror social or ideological divisions. The creative role of parties drawing lines of political division and as Tocqueville recognized “introduce[ing] a new power into the political world” is foreshadowed, aversively, here.
Against the background of these glorious traditions of antipartyism, I retrieve early moments of appreciation that can serve as guides to the achievement of parties. Sartori commented that “great achievements are accomplished in the mental fog of practical experience”. My challenge is to rescue from futility the traces of positive in the long history of antipartyism, and underscore their significance.
One moment of appreciation belongs to Burke, who portrays party conflict as a form of regulated rivalry. “Every good political institution must have a preventive operation as well as a remedial”, he wrote. Revolution and impeachment are recognized remedies for tyranny, but party conflict is the previously unrecognized preventative that makes these remedies unnecessary. The spirit of party is a “vigilant watchman over those in power”. Parties expose one another’s crimes and failures. Regulated party rivalry entails enormous political self-restraint; that was a crucial insight. The discipline consists of conceding each party’s status as just a part in a permanently pluralist politics, and with it the provisional nature of being the governing party, and the charade of pretending to represent the whole.
By bringing opposition within the frame of government, parties do more than manage political conflict; they organize the business of government. Perhaps surprisingly, this moment of appreciation belongs to Hegel. He argued that the real issue vexing political representation is not the right of enfranchisement or who were to be the constituents but rather the result of representation: the creation of a legislative assembly. Political men must recruit responsible colleagues and form parties in order to govern, which requires more than temporary cooperation or a commanding personality. Hegel wrote of the opposition party: “What it is often charged with, as if with something bad, namely all it wants is to form a Ministry itself, is in fact its greatest justification.”
Both regulated rivalry and governing are forgiving when it comes to the character of parties; neither moment of appreciation appears to depend on “great parties” mirroring deep natural or social cleavages or on partisans’ shared philosophy. “Small” parties can do the work, and serve as templates for great transformative parties.
(Continued in Part II here.)
Nancy Rosenblum
1. Nancy Rosenblum: "Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation," Part I
In political theory today, political parties and their partisan supporters are disparaged if not actively despised. They always have been. The canonical history of political thought is a record of relentless opposition to parties as institutions and moral disdain for partisans. Parties do have one classic defender, Edmund Burke. Of whom William Goldsmith wrote in 1774 “Here lies our good Edmund. Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind. And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.” On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship is my analysis of antipartyism and attempt at rehabilitation.
To begin, I’ll introduce two high points on my map of the terrain, two “Glorious Traditions” of antipartyism. The character and purpose of political parties vary over time and political contexts, of course, but if “party” lacks institutional coherence, aversions to parties are surprisingly steady. The first glorious tradition of antipartyism insists that political society should be integral and that divisions are unwholesome. The formulations are familiar – an organic body politic, an indivisible nation or people, unitary royal or popular sovereignty, a general will that cannot err, one determinable common good. “Holism” can be hierarchical or communitarian and egalitarian. From a holist perspective, every partial group and association fosters particularist interests and opinions. No form of pluralism is benign. Parts just are partial, and every organized interest and opinion is an actual or latent political party. Because parties’ raison d’etre is partiality and conflict, they are particularly anathema -- parts against not of the whole. This aversion is with us still.
The second glorious tradition of antipartyism accepts pluralism and partiality, and incorporates social and political parts into the frame of government. It is one thing to accommodate divisions in a system of representation (as in the mixed constitution or corporatism), however, and another to organize party conflict within or among them. “In all civilized societies, distinctions are various and unavoidable”, Madison wrote to Jefferson, but the logic of pluralism does not extend to parties. What earns the accusatory label “party” is turning acceptable divisions into warring factions, or inventing needless, novel divisions as an excuse for contesting for power. Partisans are passionate zealots, extremists, begetters of “extraordinary ferment” and “violent animosities”. Partisans, Hume wrote, suffer “madness of heart”.
In this tradition of antipartyism, in contrast to holism, however, reconciliation to parties is conceivable. For here, parties are less symptoms of deeper intolerable division than causes and drivers of arrant divisiveness, disrupters of political equilibrium. They can conceivably be tempered and put to use. We see this in the half-way house status of the party of constitutional necessity that David Hume identified with the fortunate parties of the Glorious Revolution. Constitutional necessity was the judgment partisans passed on their own activity, of course, before parties became respectable. Partisan association was temporary, a dangerous instrument political men must occasionally employ for the public good. The halfway house party of necessity with its disclaimers of partisanship is still with us: a nonpartisan party uniting people of all views in defense of the neglected national interest; an honorable party of independents; a party to transcend parties.
A set of recurrent themes marks the long course of the antiparty tradition that sees parties as fatally divisive, among them grim explanations for the ubiquity and irrepressibility of parties. Finally, there were so many causes there seemed to be no cause and we can almost see Madison throwing up his hands when he wrote, “A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them.” Another constant theme is party archetypes, as in Jefferson’s “the terms whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history.” Both themes had a critical thrust, but they could be inverted and recast as appreciative of parties. For example, it is not hard to see that with a half conceptual turn it would be possible to represent parties as antagonistic but necessary elements of a reasonable political order – party of order/party of progress, say, so that parties appear as philosophically defensible parts whose dynamic is mutually corrective, even progressive. Similarly, the charge that parties not only exploit deep divisions but also invent conflicts (“the smallest appearance of real difference suffices”) contains the insight that parties create rather than simply mirror social or ideological divisions. The creative role of parties drawing lines of political division and as Tocqueville recognized “introduce[ing] a new power into the political world” is foreshadowed, aversively, here.
Against the background of these glorious traditions of antipartyism, I retrieve early moments of appreciation that can serve as guides to the achievement of parties. Sartori commented that “great achievements are accomplished in the mental fog of practical experience”. My challenge is to rescue from futility the traces of positive in the long history of antipartyism, and underscore their significance.
One moment of appreciation belongs to Burke, who portrays party conflict as a form of regulated rivalry. “Every good political institution must have a preventive operation as well as a remedial”, he wrote. Revolution and impeachment are recognized remedies for tyranny, but party conflict is the previously unrecognized preventative that makes these remedies unnecessary. The spirit of party is a “vigilant watchman over those in power”. Parties expose one another’s crimes and failures. Regulated party rivalry entails enormous political self-restraint; that was a crucial insight. The discipline consists of conceding each party’s status as just a part in a permanently pluralist politics, and with it the provisional nature of being the governing party, and the charade of pretending to represent the whole.
By bringing opposition within the frame of government, parties do more than manage political conflict; they organize the business of government. Perhaps surprisingly, this moment of appreciation belongs to Hegel. He argued that the real issue vexing political representation is not the right of enfranchisement or who were to be the constituents but rather the result of representation: the creation of a legislative assembly. Political men must recruit responsible colleagues and form parties in order to govern, which requires more than temporary cooperation or a commanding personality. Hegel wrote of the opposition party: “What it is often charged with, as if with something bad, namely all it wants is to form a Ministry itself, is in fact its greatest justification.”
Both regulated rivalry and governing are forgiving when it comes to the character of parties; neither moment of appreciation appears to depend on “great parties” mirroring deep natural or social cleavages or on partisans’ shared philosophy. “Small” parties can do the work, and serve as templates for great transformative parties.
(Continued in Part II here.)
Nancy Rosenblum
On the Side of Angels symposium: Introduction
This week in this space we'll be having a look at Nancy Rosenblum's important new book, On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.
Those who read this blog from time to time will know that one recurring issue is the intellectual relationship between political theory and political science, and that I'm constantly urging a view of political theory as within and tied to the social sciences, not only within or tied to philosophy. On the Side of Angels sets a high new standard for what political-theory-with-political science can look like and do. A number of our commentators also do exemplary work at that intersection; and all are terrific and thoughtful scholars whom I'm honored to have on this site for a week!
Our participants are:
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and chair of the Department of Government at Harvard University, and Vice-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She is the author of Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America , Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought, and editor of, among other volumes, the very influential collection Liberalism and the Moral Life. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Patrick Deneen, Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies and Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (2000) and Democratic Faith (2005), and coeditor of Democracy's Literature. He blogs regularly at What I Saw In America.
Henry Farrell, well-known in the blogosphere from his frequent contributions to Crooked Timber (which pioneered this kind of book event) and The Monkey Cage, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; the author of The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; and co-editor (with Dan Drezner of The Political Promise of Blogging, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Jacob T. Levy, That's me. Just for the sake of completeness within one post, I'll say: I am Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear.
Mara Marin is Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on the status of commitments in politics and political theory.
Andrew Rehfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design and is currently writing a book entitled A General Theory of Political Representation . He made an important and controversial contribution to the political theory/ political science debates with his paper Offensive Political Theory.
Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research centers on the historical origins and normative consequences of rules governing democratic decision-making. Her first book, Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007), retrieves and defends the historically salient view that democracies regularly change their laws, while exploring the circumstances under which democracies have enacted immutable rules. She is writing a second book, Counting the Many, on the historical development and justifications of supermajority rules. Democracy and Legal Change was featured, along with Corey Brettschenider's Democratic Rights, in a mutual-critical-exchange in Perspectives on Politics 6(2), June 2008.
Nadia Urbinati is Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the department of Political Science at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Constellations, and author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006), and Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.)
Welcome to all of you!
The symposium will begin with posts by Rosenblum summarizing a few of the central arguments of On the Side of Angels, so that blog-readers not familiar with the book can take part in the conversation. Several of the commentators will focus on the arguments in those posts, though reference is made to the book as well. I'll be posting the contributions to the symposium between now and Thursday, so that each cluster of posts spends some time as a possible locus of conversation.
This week in this space we'll be having a look at Nancy Rosenblum's important new book, On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.
Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science. Their governing and electoral functions are among the chief concerns of the field. Yet most political theorists--including democratic theorists--ignore or disparage parties as grubby arenas of ambition, obstacles to meaningful political participation and deliberation. On the Side of the Angels is a vigorous defense of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory.
Nancy Rosenblum's account moves between political theory and political science, and she uses resources from both fields to outline an appreciation of parties and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. She draws from the history of political thought and identifies the main lines of opposition to parties, as well as the rare but significant moments of appreciation. Rosenblum then sets forth her own theoretical appreciation of parties and partisanship. She discusses the achievement of parties in regulating rivalries, channeling political energies, and creating the lines of division that make pluralist politics meaningful. She defends "partisan" as a political identity over the much-vaunted status of "independent," and she considers where contemporary democracies should draw the line in banning parties.
On the Side of the Angels offers an ethics of partisanship that speaks to questions of centrism, extremism, and polarization in American party politics. By rescuing parties from their status as orphans of political philosophy, Rosenblum fills a significant void in political and democratic theory.
Those who read this blog from time to time will know that one recurring issue is the intellectual relationship between political theory and political science, and that I'm constantly urging a view of political theory as within and tied to the social sciences, not only within or tied to philosophy. On the Side of Angels sets a high new standard for what political-theory-with-political science can look like and do. A number of our commentators also do exemplary work at that intersection; and all are terrific and thoughtful scholars whom I'm honored to have on this site for a week!
Our participants are:
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and chair of the Department of Government at Harvard University, and Vice-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She is the author of Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America , Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought, and editor of, among other volumes, the very influential collection Liberalism and the Moral Life. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Patrick Deneen, Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies and Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (2000) and Democratic Faith (2005), and coeditor of Democracy's Literature. He blogs regularly at What I Saw In America.
Henry Farrell, well-known in the blogosphere from his frequent contributions to Crooked Timber (which pioneered this kind of book event) and The Monkey Cage, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; the author of The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; and co-editor (with Dan Drezner of The Political Promise of Blogging, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Jacob T. Levy, That's me. Just for the sake of completeness within one post, I'll say: I am Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear.
Mara Marin is Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on the status of commitments in politics and political theory.
Andrew Rehfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design and is currently writing a book entitled A General Theory of Political Representation . He made an important and controversial contribution to the political theory/ political science debates with his paper Offensive Political Theory.
Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research centers on the historical origins and normative consequences of rules governing democratic decision-making. Her first book, Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007), retrieves and defends the historically salient view that democracies regularly change their laws, while exploring the circumstances under which democracies have enacted immutable rules. She is writing a second book, Counting the Many, on the historical development and justifications of supermajority rules. Democracy and Legal Change was featured, along with Corey Brettschenider's Democratic Rights, in a mutual-critical-exchange in Perspectives on Politics 6(2), June 2008.
Nadia Urbinati is Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the department of Political Science at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Constellations, and author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006), and Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.)
Welcome to all of you!
The symposium will begin with posts by Rosenblum summarizing a few of the central arguments of On the Side of Angels, so that blog-readers not familiar with the book can take part in the conversation. Several of the commentators will focus on the arguments in those posts, though reference is made to the book as well. I'll be posting the contributions to the symposium between now and Thursday, so that each cluster of posts spends some time as a possible locus of conversation.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
I'm going to live, and keep my wits about me, forever, part of a continuing series
Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk : "A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions."
Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk : "A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions."
Saturday, January 24, 2009
On The Side of Angels symposium: prologue
In Barack Obama’s inaugural address last week,Americans encountered their quadrennial moment of post-partisanship. Since Thomas Jefferson’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” almost nothing has been so common in an inaugural address as a call to move past old partisan divides. (See recent examples below.) In many respects this is politeness and graciousness in victory: no one thought that Jefferson really was a capital-F Federalist, and no one is at risk of forgetting that Obama is a Democrat. An inauguration marks the transition from candidate to president, from campaign to governing, and from voice of a party to head of a government. There’s something appropriate in the new president’s acknowledgement that, while remaining a partisan, he is now responsible to and for an entire citizenry.
But there is still something odd about the trope. There is always a hint that, prior to the great man’s arrival, the parties disputed over petty and silly things, whereas now they shall unify behind his vision of greatness. It’s partly a result of presidentialism; where the head of state is separate from the head of government, the head of government doesn’t feel the same need to pretend to be above party, and doesn’t have the same presumptuousness that his or her program is now the whole nation’s program. But it’s also partly a legacy of a reflexive distrust of parties and partisanship—a disposition we’ll be considering here next week.
Reagan, 1985:
Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.
Bush, 1989:
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again. To my friends—and yes, I do mean friends—in the loyal opposition—and yes, I mean loyal: I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand. We can't turn back clocks, and I don't want to. But when our fathers were young, Mr. Speaker, our differences ended at the water's edge. And we don't wish to turn back time, but when our mothers were young, Mr. Majority Leader, the Congress and the Executive were capable of working together to produce a budget on which this nation could live. Let us negotiate soon and hard. But in the end, let us produce. The American people await action. They didn't send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan. "In crucial things, unity"—and this, my friends, is crucial.
Clinton, 1997:
To that effort I pledge all my strength and every power of my office. I ask the members of Congress here to join in that pledge. The American people returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another. Surely, they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach, and to move on with America’s mission.
Bush, 2005:
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
In Barack Obama’s inaugural address last week,Americans encountered their quadrennial moment of post-partisanship. Since Thomas Jefferson’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” almost nothing has been so common in an inaugural address as a call to move past old partisan divides. (See recent examples below.) In many respects this is politeness and graciousness in victory: no one thought that Jefferson really was a capital-F Federalist, and no one is at risk of forgetting that Obama is a Democrat. An inauguration marks the transition from candidate to president, from campaign to governing, and from voice of a party to head of a government. There’s something appropriate in the new president’s acknowledgement that, while remaining a partisan, he is now responsible to and for an entire citizenry.
But there is still something odd about the trope. There is always a hint that, prior to the great man’s arrival, the parties disputed over petty and silly things, whereas now they shall unify behind his vision of greatness. It’s partly a result of presidentialism; where the head of state is separate from the head of government, the head of government doesn’t feel the same need to pretend to be above party, and doesn’t have the same presumptuousness that his or her program is now the whole nation’s program. But it’s also partly a legacy of a reflexive distrust of parties and partisanship—a disposition we’ll be considering here next week.
Reagan, 1985:
Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.
Bush, 1989:
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again. To my friends—and yes, I do mean friends—in the loyal opposition—and yes, I mean loyal: I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand. We can't turn back clocks, and I don't want to. But when our fathers were young, Mr. Speaker, our differences ended at the water's edge. And we don't wish to turn back time, but when our mothers were young, Mr. Majority Leader, the Congress and the Executive were capable of working together to produce a budget on which this nation could live. Let us negotiate soon and hard. But in the end, let us produce. The American people await action. They didn't send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan. "In crucial things, unity"—and this, my friends, is crucial.
Clinton, 1997:
To that effort I pledge all my strength and every power of my office. I ask the members of Congress here to join in that pledge. The American people returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another. Surely, they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach, and to move on with America’s mission.
Bush, 2005:
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Of what is political theory a subset?
The newly-engaged Will Wilkinson is back from southeast Asia and has been blogging up a non-stop storm of terrific posts for a week now. I keep wanting to put up one-line posts that say "what he said!" with a link, but that way lies Instapunditry and is best kept to a minimum.
In response to this post (and as much as I like Will as a commentator on current politics, I like him still better when he engages in political philosophy), I posted the following in comments.
Will says he'll answer at some point; I eagerly await his views. In the meantime, on to my own independent interests in it, as the exchange has crystallized some old thoughts in a new way for me.
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I have a longstanding interest (dating, in my published work, to the first few pages of The Multiculturalism of Fear) in the puzzle of which facts of the world should be taken as given and which susceptible to deliberate reform in normative theory. This is closely tied to a favorite topic around here (see e.g. this post and the comments thread): the relationship of political theory to both political science and political philosophy. And today I was rereading parts of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie with its tree of domains of knowledge.
These all get me to the following framing:
Of what is political theory a subset?
The answer we get from the Rawlsian revival is: political theory/philosophy is a subset of moral philosophy/ethics. (As between the latter two categories, it doesn’t matter for my purposes which is a subset and which is a superset, or whether they’re distinct.) “What is the right thing to do?” has as a special applied case “what is the right thing to legislate?” or “what is the right thing for a judge to do?” It has other special applied cases: “What is the right thing for a doctor, a corporation, a biologist to do?” We call these medical ethics or business ethics or bioethics or… We don’t call “what is the right thing to legislate?” “political ethics,” because the person of the legislator disappears from that question; “political ethics” is reserved for questions that can’t be rendered actorless. (Should the legislator accept a donation? Should a bureaucrat resign?)
Nonetheless, I trust that the idea that political philosophy is a kind of applied ethics or moral philosophy is familiar enough. We treat a journal called Ethics as perhaps the highest-prestige place in which to publish political philosophy; the network of institutional interdisciplinary homes of political philosophy are often characterized as ethics centers, and the ur-center is a center for ethics and the professions; and the methodology of the canonical Theory of Justice is laid out and legitimized in an article called “the autonomy of moral theory.”
But political theory has (increasingly-atrophied) sister disciplines in the other social sciences: economic theory and social theory, both practiced by Montesquieu, Smith, Marx, and Weber, and at least one of which was practiced by Tocqueville, Foucault, Polanyi, Durkheim, Hayek, and Habermas. These are, broadly, descriptive and explanatory theoretical disciplines, attempts to understand the phenomena of the social world. They often analyze phenomena that are too broad and sweeping to be easily tractable by fine-grained and localized data analysis: modernization, modernity, industrialization, market society, nationalism, and so on. Stereotypically, these disciplines study such huge phenomena as to look like the sweep and tide of history, things that seem especially un-suited to analysis in terms of what the right thing for a person to do is. (Business ethics and economic theory in this sense are wholly distinct enterprises.) They are the study of necessity and given phenomena, not normative choice and deliberate reform. I regret the unavailability of the word “phenomenology” for this kind of study; let’s call it social-science theory.
(It’s obviously a little too simple to describe sociological theory, which has as one of its central axes the “structure or agency?” question, as all being about structural necessity—but the “agency” side of those debates isn’t about the deliberate normative choices people informed by social theory should make, but a descriptive/ explanatory claim about the world, about the efficacy of individual choices and actions.)
Political theory might—mightn’t it?—be a subset of social science theory. The political theorist might seek to be to states and wars and elections as Hayek or Marx or Polanyi or Weber are to markets, or as Foucault or Durkheim is to modernity, or as Gellner is to nationalism. I try to make a start in my article on David Miller's book, which gradually turns into an article on what normative political theory can look like if we take a social-science theory view of the world of states.
(Interestingly, legal philosophy, analytic jurisprudence as that field has come to exist since Hart, is not construed as a subset of ethics or as the study of the right choice to make; Hart characterized his enterprise as one of “descriptive sociology,” and even non-positivist or partly non-positivist successors such as Fuller, Finnis and Dworkin, have had to work out a theory of what law is in a way that has not been much paralleled in political philosophy. Legal philosophy, in this sense, looks more like social-science-theory than like political philosophy.)
Now, there are understandable reasons, both simple and complicated, for emphasizing politics as the domain of choice. One complicated reason has to do with the influence of Arendt and the idea of freedom in human action, located quintesentially in the realm of the political. One simple reason is that what politicians like to tell us about themselves is that they're always in the business of Doing Something, and that every Something they Do will dissolve some unpleasant thing in human social life. The domains studied by economists and sociologists tend to lack actors claiming those magical powers.
But here it's worth remembering my exchange with Will. He's far from believing in the magical ability of political officials to alter just any thing they wish in the social world. But he, too, treats politics as a domain differently from other domains; economic facts just are, whereas political facts are unjust results of human decisions that presumably could and should be decided differently. The world of states (and of states' relationships to borders and economies and labor migration) is up for normative grabs.
I believe in the importance and value of normative questions about politics, and normative theories that try to answer them! The possibility of freely-chosen deliberate normative reform is real. I don't think that political theory is best done as only a subset of a social-science theory of necessity. (Indeed, I suspect the same is true of theorizing about economics or culture or social structures.) But I also don't think it's best done as only a subset of ethics or moral theory. Our aspiration should be to do both-- to theorize the social phenomena of politics, and to analyze the morality of choices within politics, as well as to think about how each of those shapes the other. To be grandiose: we should try to reunify some of what's been divided in the human sciences, and to understand normative reflection and explanatory explorations as linked and complementary.
And I suspect that, even as we approach 40 years on from Theory of Justice, it's the social-science theory part of our vocabulary and intellectual toolkit that's currently underdeveloped. (This is truer in some parts of the field than others; those for whom Foucault or the early Habermas is more significant than Rawls aren't as likely to fit the "subset of ethics" model, and some of those explicitly reject normative theory as an enterprise. But that's not what I want, either.) I also suspect that developing that part of our intellectual toolkits will require abandoning the ideal/ non-ideal theory distinction. Perhaps individual moral decisions can be analyzed in an idealized abstraction; but social and political decisions, not so.
In the current literature, G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality (about which more in another post, or follow the beginnings of the symposium at Crooked Timber) seems especially strongly committed to the view I’m implicitly criticizing here. So too is David Estlund, a critic of what he calls "utopophobia." Any thing which is not naturally impossible (as Blackstone described Parliament’s legislative competence) is within the scope of what our normative political principles might legitimately demand. I haven't here offered any substantive argument against their views. I'm trying, however, to alter the terms of debate a bit. I think that there's a sense in which that substantive position is allowed to follow too quickly on an implicit sense of what our intellectual enterprise just is.
(NB: In an inchoate but real way this post is indebted to Jeremy Waldron's old essay "What Plato Would Allow," from Nomos: Theory and Practice, and to a related talk I heard him give at ANU sometime in the 1993-94 school year.)
The newly-engaged Will Wilkinson is back from southeast Asia and has been blogging up a non-stop storm of terrific posts for a week now. I keep wanting to put up one-line posts that say "what he said!" with a link, but that way lies Instapunditry and is best kept to a minimum.
In response to this post (and as much as I like Will as a commentator on current politics, I like him still better when he engages in political philosophy), I posted the following in comments.
Will, I wonder whether there are political facts which you think can be taken as given for purposes of moral inquiry in the same way that you take economic facts as given...?
Evidently you don't attribute to them just the same status. The gap between the Canadian and the Mexican dingus-tightener is to be the object of direct moral criticism in a way that the gap between the American dingus-tightener and the American widget-polisher is not. T
I know some of the moves that could be made here, but I don't want to provide too much of a prompt. So let me start with: Do political facts about the world occupy a categorically different status from economic facts about the world for purposes of moral inquiry? If so, why? If not, then why is the fact of the border-controlling 'nation-'state up for moral criticism in a way that market outcomes aren't?
(As always, I agree with your analysis of nearly everything! But I'm pulling on a loose thread to see what unravels, partly because it seems relevant to your argument and partly because I'm independently interested in it.)
Will says he'll answer at some point; I eagerly await his views. In the meantime, on to my own independent interests in it, as the exchange has crystallized some old thoughts in a new way for me.
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I have a longstanding interest (dating, in my published work, to the first few pages of The Multiculturalism of Fear) in the puzzle of which facts of the world should be taken as given and which susceptible to deliberate reform in normative theory. This is closely tied to a favorite topic around here (see e.g. this post and the comments thread): the relationship of political theory to both political science and political philosophy. And today I was rereading parts of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie with its tree of domains of knowledge.
These all get me to the following framing:
Of what is political theory a subset?
The answer we get from the Rawlsian revival is: political theory/philosophy is a subset of moral philosophy/ethics. (As between the latter two categories, it doesn’t matter for my purposes which is a subset and which is a superset, or whether they’re distinct.) “What is the right thing to do?” has as a special applied case “what is the right thing to legislate?” or “what is the right thing for a judge to do?” It has other special applied cases: “What is the right thing for a doctor, a corporation, a biologist to do?” We call these medical ethics or business ethics or bioethics or… We don’t call “what is the right thing to legislate?” “political ethics,” because the person of the legislator disappears from that question; “political ethics” is reserved for questions that can’t be rendered actorless. (Should the legislator accept a donation? Should a bureaucrat resign?)
Nonetheless, I trust that the idea that political philosophy is a kind of applied ethics or moral philosophy is familiar enough. We treat a journal called Ethics as perhaps the highest-prestige place in which to publish political philosophy; the network of institutional interdisciplinary homes of political philosophy are often characterized as ethics centers, and the ur-center is a center for ethics and the professions; and the methodology of the canonical Theory of Justice is laid out and legitimized in an article called “the autonomy of moral theory.”
But political theory has (increasingly-atrophied) sister disciplines in the other social sciences: economic theory and social theory, both practiced by Montesquieu, Smith, Marx, and Weber, and at least one of which was practiced by Tocqueville, Foucault, Polanyi, Durkheim, Hayek, and Habermas. These are, broadly, descriptive and explanatory theoretical disciplines, attempts to understand the phenomena of the social world. They often analyze phenomena that are too broad and sweeping to be easily tractable by fine-grained and localized data analysis: modernization, modernity, industrialization, market society, nationalism, and so on. Stereotypically, these disciplines study such huge phenomena as to look like the sweep and tide of history, things that seem especially un-suited to analysis in terms of what the right thing for a person to do is. (Business ethics and economic theory in this sense are wholly distinct enterprises.) They are the study of necessity and given phenomena, not normative choice and deliberate reform. I regret the unavailability of the word “phenomenology” for this kind of study; let’s call it social-science theory.
(It’s obviously a little too simple to describe sociological theory, which has as one of its central axes the “structure or agency?” question, as all being about structural necessity—but the “agency” side of those debates isn’t about the deliberate normative choices people informed by social theory should make, but a descriptive/ explanatory claim about the world, about the efficacy of individual choices and actions.)
Political theory might—mightn’t it?—be a subset of social science theory. The political theorist might seek to be to states and wars and elections as Hayek or Marx or Polanyi or Weber are to markets, or as Foucault or Durkheim is to modernity, or as Gellner is to nationalism. I try to make a start in my article on David Miller's book, which gradually turns into an article on what normative political theory can look like if we take a social-science theory view of the world of states.
(Interestingly, legal philosophy, analytic jurisprudence as that field has come to exist since Hart, is not construed as a subset of ethics or as the study of the right choice to make; Hart characterized his enterprise as one of “descriptive sociology,” and even non-positivist or partly non-positivist successors such as Fuller, Finnis and Dworkin, have had to work out a theory of what law is in a way that has not been much paralleled in political philosophy. Legal philosophy, in this sense, looks more like social-science-theory than like political philosophy.)
Now, there are understandable reasons, both simple and complicated, for emphasizing politics as the domain of choice. One complicated reason has to do with the influence of Arendt and the idea of freedom in human action, located quintesentially in the realm of the political. One simple reason is that what politicians like to tell us about themselves is that they're always in the business of Doing Something, and that every Something they Do will dissolve some unpleasant thing in human social life. The domains studied by economists and sociologists tend to lack actors claiming those magical powers.
But here it's worth remembering my exchange with Will. He's far from believing in the magical ability of political officials to alter just any thing they wish in the social world. But he, too, treats politics as a domain differently from other domains; economic facts just are, whereas political facts are unjust results of human decisions that presumably could and should be decided differently. The world of states (and of states' relationships to borders and economies and labor migration) is up for normative grabs.
I believe in the importance and value of normative questions about politics, and normative theories that try to answer them! The possibility of freely-chosen deliberate normative reform is real. I don't think that political theory is best done as only a subset of a social-science theory of necessity. (Indeed, I suspect the same is true of theorizing about economics or culture or social structures.) But I also don't think it's best done as only a subset of ethics or moral theory. Our aspiration should be to do both-- to theorize the social phenomena of politics, and to analyze the morality of choices within politics, as well as to think about how each of those shapes the other. To be grandiose: we should try to reunify some of what's been divided in the human sciences, and to understand normative reflection and explanatory explorations as linked and complementary.
And I suspect that, even as we approach 40 years on from Theory of Justice, it's the social-science theory part of our vocabulary and intellectual toolkit that's currently underdeveloped. (This is truer in some parts of the field than others; those for whom Foucault or the early Habermas is more significant than Rawls aren't as likely to fit the "subset of ethics" model, and some of those explicitly reject normative theory as an enterprise. But that's not what I want, either.) I also suspect that developing that part of our intellectual toolkits will require abandoning the ideal/ non-ideal theory distinction. Perhaps individual moral decisions can be analyzed in an idealized abstraction; but social and political decisions, not so.
In the current literature, G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality (about which more in another post, or follow the beginnings of the symposium at Crooked Timber) seems especially strongly committed to the view I’m implicitly criticizing here. So too is David Estlund, a critic of what he calls "utopophobia." Any thing which is not naturally impossible (as Blackstone described Parliament’s legislative competence) is within the scope of what our normative political principles might legitimately demand. I haven't here offered any substantive argument against their views. I'm trying, however, to alter the terms of debate a bit. I think that there's a sense in which that substantive position is allowed to follow too quickly on an implicit sense of what our intellectual enterprise just is.
(NB: In an inchoate but real way this post is indebted to Jeremy Waldron's old essay "What Plato Would Allow," from Nomos: Theory and Practice, and to a related talk I heard him give at ANU sometime in the 1993-94 school year.)
Charming.
Noted without comment from the Gazette:
Noted without comment from the Gazette:
A Quebec billionaire at the centre of a messy and very public airing of his 10-year tumultuous relationship with a young Brazilian summed up yesterday why he never married her, despite having three children together.
“It’s not my cup of tea,” the man, who can’t be identified under Quebec family law, told a packed Quebec Superior Court room.
His ex has launched a constitutional challenge to Quebec’s unique family law in order to receive financial support – an issue he conceded he finds interesting.
“I just wish I wasn’t in the middle of it,” he said. “I’m disappointed that what was supposed to be a constitutional debate has evolved into an airing of our dirty laundry.”
As it stands now in Quebec, couples living common-law only have to pay child support but are under no obligation to provide support to the spouse, or to divide assets once the union ends.
The woman’s lawyers, who expect the case to go all the way to Canada’s highest court, want couples in de facto unions for three years without children or one year with children treated the same as people who are legally married, just as in other provinces.
The woman is asking for $56,000 a month plus $50 million – a figure she says reflects the kind of spending power she had when the two were together. But the man, who is now with a model with whom he is not married but has two children, says he gives the three children ample support.
They and their mother are in the process of moving out of their Westmount home, which has a mould problem, into a $2.4-million Outremont home which is in the man’s name. He pays for the nannies, chauffeur, cleaning lady and cook, as well as all the children’s school fees. He gives the woman $35,000 a month child support.
Yesterday, his testimony sounded like a script from a soap opera, as he recounted details of their on-again off-again relationship. It was peppered with details of jetting off to Europe, Brazil, Fiji, Japan and Dubai, house parties with 2,500 guests and denials of drug overdoses.
“We were incredibly in love and our three children were made with love,” he said. “But on the other hand, I was constantly criticized for my lifestyle, that I worked too hard and for the people I hung out with.
“And I had problems with her behaviour, too.”
He met the girl, then 17 and 15 years younger than him, on a beach in Brazil in 1992. She didn’t speak English or French, and he couldn’t speak Spanish or Portuguese, so for the first few years of their relationship, he said, they used a lot of sign language.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
For what it's worth...
I think both Battlestar Galactica and Lost are back in good form.
The two bits of my pre-premiere talk on "Lost" last night that I'll now cherry-pcik to make myself look smart:
1) Hume's philosophy includes a funny combination of apparent determinism with skepticism about [what we can know about] causation. Desmond [David Hume's] unique status with respect to the timeslip parts of the story-- he was the first character to get knocked loose from the timestream, the first whose consciousness went time-traveling, the first to experience the impossibility of changing history, and the first to nonetheless make use of timeslips in non-paradox-inducing ways-- and his unique status off the island [he's not one of the Oceanic Six and so far there haven't been any indications that he's included in the mandate to return, but he's still an island escapee and therefore tied to it-- in a way that seems more important than, say, Walt]-- will be centrally important as the story becomes more and more about time.
2) One of the three possibilities I laid out for why Locke becomes Bentham is that, in between then and now, he learned that he had to sacrifice his life to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of Islanders for whom he now had responsibility. Locke (philosopher) not only supports individual rights but also insists on the moral priority of life and condemns suicide. An act of utility-maximizing self-sacrifice is commemorated by his ceasing to be Locke at all and becoming Bentham. (But I admit that this was not my *preferred* possibility.)
A thought about Lost that doesn't have anything to do with political theory: Hurley always seems like he's in a slightly different show, and somehow the actor and the writers make that work very effectively. It's not just that he's comic relief, or that he's the one to stand in (very obviously) for the viewers ("I was never too clear on that part"). More generally he seems like his world only occasionally intersects with the dark, grim, meaningful, trumpet-heavy world of the rest of the characters, and that he's only intermittently interested in that world.
This has always been true of him, though he didn't always seem quite so on his own. The grimmest characters from the first season have tended to have the highest survival rate into later seasons; Rose and Bernard excepted, the major surviving Survivors are people with pretty heavy baggage and major Issues. Charlie, Boone, and Shannon had all of that too-- but they often featured in lighter scenes and exchanges. Now: well, everyone else's world has Alan Dale as a glowering presence in it, whereas Hurley's has Cheech. And Linus seemed not to understand this; he showed up in Hurley's kitchen making the kind of grim, opaque, meaningful speech that works on someone like Locke, Jack, or Sayiid. And Hurley responded appropriately-- which meant that he responded like a character from a different show. I got a kick out of it.
I think both Battlestar Galactica and Lost are back in good form.
The two bits of my pre-premiere talk on "Lost" last night that I'll now cherry-pcik to make myself look smart:
1) Hume's philosophy includes a funny combination of apparent determinism with skepticism about [what we can know about] causation. Desmond [David Hume's] unique status with respect to the timeslip parts of the story-- he was the first character to get knocked loose from the timestream, the first whose consciousness went time-traveling, the first to experience the impossibility of changing history, and the first to nonetheless make use of timeslips in non-paradox-inducing ways-- and his unique status off the island [he's not one of the Oceanic Six and so far there haven't been any indications that he's included in the mandate to return, but he's still an island escapee and therefore tied to it-- in a way that seems more important than, say, Walt]-- will be centrally important as the story becomes more and more about time.
2) One of the three possibilities I laid out for why Locke becomes Bentham is that, in between then and now, he learned that he had to sacrifice his life to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of Islanders for whom he now had responsibility. Locke (philosopher) not only supports individual rights but also insists on the moral priority of life and condemns suicide. An act of utility-maximizing self-sacrifice is commemorated by his ceasing to be Locke at all and becoming Bentham. (But I admit that this was not my *preferred* possibility.)
A thought about Lost that doesn't have anything to do with political theory: Hurley always seems like he's in a slightly different show, and somehow the actor and the writers make that work very effectively. It's not just that he's comic relief, or that he's the one to stand in (very obviously) for the viewers ("I was never too clear on that part"). More generally he seems like his world only occasionally intersects with the dark, grim, meaningful, trumpet-heavy world of the rest of the characters, and that he's only intermittently interested in that world.
This has always been true of him, though he didn't always seem quite so on his own. The grimmest characters from the first season have tended to have the highest survival rate into later seasons; Rose and Bernard excepted, the major surviving Survivors are people with pretty heavy baggage and major Issues. Charlie, Boone, and Shannon had all of that too-- but they often featured in lighter scenes and exchanges. Now: well, everyone else's world has Alan Dale as a glowering presence in it, whereas Hurley's has Cheech. And Linus seemed not to understand this; he showed up in Hurley's kitchen making the kind of grim, opaque, meaningful speech that works on someone like Locke, Jack, or Sayiid. And Hurley responded appropriately-- which meant that he responded like a character from a different show. I got a kick out of it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Leiter reports: political philosophy rankings
The 2008-09 round of the Leiter Report on philosophy departments is being released on Leiter's blog piecemeal, and today there's a list of interest to many readers of this blog: political philosophy.
This is a very good list, and shows the value of the Leiter Reports. Even though Arizona has been an excellent program in legal and/or political philosophy more often than not in my lifetime, I think it still gets undervalued in some circles just because the university as a whole isn't a traditional name-brand research powerhouse. Brown and Stanford have made important new commitments to political philosophy over the past several years, and I think either would now be a terrific place to study the field, but that's relatively new, and the kind of thing that could take a long time to become conventional wisdom.
Compared with the 2006 list (I assume that at some point that link will start pointing to the new list, but it hasn't yet):
Oxford has dropped to group 2 (G.A. Cohen has retired and not yet been replaced)
NYU has risen to group 1 (Samuel Scheffler has been hired)
Michigan has dropped out of group 2 (lost Darwall, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Berkeley has dropped out of group 2 (lost Scheffler)
Toronto has dropped out of group 2 (lost Sreenivasan and Hawkins, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Rutgers has dropped out of group 2 (probably some obvious reason for this but I don't recall)
Yale has risen into group 2
For what it's worth, I would still think that Michigan ought to be somewhere near the top.
The 2008-09 round of the Leiter Report on philosophy departments is being released on Leiter's blog piecemeal, and today there's a list of interest to many readers of this blog: political philosophy.
Top 9 Faculties in "Political Philosophy" in the English-Speaking World
In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score, rounded to the nearest .5. In parentheses after the school's name, the median and mode scores are listed. Within the grouping, faculties are listed alphabetically.
Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 4.5) (median, mode)
Harvard University (5, 5)
New York University (5, 5)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)
Group 2 (4-9) (rounded mean of 4.0) (median, mode)
Brown University (4, 4)
Oxford University (4.25, 4.5)
Princeton University (4, 5)
Stanford University (4.5, 4.5)
University College London (3.75, 3.75)
Yale University (4, 4.25)
This is a very good list, and shows the value of the Leiter Reports. Even though Arizona has been an excellent program in legal and/or political philosophy more often than not in my lifetime, I think it still gets undervalued in some circles just because the university as a whole isn't a traditional name-brand research powerhouse. Brown and Stanford have made important new commitments to political philosophy over the past several years, and I think either would now be a terrific place to study the field, but that's relatively new, and the kind of thing that could take a long time to become conventional wisdom.
Compared with the 2006 list (I assume that at some point that link will start pointing to the new list, but it hasn't yet):
Oxford has dropped to group 2 (G.A. Cohen has retired and not yet been replaced)
NYU has risen to group 1 (Samuel Scheffler has been hired)
Michigan has dropped out of group 2 (lost Darwall, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Berkeley has dropped out of group 2 (lost Scheffler)
Toronto has dropped out of group 2 (lost Sreenivasan and Hawkins, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Rutgers has dropped out of group 2 (probably some obvious reason for this but I don't recall)
Yale has risen into group 2
For what it's worth, I would still think that Michigan ought to be somewhere near the top.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Hither and Yon, local edition: "Lost in the state of nature"
I'll be giving a talk called "Lost in the state of nature: the political theory of the Island," Wednesday, January 21, 7 pm, in the Shatner Building cafe at McGill; the talk will of course be followed immediately by the season premiere of Lost.
Sponsored by the McGill Political Science Students' Association.
RSVP on facebook if you like.
Theories about the conversion of Locke into Bentham may be ventured in comments below...
I'll be giving a talk called "Lost in the state of nature: the political theory of the Island," Wednesday, January 21, 7 pm, in the Shatner Building cafe at McGill; the talk will of course be followed immediately by the season premiere of Lost.
Sponsored by the McGill Political Science Students' Association.
RSVP on facebook if you like.
Theories about the conversion of Locke into Bentham may be ventured in comments below...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
CFP: Theories of federalism
European Consortium of Political Research
European Consortium of Political Research
5th ECPR General Conference, Potsdam
10 - 12 September, 2009
Section Title: International Political Theory
Panel Title: Theories of federalism
PANEL CHAIR
Name: Nenad Stojanovic
Institution: Universität Zürich & Université catholique de Louvain
Email: nenad@ipz.uzh.ch
PANEL CO-CHAIR
Name:
Institution:
Email:
PANEL DISCUSSANT
Name: Helder De Schutter
Institution: University of Oxford
Email: schutter@alumni.princeton.edu
ABSTRACT - Submit a Paper to this Panel
While recent decades have witnessed a remarkable rise in empirical research on federalism, normative approaches to federalism have only very recently started to appear. Interest in these normative issues has coincided with the emergence of a normative interest in forms of self-government for nations. This manifests itself in two related areas: 1. Multinational States. Multinational states are typically confronted with claims to self-government rights by substate national and/or linguistic groups. With respect to these claims, a number of theorists have focused on federalism’s ability to provide self-government to national groups while maintaining a state-wide level of political decision-making. 2. Transnational political constellations. A number of theorists have argued that the form of democracy that is desirable above the level of the domestic state (such as for the EU and other regional multinational associations, as well as at a global level) should not be unitary but federal in nature, because federalism is better able to combine transnational decision-making with significant forms of political autonomy for national groups. Both debates ('domestic' and 'transnational' federalism) overlap extensively and tackle similar issues. The objective of the panel is to contribute to the development of normative theories of federalism in both fields. Here is a tentative guideline of questions for paper givers: - Is federalism in multinational states normatively superior to unitary forms of decision-making, or to secession? - Is federalism in the EU normatively superior to a unitary EU or to a more confederal EU? - How is federalism in transnational political contexts different from federalism in multinational domestic states? - Is federalism democratic? - Is federalism divisive? What are the sources of unity in federal political constellations? - What is the theoretical relationship between federal and consociational arrangements? - Is it unjust that in a multinational federal political constellation resources are distributed on the basis of territorial units instead of individual needs? Could/should we opt for non-territorial forms of federalism? Does federalism disadvantage non-territorial minorities? - What are the relations between the ethnocultural rights of national groups and those of immigrants?
Friday, January 16, 2009
Elsewhere: The Life of Levy
My old friend Todd Seavey has an inimitable style of storytelling-as-biography. Every person named in a story is given an appositive description linking them, in every way Todd knows, to other persons named in the story, to intellectual themes or cultural trends he finds of interest, or to noteworthy events. This is so regardless of whether every person listening has already heard the footnoted stories already and knows how they connect or even already knows the person in question. He makes it work; it's highly entertaining, and although he was speaking that way before the advent of html it strikes me that it's the conversational equivalent of hypertext.
In any event, he's now posted a highly idiosyncratic origin story-cum-intellectual-biography-cum-narration-of-shared-cultural-interests of, well, me. It's roughly his standard format turned inside-out-- biography-as-storytelling, in which I'm the framing device for some reflections all his own.
My old friend Todd Seavey has an inimitable style of storytelling-as-biography. Every person named in a story is given an appositive description linking them, in every way Todd knows, to other persons named in the story, to intellectual themes or cultural trends he finds of interest, or to noteworthy events. This is so regardless of whether every person listening has already heard the footnoted stories already and knows how they connect or even already knows the person in question. He makes it work; it's highly entertaining, and although he was speaking that way before the advent of html it strikes me that it's the conversational equivalent of hypertext.
In any event, he's now posted a highly idiosyncratic origin story-cum-intellectual-biography-cum-narration-of-shared-cultural-interests of, well, me. It's roughly his standard format turned inside-out-- biography-as-storytelling, in which I'm the framing device for some reflections all his own.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Liberalism and libertarianism, again
Last fall's Princeton panel has now had its west coast counterpart, at Stanford.
Brad DeLong posts his remarks here. I do wish I had Brad's way with words:
Two thoughts:
1) Josh Cohen is a leading political theorist/ philosopher and an important figure on the center-left of intellectual life-- but I can't think that I've ever read him describing himself as a liberal. He seems to me an odd choice if one is constructing this as Team Liberal and Team Libertarian.
2) It struck me at the Princeton session that "Team Liberal and Team Libertarian" is the wrong construction for the project. If there must be a debate with sides (rather than a discussion around common issues) then it ought to be something like "Team 'Kissing Cousins' Thesis and Team 'Distant Relatives' Thesis."
Last fall's Princeton panel has now had its west coast counterpart, at Stanford.
Liberals and Libertarians: Kissing Cousins or Distant Relatives?
Description:
A DEBATE BETWEEN LIBERALS AND LIBERTARIANS
LIBERALS
Joshua Cohen / Political Science, Stanford University
Pamela Karlan / Law, Stanford University
Bradley DeLong / Economics, UC Berkeley
LIBERTARIANS
Brink Lindsay / Cato Institute
Will Wilkinson / Cato Institute, Blogger at FlyBottle
Virginia Postrel / Dynamist
That liberals and libertarians share philosophical origins is clearly implied by the common Latin root for both words, liberalis, meaning open or generous. Both philosophies advocate civil liberties, individual autonomy, limited state interference in private affairs, and a non-bellicose foreign policy. Where the two stances have diverged is with respect to fiscal and regulatory issues. Although liberals generally view markets as the best way of organizing production and distribution, they have been more sympathetic than libertarians to governmental involvement in the management of markets for the public good. Moreover, whereas both liberals and libertarians generally concur that the public sector should avoid excessive spending, the former have been more supportive of government programs to expand opportunity and provide social insurance.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when the public sector was expanding and government spending was rising sharply, libertarians leaned strongly toward a “fusionist” coalition with traditional social conservatives and generally supported the Republican realignment of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, however, the Republican party has succumbed to ideologies that have shifted it steadily away from core libertarian principles by curtailing civil liberties, expanding government intrusions into private affairs, running up huge fiscal deficits, expanding federal control over local institutions such as schools, and launching costly military invasions in the absence of direct threats.
In the wake of these developments, the “fusionist” coalition between libertarians and conservative republicans has substantially frayed and perhaps the time has come to reconsider the historical estrangement between liberals and libertarians. Given shared positions with respect to civil liberties, state involvement in private affairs, fiscal responsibility, and the War in Iraq, it may be fruitful to search for common ground in other areas. Is there room for compromise on contested regulatory and fiscal issues, or are liberals and libertarians destined to be occasional tactical allies with fundamentally conflicting strategic visions? And regardless of possibilities for closer political cooperation, what libertarian insights do liberals need to do a better job of appreciating, and vice versa?
Brad DeLong posts his remarks here. I do wish I had Brad's way with words:
One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern American liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.
Two thoughts:
1) Josh Cohen is a leading political theorist/ philosopher and an important figure on the center-left of intellectual life-- but I can't think that I've ever read him describing himself as a liberal. He seems to me an odd choice if one is constructing this as Team Liberal and Team Libertarian.
2) It struck me at the Princeton session that "Team Liberal and Team Libertarian" is the wrong construction for the project. If there must be a debate with sides (rather than a discussion around common issues) then it ought to be something like "Team 'Kissing Cousins' Thesis and Team 'Distant Relatives' Thesis."
Friday, January 09, 2009
The news I miss on red-eye flights
Cass Sunstein chosen as new administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congratulations to him!
Notes Orin Kerr, "this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government."
But Orin neglects the cost to all of Cass' foregone coauthors.
Cass Sunstein chosen as new administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congratulations to him!
Notes Orin Kerr, "this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government."
But Orin neglects the cost to all of Cass' foregone coauthors.
2008 books in political theory, continued
See this post for part 1.
Ten interesting and important books, by my lights, in political theory in 2008 by young and mid-career scholars. This will be a much more idiosyncratic list built around my own interests than the first one was-- not that the first one represented Objective Truth or anything, but, e.g., I'm pretty confident that there will be APSA panels or conferences or workshops or review symposia about most of the books I named there. Some of the books below are ones I suspect not many people have heard of yet; I want to encourage more people to have a look at them. In any case, well-known or not, consensus choices or not, these are interesting-to-me books published last year. Further contributions welcome in comments!
Sharon Krause, Civil Passions
Burke Hendrix, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims
Dennis Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau
Annelien De Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society
Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context
Jenet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience:
Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics
Jason Maloy,The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought
Dana Villa, Public Freedom
Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement
Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason
See this post for part 1.
Ten interesting and important books, by my lights, in political theory in 2008 by young and mid-career scholars. This will be a much more idiosyncratic list built around my own interests than the first one was-- not that the first one represented Objective Truth or anything, but, e.g., I'm pretty confident that there will be APSA panels or conferences or workshops or review symposia about most of the books I named there. Some of the books below are ones I suspect not many people have heard of yet; I want to encourage more people to have a look at them. In any case, well-known or not, consensus choices or not, these are interesting-to-me books published last year. Further contributions welcome in comments!
Must we put passions aside when we deliberate about justice? Can we do so? The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of impartiality as a cornerstone of fair decision making, but they wrongly assume that impartiality means being disengaged and passionless. In Civil Passions, Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, Civil Passions breaks new ground by providing a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics. Krause shows that the path to genuinely impartial justice in the public sphere--and ultimately to social change and political reform--runs through moral sentiment properly construed. This new account of affective but impartial judgment calls for a politics of liberal rights and democratic contestation, and it requires us to reconceive the meaning of public reason, the nature of sound deliberation, and the authority of law. By illuminating how impartiality feels, Civil Passions offers not only a truer account of how we deliberate about justice, but one that promises to engage citizens more effectively in acting for justice.
Much controversy has existed over the claims that Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have a right—based on original occupancy of land, historical transfers of sovereignty, and principles of self-determination—to a political status separate from the states in which they now find themselves embedded. How valid are these claims on moral grounds?
Burke Hendrix tackles these thorny questions in this book. Rather than focusing on the legal and constitutional status of indigenous nations within the states now ruling them, he starts at a more basic level, interrogating fundamental justifications for political authority itself. He shows that historical claims of land ownership and prior sovereignty cannot provide a sufficient basis for challenging the authority of existing states, but that our natural moral duties to aid other persons in danger can justify rights to political separation from states that fail to protect their citizens as they should.
Actual attempts at political separation must be carefully managed through well-defined procedural mechanisms, however, to foster extensive democratic deliberation about the nature of the politic al changes at stake. Using such procedures, Hendrix argues, indigenous peoples should be able to withdraw politically from the states currently ruling them, even to the point of choosing full independence.
Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique.
In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith's view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives.
Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith's approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.
This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu’s aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic ‘corps intermédiaire’ - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides a new context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.
If we are to vindicate moral reasoning in politics, Elisabeth Ellis argues in this original and provocative work, we must focus on the conditions of political discourse rather than the contents of any particular ethical system. Written in an engaging, direct style, Provisional Politics builds on Ellis’s prize-winning interpretation of Kant’s theory of provisional right to construct a new theory of justice under conditions of agency and plurality. She develops this new perspective through a series of cases ranging from the treatment of AIDS widows in Kenya to the rights of non-citizens everywhere, as well as the clash between democratic decision-making and the politics of species conservation. The book concludes with a sobering discussion of the probable limits of political agency.
Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics
Uncivil Disobedience examines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people.
Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a "bottom-up" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law.
Uncivil Disobedience calls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.
This first examination in almost 40 years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control that originally animated it.
The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself.
Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity.
Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.
This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad.
Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society.
Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.
Human reason is limited. Given the scarcity of reason, how should the power to make constitutional law be allocated among legislatures, courts and the executive, and how should legal institutions be designed? In Law and the Limits of Reason, Adrian Vermeule denies the widespread view, stemming from Burke and Hayek, that the limits of reason counsel in favor of judges making "living" constitutional law in the style of the common law. Instead, he proposes and defends a "codified constitution" - a regime in which legislatures have the primary authority to develop constitutional law over time, through statutes and constitutional amendments.
Vermeule contends that precisely because of the limits of human reason, large modern legislatures, with their numerous and highly diverse memberships and their complex internal structures for processing information, are the most epistemically effective lawmaking institutions.
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