'Which is to be Master?'—The Indefensibility of Political Representation

0:00Well, it's a great pleasure to be here again. I was here two years ago, and you made a fatal mistake of being nice to me, and I'm back. You were probably just being polite. I misunderstood you. With typical philosophical cunning, I've changed the title of my paper, so those of you who are here to hear a paper on representation, the very idea, are going to get that paper, but I just changed the title. It's called, Which is to be a Master of the Indefensibility of Political Representation? So, I know it's the end of the day, so I'm going to lighten things up a little bit, so this is the kind of graphic novel version of this, right? It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly Native American criminal class, except Congress. That's from Mark Twain.

0:45And from the Bible of political philosophy, I don't trust society to protect us. I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them. Michael Corleone. Back to the desert island. Where would we be in this tradition if we didn't have desert islands to talk about, right? Tom Hanks and Passepartout are the only two human inhabitants of a Pacific island. Neither is aware of the other until one fateful day they meet.

1:30What happens next is a matter of some moment. Will they greet each other politely and go about their respective businesses? Will they agree to cooperate for their mutual benefit? Will they fight? Who can tell? However, we can reasonably be sure in supposing that if Hanks were to command Passepartout I would ask Passepartout to tilt that barge or lift that bale, or demand that Passepartout give up his vile habit of drinking coconut juice while eating fish, or insist that Passepartout cooperate with him in his fishing and hunting ventures, or abstain from servile work on a Sunday. In short, if Hanks were in any way to attempt to require Passepartout to obey his commands, Passepartout would, I believe, rightly resent and probably resist such injunctions. The same of course applies if roles were to be reversed and Passepartout were to assume the position of a would-be commander.

2:16Now the essential principle of legitimate command can be established by reflection on our insular drama. Okay, this is the serious part of the paper, the rest is fun. First of all, Adam may legitimately command Benjamin to refrain from action C if and only if C is demonstrable initiation of aggression against the person or property of Adam or Against the Person or Property of Another Innocent Human Being. Adam may legitimately command Benjamin to perform Action C if and only if C is an element of a freely that is non-coercive arrived at binding agreement between Adam and Benjamin and C does not violate Condition 1.

3:04In no other case may Adam legitimately command Benjamin. Alright? Now, switching over to the other side. If in 1, Benjamin refuses to refrain from Action C, then Adam may use proportionate force to restrain or punish him. If in 2, Benjamin refuses to perform Action C, Adam may use proportionate force to elicit compensation. And finally, if in three Adam commands Benjamin, Benjamin may refuse to comply with such a command, and where appropriate may resist such commands with proportionate force. That's it. I may be wrong in all this, of course, but that's what I think. Now, what is true of the one is true of the many, so that if no one person has a right to so command me, no two persons acting severally or in concert have that right.

3:56And may of course combine to use their superior force to coerce me into doing something which they require, but that's a matter of might, not right. Whether that number purporting to command me be 1, or 2, or 7, or 1,223, or 10 million, it cannot accept under the conditions sketched above be a matter of right. Numbers don't count. Size doesn't matter. In other areas, yes. In this one, no. Now, in every modern state, some group of people, usually a fairly small group of people, purport to have the authority to command the mass of the population to do this or that, or to refrain from doing this or that. They don't possess such a right by virtue of some special divine gift, still less by virtue of their manifestly superior intelligence or more virtue, since that experience shows that our erstwhile leaders, by and large, are no better in general than the rest of us, and often, sadly, much worse. By what What right then do they claim the authority to command us, to make laws for us that govern

4:53many if not most of the significant aspects of our lives? Government as the systematic exercise of such command is commonly called requires justification. This is not to raise the fundamental and anarchic question of whether governance is at all justified and I'm an anarchist on this and we might talk about this in the questioning later on. In this context of this paper I'm prescinding from that. It's merely to ask the question why they, and it's always they, are entitled to call called upon us to pay taxes or serve in the military or the armed forces or to refrain from taking government non-approved drugs or driving without a seatbelt. It is in short to ask why some are rulers and others are ruled. One of my first professors says, remember the fundamental principle of political philosophy is the peasant always pays and you're a peasant.

5:45In the not-so-distant past, those who claimed to drive the government others did so because they had, they claimed, a mandate from God, or were better than the common run of man by virtue of their outstanding intellect, sterling characters, Nietzschean will or distinguished family tree, or had more money than the peasantry, or were simply more powerful than most other people. Now, whatever persuasive character such justifications may have had in the past, they have none now. Divine rule theories of government are at an all-time low ebb in the intellectual market. aristocratic theories of government command no respect, oligarchy theories even less and might-is-right theories are now, as they always have been, absolutely bankrupt.

6:31In the arena of government, governmental justification, democracy is the only game in town, for if there is a fundamental article of faith in the contemporary world, it is not that God So entrenched, so widespread is this belief that to call it into question is to invite bafflement, bewilderment and amusement and when it becomes apparent that one is not joking, Let's keep the alliteration going. Dismay, disbelief and derision. So democracy and representation. Let's have a look at this. The key to the justification and popular acceptance of democracy is the idea of representation.

7:19Those who are governed are thought to be governed by those who represent them, and thus it is claimed that being thus governed by those who represent them, they are in effect governing themselves. This gets over the problem of why in any political structure some rule and others are ruled. If rulers and ruled are in effect one and the same, Okay, so this is how it works. Democracy equals self-government because in representative of democracy we are governed by representatives whom we have chosen and so in effect we're governing ourselves. If the bow of representation were to break, then down would come the cradle of democracy, baby and all.

8:05Somewhat less metaphorically, if representation cannot be satisfactorily explicated, then representative or indirect democracy, the last remaining contender for the justification of political governance, in the sense of a division of mankind into rulers and ruled, finds itself in no more tenable a position than any of its discredited competitors. Now, despite the central importance of the concept of representation, not a huge amount of work appears to have been done in it, or maybe I just didn't do enough research. I'm not sure. The classic work in this area is Hannah Pitkin's work called The Concept of Representation, now almost 40 years old. I read it when it came out first. I don't know. I'm not that old. She supports my claim regarding the linkage of democracy and representation, noting, and I quote, The contemporary popularity of the concept of representation depends much upon as having become linked with the idea of democracy, unquote, although she points out correctly, and I quote again, initially, neither the concept nor the institution to which it was applied

9:02were linked with elections or democracy. The contingent connection of democracy with representation is now of historical interest only. For the contemporary mind, democracy and representation are so interlinked as almost to be conceptually indistinguishable. Given the contemporary firm linkage between democracy and representation, A problem in political philosophy is how to conceive a political representation. Is the political representative an agent of those whom he represents, limited to the carrying out of their instructions, or is he a trustee free to act in the interest of those whom he represents according to his own best judgement of what those interests are, or is he neither an agent nor a delegate being simply able to do more or less whatever he likes once elected? Or are there other possibilities in addition to these? Pitkin's book is an extended analysis of the various options.

9:47I believe that the idea of political representation derives such rhetorical force as it has from a set of loose analogies with non-problematic ordinary instances of representation, that none of the ordinary instances of representation translate without loss into the political realm and that ultimately there is no coherent idea of political representation that can survive rational scrutiny. So in what way are our political representatives representative? What does it mean for one man to represent another? Under normal circumstances those who represent us do so at our bidding and cease to do so at our bidding. They act on our instructions within the boundaries of a certain remit and we are responsible for what they do as our agents.

10:32By the way, this is all stolen from Lysander Spooner, okay? Can you imagine putting Lysander and Spooner together? I mean, Spooner is a kind of like Yorkshire name, and Lysander is Greek. I mean, why would his parents do that to him? Anyway, that's not a hair now there, okay? He's a great writer, I mean, what a mind. So, furthermore, I just... Every time I see it, I think, how am I going to persuade anybody to read somebody with a name like Lysander Spooner? Furthermore, the central characteristic of representation by agency is that the agent is responsible to his principal and is bound to act in the principal's interest. Is this the situation with so-called political representatives? Political representatives are not usually legally answerable to those whom they allegedly represent. Try suing your congressman for not carrying out his election promises. See how far you get.

11:22In fact, in modern democratic states, the majority of a representative's putative principles are in fact unknown to him. Can a political representative be an agent of a multitude? This also seems unlikely. What if the principles of interests that diverge from each other? A political representative must then, of necessity, cease to represent one or more of his principles. The best that can be done in these circumstances is for the politician to serve the many and betray the few. Some may take issue with the notion of representation

11:58presented here, and argue that we are dealing with a considerably more complex phenomenon that political representation is just one instance of a variety of types of representation, that representation can be symbolic, formal, religious or iconic, and the complete version of the paper of which there are about 30 copies here goes into some detail on that if you want one. While my remarks apply primarily to representation as agency, similar considerations can be brought to Barry Mutatus Futandis on representation as trustee, deputy, commissioner, and so on and so forth. Once again, as with our desert island drama, the basic conceptual point can be grasped from the single example of representation as agency. There is little to be gained except a kind of soothing tedium from a rehearsal of the inapplicability of the other paradigmatic types to political representation.

12:45It is of course perfectly possible that the concept of representation is systematically ambiguous and that there is at best a sort of family resemblance between its various kinds. If this were so, it would leave the notion of political representation as a more or less distant cousin of other kinds of representations so that, as in the case of human relations, while John resembles Howard and Howard resembles Tom and Tom resembles Michael, it doesn't follow that John resembles Michael in any way. Okay, so you could have that. However, Pitkin, and this as I said is the classic in the area, adopts as a working assumption the from the position that, quote, representation does have an identifiable meaning applied in different but controlled and discoverable ways in different contexts. It is not vague and shifting, but a single, highly complex concept that has not changed much in its basic meaning since the 17th century, end of quote.

13:31Her attempt at definition is as follows, and I quote, representation taking generally means the making present in some sense, in italics, of something which is nonetheless not, in italics, present literally or in fact. This is immediately followed by another attempted definition that may or may not be the same. Quote, in representation, something not literally present is considered as present in a non-literal sense. Now Pitkin is honest enough to admit that this or these definitions may not be particularly helpful. And actually, it's hard to disagree with that negative assessment. She thinks, however, that is, quote, a mistake to approach political representation too directly from the various individual representation analogies, agent and trustee and deputy and so on.

14:18She then proceeds to suggest a kind of institutional or systemic account. And again I quote, Political representation is primarily a public institutionalized arrangement involving many people in groups and operating in complex ways of large-scale social arrangements. What makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, but the overall structure and functioning of the system. The patterns emerging from the multiple activities of many people. It is representation if the people, or a constituency, are present in governmental action, even though they do not literally act for themselves. She picks up this idea again when she says, When we speak of political representation, we are almost always speaking of individuals acting in an institutionalized representative system, and it is against the background of this system as a whole that their action constitutes representation if they do.

15:11and I realized that was a bit fast and so on, you may not well have understood it, I read it slowly and I don't understand it. Frankly, this is nonsense. I'm being diplomatic. If we were all men here, I might use other language. And it is in fact a council despair. It comes to this, none of the paradigmatic uses of the term representation, instance by the various examples she considers, namely deputy, agent, and so on and so forth, suffices to make sense of the idea of political representation. So Pitkin invents a whole new unsubstantiated systemic account instead of individuals represented. By the way, this only comes in the last couple of pages of the book. Where has this been all along? Suddenly it pops up from nowhere. This, by the way, her book was originally her doctoral thesis We are to forget that we have been unable to make any sense of individual political representation.

16:17We can kick the problem upstairs by ignoring the individual and having the system itself be representative. So let us risk committing the fallacy of composition and assert that if the idea of explicating and Political Representation by means of the analysis of individual acts of agency, trusteeship and so on is unrealizable. The problem is hardly solved by simply positing the system as a sort of super agent of representation. I would go further. The systemic account is not only unhelpful, it is obfuscatory, appearing to explain when in fact it simply sweeps the problem under a pseudo-explanatory carpet in a manner reminiscent of the doctrine Mollier's based on the Malaid Imaginaire, who posits as a dormative force, power, as an explanation of the soporific qualities of opium.

17:16Wow, that really helped. This systemic account is of course to explain the obscure by the more obscure. It is also a striking example of what Alfred Northwaite had called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. And so I come to the end. If it is to be tenable, representative or indirect democracy requires a clear, robust and defensible concept of representation. No such conception has been forthcoming, and it is doubtful that any ever will be forthcoming. It used to be said that only three things were definitely true about the Holy Roman Empire. It wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman, and it wasn't an empire. Similarly, two things are definitely true about representative democracy. It isn't democracy and it isn't representative. In the end, representation is that it is insufficient to cover the naked and brutal fact that even in our sophisticated modern states, however However elegant the rhetoric and however persuasive the propaganda, some rule and others are ruled.

18:31The only question, as something Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, is which is to be mastered. That's all. So if there aren't enough copies of the paper, you can email me at that particular address. Thank you very much.