WEBVTT NOTE 'Which is to be Master?'—The Indefensibility of Political Representation 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.000 Well, 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. 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:12.000 You were probably just being polite. I misunderstood you. 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:22.000 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. 4 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:28.000 It's called, Which is to be a Master of the Indefensibility of Political Representation? 5 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:36.000 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? 6 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:43.000 It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly Native American criminal class, except Congress. 7 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000 That's from Mark Twain. 8 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:52.000 And from the Bible of political philosophy, 9 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:03.000 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. 10 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:11.000 Michael Corleone. 11 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:18.000 Back to the desert island. Where would we be in this tradition if we didn't have desert islands to talk about, right? 12 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:25.000 Tom Hanks and Passepartout are the only two human inhabitants of a Pacific island. 13 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:30.000 Neither is aware of the other until one fateful day they meet. 14 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:33.000 What happens next is a matter of some moment. 15 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:36.000 Will they greet each other politely and go about their respective businesses? 16 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:39.000 Will they agree to cooperate for their mutual benefit? 17 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:42.000 Will they fight? Who can tell? 18 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:46.000 However, we can reasonably be sure in supposing that if Hanks were to command Passepartout 19 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:53.000 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, 20 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:59.000 or insist that Passepartout cooperate with him in his fishing and hunting ventures, or abstain from servile work on a Sunday. 21 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:10.000 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. 22 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:16.000 The same of course applies if roles were to be reversed and Passepartout were to assume the position of a would-be commander. 23 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:23.000 Now the essential principle of legitimate command can be established by reflection on our insular drama. 24 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:28.000 Okay, this is the serious part of the paper, the rest is fun. 25 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:38.000 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 26 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:50.000 or Against the Person or Property of Another Innocent Human Being. 27 00:02:50.000 --> 00:03:04.000 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. 28 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.280 In no other case may Adam legitimately command Benjamin. 29 00:03:08.280 --> 00:03:11.280 Alright? Now, switching over to the other side. 30 00:03:11.280 --> 00:03:15.080 If in 1, Benjamin refuses to refrain from Action C, 31 00:03:15.080 --> 00:03:21.480 then Adam may use proportionate force to restrain or punish him. 32 00:03:21.480 --> 00:03:25.880 If in 2, Benjamin refuses to perform Action C, 33 00:03:25.880 --> 00:03:30.280 Adam may use proportionate force to elicit compensation. 34 00:03:30.280 --> 00:03:43.280 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. 35 00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:47.280 That's it. I may be wrong in all this, of course, but that's what I think. 36 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:56.280 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. 37 00:03:56.280 --> 00:04:04.280 And 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. 38 00:04:04.280 --> 00:04:15.280 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. 39 00:04:15.280 --> 00:04:21.280 Numbers don't count. Size doesn't matter. In other areas, yes. In this one, no. 40 00:04:21.280 --> 00:04:28.440 Now, in every modern state, some group of people, usually a fairly small group of people, 41 00:04:28.440 --> 00:04:32.360 purport to have the authority to command the mass of the population to do this or that, 42 00:04:32.360 --> 00:04:36.240 or to refrain from doing this or that. They don't possess such a right by virtue of some 43 00:04:36.240 --> 00:04:40.100 special divine gift, still less by virtue of their manifestly superior intelligence 44 00:04:40.100 --> 00:04:45.280 or more virtue, since that experience shows that our erstwhile leaders, by and large, 45 00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:49.800 are no better in general than the rest of us, and often, sadly, much worse. By what 46 00:04:49.800 --> 00:04:53.080 What right then do they claim the authority to command us, to make laws for us that govern 47 00:04:53.080 --> 00:04:57.720 many if not most of the significant aspects of our lives? 48 00:04:57.720 --> 00:05:02.240 Government as the systematic exercise of such command is commonly called requires justification. 49 00:05:02.240 --> 00:05:06.640 This is not to raise the fundamental and anarchic question of whether governance is at all justified 50 00:05:06.640 --> 00:05:11.340 and I'm an anarchist on this and we might talk about this in the questioning later on. 51 00:05:11.340 --> 00:05:14.120 In this context of this paper I'm prescinding from that. 52 00:05:14.120 --> 00:05:19.380 It's merely to ask the question why they, and it's always they, are entitled to call 53 00:05:19.380 --> 00:05:25.180 called upon us to pay taxes or serve in the military or the armed forces or to refrain 54 00:05:25.180 --> 00:05:29.500 from taking government non-approved drugs or driving without a seatbelt. It is in short 55 00:05:29.500 --> 00:05:37.380 to ask why some are rulers and others are ruled. One of my first professors says, remember 56 00:05:37.380 --> 00:05:45.180 the fundamental principle of political philosophy is the peasant always pays and you're a peasant. 57 00:05:45.180 --> 00:05:51.660 In the not-so-distant past, those who claimed to drive the government others did so because 58 00:05:51.660 --> 00:06:01.660 they had, they claimed, a mandate from God, or were better than the common run of man 59 00:06:01.660 --> 00:06:06.540 by virtue of their outstanding intellect, sterling characters, Nietzschean will or distinguished 60 00:06:06.540 --> 00:06:11.340 family tree, or had more money than the peasantry, or were simply more powerful than most other 61 00:06:11.340 --> 00:06:12.940 people. 62 00:06:12.940 --> 00:06:19.020 Now, whatever persuasive character such justifications may have had in the past, they have none now. 63 00:06:19.020 --> 00:06:22.820 Divine rule theories of government are at an all-time low ebb in the intellectual market. 64 00:06:22.820 --> 00:06:27.020 aristocratic theories of government command no respect, oligarchy theories even less and 65 00:06:27.020 --> 00:06:31.340 might-is-right theories are now, as they always have been, absolutely bankrupt. 66 00:06:31.340 --> 00:06:35.860 In the arena of government, governmental justification, democracy is the only game in town, for if 67 00:06:35.860 --> 00:06:39.820 there is a fundamental article of faith in the contemporary world, it is not that God 68 00:06:39.820 --> 00:07:02.060 So entrenched, so widespread is this belief that to call it into question is to invite 69 00:07:02.060 --> 00:07:06.380 bafflement, bewilderment and amusement and when it becomes apparent that one is not joking, 70 00:07:06.380 --> 00:07:11.380 Let's keep the alliteration going. Dismay, disbelief and derision. 71 00:07:11.380 --> 00:07:14.380 So democracy and representation. Let's have a look at this. 72 00:07:14.380 --> 00:07:19.380 The key to the justification and popular acceptance of democracy is the idea of representation. 73 00:07:19.380 --> 00:07:22.380 Those who are governed are thought to be governed by those who represent them, 74 00:07:22.380 --> 00:07:25.380 and thus it is claimed that being thus governed by those who represent them, 75 00:07:25.380 --> 00:07:28.380 they are in effect governing themselves. 76 00:07:28.380 --> 00:07:32.380 This gets over the problem of why in any political structure some rule and others are ruled. 77 00:07:32.380 --> 00:07:34.380 If rulers and ruled are in effect one and the same, 78 00:07:34.380 --> 00:07:59.380 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. 79 00:07:59.380 --> 00:08:05.380 If the bow of representation were to break, then down would come the cradle of democracy, baby and all. 80 00:08:05.380 --> 00:08:12.380 Somewhat less metaphorically, if representation cannot be satisfactorily explicated, then representative or indirect democracy, 81 00:08:12.380 --> 00:08:19.380 the last remaining contender for the justification of political governance, in the sense of a division of mankind into rulers and ruled, 82 00:08:19.380 --> 00:08:24.380 finds itself in no more tenable a position than any of its discredited competitors. 83 00:08:24.380 --> 00:08:32.380 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. 84 00:08:32.380 --> 00:08:39.380 The classic work in this area is Hannah Pitkin's work called The Concept of Representation, now almost 40 years old. 85 00:08:39.380 --> 00:08:43.380 I read it when it came out first. I don't know. 86 00:08:43.380 --> 00:08:45.380 I'm not that old. 87 00:08:45.380 --> 00:08:50.380 She supports my claim regarding the linkage of democracy and representation, noting, and I quote, 88 00:08:50.380 --> 00:08:52.940 The contemporary popularity of the concept of representation 89 00:08:52.940 --> 00:08:55.980 depends much upon as having become linked with the idea of democracy, 90 00:08:55.980 --> 00:08:58.940 unquote, although she points out correctly, and I quote again, 91 00:08:58.940 --> 00:09:02.140 initially, neither the concept nor the institution to which it was applied 92 00:09:02.140 --> 00:09:03.900 were linked with elections or democracy. 93 00:09:04.860 --> 00:09:07.260 The contingent connection of democracy with representation 94 00:09:07.260 --> 00:09:09.180 is now of historical interest only. 95 00:09:09.180 --> 00:09:11.660 For the contemporary mind, democracy and representation 96 00:09:11.660 --> 00:09:14.460 are so interlinked as almost to be conceptually indistinguishable. 97 00:09:16.220 --> 00:09:19.260 Given the contemporary firm linkage between democracy and representation, 98 00:09:19.260 --> 00:09:23.840 A problem in political philosophy is how to conceive a political representation. Is the 99 00:09:23.840 --> 00:09:27.740 political representative an agent of those whom he represents, limited to the carrying 100 00:09:27.740 --> 00:09:31.500 out of their instructions, or is he a trustee free to act in the interest of those whom 101 00:09:31.500 --> 00:09:36.180 he represents according to his own best judgement of what those interests are, or is he neither 102 00:09:36.180 --> 00:09:39.700 an agent nor a delegate being simply able to do more or less whatever he likes once 103 00:09:39.700 --> 00:09:43.140 elected? Or are there other possibilities in addition to these? 104 00:09:43.140 --> 00:09:47.140 Pitkin's book is an extended analysis of the various options. 105 00:09:47.140 --> 00:09:51.140 I believe that the idea of political representation derives 106 00:09:51.140 --> 00:09:55.140 such rhetorical force as it has from a set of loose analogies with non-problematic 107 00:09:55.140 --> 00:09:59.140 ordinary instances of representation, that none of the ordinary 108 00:09:59.140 --> 00:10:03.140 instances of representation translate without loss into the political realm 109 00:10:03.140 --> 00:10:07.140 and that ultimately there is no coherent idea of political representation 110 00:10:07.140 --> 00:10:11.140 that can survive rational scrutiny. 111 00:10:11.140 --> 00:10:32.140 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. 112 00:10:32.140 --> 00:10:36.140 By the way, this is all stolen from Lysander Spooner, okay? 113 00:10:36.140 --> 00:10:39.140 Can you imagine putting Lysander and Spooner together? 114 00:10:39.140 --> 00:10:43.140 I mean, Spooner is a kind of like Yorkshire name, and Lysander is Greek. 115 00:10:43.140 --> 00:10:46.140 I mean, why would his parents do that to him? 116 00:10:46.140 --> 00:10:49.140 Anyway, that's not a hair now there, okay? 117 00:10:49.140 --> 00:10:52.140 He's a great writer, I mean, what a mind. 118 00:10:52.140 --> 00:10:54.140 So, furthermore, I just... 119 00:10:54.140 --> 00:10:59.140 Every time I see it, I think, how am I going to persuade anybody to read somebody with a name like Lysander Spooner? 120 00:10:59.140 --> 00:11:08.140 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. 121 00:11:08.140 --> 00:11:11.140 Is this the situation with so-called political representatives? 122 00:11:11.140 --> 00:11:16.140 Political representatives are not usually legally answerable to those whom they allegedly represent. 123 00:11:16.140 --> 00:11:22.140 Try suing your congressman for not carrying out his election promises. See how far you get. 124 00:11:22.140 --> 00:11:28.140 In fact, in modern democratic states, the majority of a representative's putative principles are in fact unknown to him. 125 00:11:28.140 --> 00:11:33.140 Can a political representative be an agent of a multitude? This also seems unlikely. 126 00:11:33.140 --> 00:11:36.900 What if the principles of interests that diverge from each other? A political representative 127 00:11:36.900 --> 00:11:40.540 must then, of necessity, cease to represent one or more of his principles. The best that 128 00:11:40.540 --> 00:11:44.980 can be done in these circumstances is for the politician to serve the many and betray 129 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:51.980 the few. Some may take issue with the notion of representation 130 00:11:58.140 --> 00:12:17.140 presented 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. 131 00:12:17.140 --> 00:12:29.140 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. 132 00:12:29.140 --> 00:12:35.140 Once again, as with our desert island drama, the basic conceptual point can be grasped from the single example of representation as agency. 133 00:12:35.140 --> 00:12:45.140 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. 134 00:12:45.140 --> 00:12:49.860 It is of course perfectly possible that the concept of representation is systematically ambiguous 135 00:12:49.860 --> 00:12:53.700 and that there is at best a sort of family resemblance between its various kinds. 136 00:12:53.700 --> 00:12:57.860 If this were so, it would leave the notion of political representation as a more or less distant cousin 137 00:12:57.860 --> 00:13:01.620 of other kinds of representations so that, as in the case of human relations, 138 00:13:01.620 --> 00:13:05.620 while John resembles Howard and Howard resembles Tom and Tom resembles Michael, 139 00:13:05.620 --> 00:13:09.220 it doesn't follow that John resembles Michael in any way. Okay, so you could have that. 140 00:13:10.100 --> 00:13:14.980 However, Pitkin, and this as I said is the classic in the area, adopts as a working assumption the 141 00:13:14.980 --> 00:13:16.140 from the position that, quote, 142 00:13:16.140 --> 00:13:18.860 representation does have an identifiable meaning 143 00:13:18.860 --> 00:13:21.300 applied in different but controlled and discoverable ways 144 00:13:21.300 --> 00:13:22.500 in different contexts. 145 00:13:22.500 --> 00:13:23.940 It is not vague and shifting, 146 00:13:23.940 --> 00:13:26.380 but a single, highly complex concept 147 00:13:26.380 --> 00:13:28.420 that has not changed much in its basic meaning 148 00:13:28.420 --> 00:13:31.100 since the 17th century, end of quote. 149 00:13:31.100 --> 00:13:33.940 Her attempt at definition is as follows, and I quote, 150 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:36.660 representation taking generally means the making present 151 00:13:36.660 --> 00:13:38.500 in some sense, in italics, 152 00:13:38.500 --> 00:13:42.300 of something which is nonetheless not, in italics, 153 00:13:42.300 --> 00:13:44.140 present literally or in fact. 154 00:13:44.980 --> 00:13:50.980 This is immediately followed by another attempted definition that may or may not be the same. 155 00:13:50.980 --> 00:13:55.980 Quote, in representation, something not literally present is considered as present in a non-literal sense. 156 00:13:55.980 --> 00:14:04.980 Now Pitkin is honest enough to admit that this or these definitions may not be particularly helpful. 157 00:14:04.980 --> 00:14:08.980 And actually, it's hard to disagree with that negative assessment. 158 00:14:08.980 --> 00:14:13.980 She thinks, however, that is, quote, a mistake to approach political representation too directly 159 00:14:13.980 --> 00:14:18.980 from the various individual representation analogies, agent and trustee and deputy and so on. 160 00:14:18.980 --> 00:14:22.980 She then proceeds to suggest a kind of institutional or systemic account. 161 00:14:22.980 --> 00:14:24.980 And again I quote, 162 00:14:24.980 --> 00:14:30.980 Political representation is primarily a public institutionalized arrangement involving many people in groups 163 00:14:30.980 --> 00:14:34.980 and operating in complex ways of large-scale social arrangements. 164 00:14:34.980 --> 00:14:39.980 What makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, 165 00:14:39.980 --> 00:14:42.980 but the overall structure and functioning of the system. 166 00:14:42.980 --> 00:14:45.980 The patterns emerging from the multiple activities of many people. 167 00:14:45.980 --> 00:14:54.980 It is representation if the people, or a constituency, are present in governmental action, even though they do not literally act for themselves. 168 00:14:54.980 --> 00:14:57.980 She picks up this idea again when she says, 169 00:14:57.980 --> 00:15:05.980 When we speak of political representation, we are almost always speaking of individuals acting in an institutionalized representative system, 170 00:15:05.980 --> 00:15:11.980 and it is against the background of this system as a whole that their action constitutes representation if they do. 171 00:15:11.980 --> 00:15:18.980 and 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. 172 00:15:18.980 --> 00:15:21.980 Frankly, this is nonsense. 173 00:15:21.980 --> 00:15:28.980 I'm being diplomatic. If we were all men here, I might use other language. 174 00:15:28.980 --> 00:15:31.980 And it is in fact a council despair. 175 00:15:31.980 --> 00:15:36.980 It comes to this, none of the paradigmatic uses of the term representation, 176 00:15:36.980 --> 00:15:42.340 instance by the various examples she considers, namely deputy, agent, and so on and so forth, 177 00:15:42.340 --> 00:15:47.900 suffices to make sense of the idea of political representation. So Pitkin invents a whole 178 00:15:47.900 --> 00:15:52.620 new unsubstantiated systemic account instead of individuals represented. By the way, this 179 00:15:52.620 --> 00:15:58.460 only comes in the last couple of pages of the book. Where has this been all along? Suddenly 180 00:15:58.460 --> 00:16:06.260 it pops up from nowhere. This, by the way, her book was originally her doctoral thesis 181 00:16:06.260 --> 00:16:17.820 We are to forget that we have been unable to make any sense of individual political representation. 182 00:16:17.820 --> 00:16:28.060 We can kick the problem upstairs by ignoring the individual and having the system itself 183 00:16:28.060 --> 00:16:30.340 be representative. 184 00:16:30.340 --> 00:16:35.340 So let us risk committing the fallacy of composition and assert that if the idea of explicating 185 00:16:35.340 --> 00:16:40.140 and Political Representation by means of the analysis of individual acts of agency, trusteeship 186 00:16:40.140 --> 00:16:46.020 and so on is unrealizable. The problem is hardly solved by simply positing the system 187 00:16:46.020 --> 00:16:52.420 as a sort of super agent of representation. I would go further. The systemic account is 188 00:16:52.420 --> 00:16:58.740 not only unhelpful, it is obfuscatory, appearing to explain when in fact it simply sweeps the 189 00:16:58.740 --> 00:17:03.260 problem under a pseudo-explanatory carpet in a manner reminiscent of the doctrine Mollier's 190 00:17:03.260 --> 00:17:16.260 based on the Malaid Imaginaire, who posits as a dormative force, power, as an explanation of the soporific qualities of opium. 191 00:17:16.260 --> 00:17:19.260 Wow, that really helped. 192 00:17:19.260 --> 00:17:24.260 This systemic account is of course to explain the obscure by the more obscure. 193 00:17:24.260 --> 00:17:30.260 It is also a striking example of what Alfred Northwaite had called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. 194 00:17:30.260 --> 00:17:39.260 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. 195 00:17:39.260 --> 00:17:45.260 No such conception has been forthcoming, and it is doubtful that any ever will be forthcoming. 196 00:17:45.260 --> 00:17:53.260 It used to be said that only three things were definitely true about the Holy Roman Empire. 197 00:17:53.260 --> 00:17:59.260 It wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman, and it wasn't an empire. 198 00:17:59.260 --> 00:18:03.100 Similarly, two things are definitely true about representative democracy. It isn't 199 00:18:03.100 --> 00:18:19.900 democracy and it isn't representative. In the end, representation is that it is insufficient 200 00:18:19.900 --> 00:18:25.100 to cover the naked and brutal fact that even in our sophisticated modern states, however 201 00:18:25.100 --> 00:18:31.660 However elegant the rhetoric and however persuasive the propaganda, some rule and others are ruled. 202 00:18:31.660 --> 00:18:37.300 The only question, as something Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, is which is 203 00:18:37.300 --> 00:18:44.700 to be mastered. That's all. So if there aren't enough copies of the paper, you can email 204 00:18:44.700 --> 00:18:46.700 me at that particular address. Thank you very much.