REPRESENTATION
AND DEMOCRACY: an uneasy alliance
door
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
This articlel
appeared in: Scandinavian Political Studies,
jaarg.. 27,
nr. 3, 2004
Hanna Pitkin
is emeritusprofessor political science at the University
of Berkeley (VS). She published among other things The Concept of Representation
(1967), Wittgenstein and Justice (1972), Fortune is a Woman: Gender
and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli
(1984) en The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s
Concept of "the Social"
(1998)
The concept of ‘representation’ is puzzling not
because it lacks a central definition, but because that definition implies a paradox
(being present and yet not present) and is too general to help reconcile the word’s
many senses with their sometimes conflicting implications. Representation has a problematic relationship
with democracy, with which it is often thoughtlessly equated. The two ideas have
different, even conflicting, origins. Democracy came from ancient Democrats saw representation - with an extended
suffrage - as making possible large-scale democracy. Conservatives instead saw
it as a tool for staving off democracy. Rousseau also contrasted the two concepts,
but favoured democratic self-government. He was prescient in seeing representation
as a threat to democracy. Representative government has become a new form of oligarchy,
with ordinary people excluded from public life. This is not inevitable. Representation
does make large-scale democracy possible, where it is based in participatory democratic
politics at the local level. Three obstacles block access to this possibility today: the scope of public problems and private power; money, or rather wealth; and ideas and their shaping, in an age of electronic media. |
The
idea of representation has been getting renewed attention lately, especially in
Europe, where the effort to form some sort of regional institutions - less than
a state but more than an alliance - has raised countless issues of both theoretical
principle and political practicality, many of them involving representation. What
institutions should there be, with what powers, and how should their offices be
filled? Appointment? Elections?
On what basis and by whom? Whom or what are these officials
to represent? These European concerns also reflect the wider problems raised by
our peculiar current combination of unchecked globalization with resurgent localism
and ethnic separatism. What sort of political organization, what sort of representation
can suit such conditions?
Given
the gravity, complexity, and urgency of such questions, together with the enormously
technological outlook of our time, an audience attending a lecture on representation
is almost bound to expect an expert, offering technical, institutional advice:
unitary or district elections, winner-takes-all or proportional representation,
majority rule or reserved quotas for minorities? Such issues do matter, but I
am not such an expert. I fear that my remarks will disappoint you.
My
own study of representation was not technically oriented but conceptual and theoretical
[H.F. Pitkin, The Concept
of Representation.
The
concept does have a central core of meaning: that somebody or something not literally
present is nevertheless present in some non-literal sense. But that is not much
help. First, the core itself contains an inescapable paradox: not present yet
somehow present. And, second, the definition is too broadly vague to help in sorting
out the many particular senses, often with incompatible
implications or assumptions, that the word has developed over centuries of use.
The
way a city or a mountain is ‘made present’ on a map differs totally from the way
a litigant is ‘made present’ by an attorney. The way Macbeth is ‘made present’
on the stage differs from the way an ambassador represents a state, or the way
one ‘makes representations about’ something, or what characterizes representational
art or a representative sample. And all this is only in English. If one wants
to know not just about the word, but about the actual phenomena of ‘representation’
in various times and cultures, things get much worse. Even in German – a language
after all very close to English – representation in art or theatre has no conceptual
connection with representation in court or in government [H.F.
Pitkin, ‘Representation’, in T. Ball, J. Farr, &
R.L. Hanson (red.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change,
That
is as far as I got with the concept when I studied it some forty years ago. Since
then I have pursued other interests, and in order to engage at least one of them,
I want to talk about the relationship of representation to democracy, a topic
never raised in my earlier study because at the time I took that relationship
for granted as unproblematic. Like most people even today, I more or
less equated
democracy with representation, or at least with representative government. It
seemed axiomatic that under modern conditions only representation can make democracy
possible. That assumption is not exactly false, but it is profoundly misleading,
in ways that remain hidden if one treats it as an axiom and asks only technical
rather than fundamental theoretical questions.
The
idea of ‘democracy’ is every bit as complex and troublesome as that of representation.
Etymologically it means that the people (Greek demos) rule (kratein).
But the meaning of demos is ambiguous. Is it that all the people jointly
are to rule themselves, or that the common (demotic) people are to rule over the
(former) aristocracy? And what criteria determine whether the people are in fact
ruling? Words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘representation’ furthermore, like the vocabulary
of human institutions more generally, have this peculiarity: their use ranges
confusingly between expressing an idea or ideal, and designating uncritically
the actual arrangements currently supposed to embody that idea [Pitkin, 1967].
When
I speak about democracy here today I mean to raise and acknowledge such difficulties
rather than suppress them. Let us just say that by ‘democracy’ I mean popular
self-government, what Abraham Lincoln spoke of – though John Wycliffe had used
the expression some five centuries before – as ‘government of the people, by the
people, and for the people’ [A. Lincoln, Selected
Writings and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, T. H. Williams (red.) 1980, p. 231].
It is a matter of degree, an idea or ideal realized more or less well in various
circumstances, conditions, and institutional arrangements. ‘Fugitive’, Sheldon
Wolin calls it [S.S. Wolin ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in
That
the relationship between democracy so understood and representation is problematic
is suggested already by the two concepts’ disparate, even conflicting, histories.
Democracy originated with the ancient Greeks. At least the concept did; the practice
must surely have been lot older in some tribes and small settlements. Athenian
democracy was won by political struggle, from below, and it was direct and participatory
to an astonishing degree. It was also, by our standards, extremely constricted,
unrelated to any notion of universal human rights. The Greeks thought of other
peoples (barbarians) and of women as being generically incapable of politics.
Their democracy also had nothing whatever to do with representation, an idea for
which their language had no word.
Representation,
at least as a political idea and practice, emerged only in the early modern period
and had nothing at all to do with democracy. Take
gradually
became institutionalized. Sometimes the delegates were sent with instructions
from their communities; sometimes they were expected to report back on what had
transpired. Gradually they began to make their consent conditional on redress
of grievances, to think of themselves as members of a single, continuing body,
and sometimes to join forces against the king. So representation slowly came to
be considered a matter of right rather than a burden, though even then the selection
of delegates was by no means democratic, often not even accomplished by election.
Only
when these struggles between king and parliament culminated in civil war in
Instead,
the democrats held that everyone born and living in the land had a stake in public
life: ‘The poorest he that is in
rights’,
and that governments are legitimate only when they ‘secure those rights’ (Declaration
of Independence of the
So
democracy (re-)emerged in the modern world. But, since it emerged in large nation-states
rather than small city-states, and since by then the practice of (undemocratic)
representation was well established, the alliance seemed obvious. Extend the suffrage,
and democracy would be enabled by representation. Since, as John Selden put it,
‘the room will not hold all’, the people would rule themselves vicariously, through
their representatives [H. Arendt Crises of the Republic,
The
democrats’ conservative opponents, apart from a few die-hard monarchist absolutists,
by this time accepted (undemocratic) representation as traditional. But far from
equating it with democracy, they mobilized it as a tool for staving off the democratic
impulse and controlling the unruly lower classes. In the debates accompanying
the English Civil War, the conservatives said, once you start opening the traditional
way of selecting members of parliament to the challenge of principle, ‘you must
fly . . . to an absolute
natural
right’, and then there is no limit; anyone can claim anything. There are five
times as many in this realm without (landed) property as with, they said. ‘If
the master and servant shall be equal electors . . . the majority may by law .
. . [enact] an equality of goods and estate.’ Chaos will result [A.S.P. Woodhouse Puritanism and Liberty,
In
But
saying that the democrats conjoined representation with
democracy while the conservatives contrasted the two ideas is too simple. There
was also at least one idiosyncratic democratic voice that warned against representation:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now, Rousseau spoke not in terms of ‘democracy’, which
he regarded merely as a form of executive, but of freedom in a legitimate state.
Still, what he said was quintessentially democratic: freedom requires the active,
personal participation of all, assembled
together,
jointly deciding public policy. It is therefore incompatible with representation.
The English, Rousseau remarked, imagine themselves to be free, but actually they
are free only at the moment of casting their ballots in an election; immediately
afterwards they sink back into slavery, and cease to exist as a people [Rousseau
1968, pp. 101–2, 110, 141].
Well,
Rousseau was a romantic and a utopian, hopelessly impractical. By his account,
freedom would be possible only in a very small community and among people who
are heroically, self-sacrificingly public spirited.
‘As soon as the public service ceases to be the main concern of the citizens’,
he wrote, or as citizens begin to say about the public good, ‘What does it matter
to me?’, freedom disappears [J-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (vert.
M. Cranston), Harmondsworth,
1968, pp.
140–41].
And
yet, for all his romantic posturing, Rousseau was on to something about representation.
The intervening centuries seem to have proved him right, at least in this respect.
Despite repeated efforts to democratize the representative system, the predominant
result has been that representation has supplanted democracy instead of serving
it. Our governors have become a self-perpetuating elite
that rules - or rather, administers - passive or privatized masses of people.
The representatives act not as agents of the people but simply instead of them.
We
send them to take care of public affairs like hired experts, and they are professionals,
entrenched in office and in party structures. Immersed in a distinct culture of
their own, surrounded by other specialists and insulated from the ordinary realities
of their constituents’ lives, they live not just physically but also mentally
‘inside the beltway’, as we say in America (that is, within the ring
of freeways
that encircle
Not
that people idolize their governors and believe all the official pronouncements.
On the contrary, they are cynical and sulky, deeply alienated from what is done
in their name and from those who do it. Yet in their conduct they continue to
support - that is, to refrain from disrupting - the system. Most do not even bother
to vote, let alone take any active responsibility for their nation’s public life.
Sporadically unruly, distrusting politicians and hating ‘the government’ even
while they accept and pursue its largesse, they regard the resulting policies
and conditions as if fated. It never occurs to them to think of the government
as their shared instrument, or of the public as consisting simply of themselves
collectively. (And why should it occur to them, given how things now work?)
Clearly,
representation is not the only culprit in bringing about this lamentable state
of affairs, but it is a culprit. The repeated widening of the suffrage and the
many technical improvements in systems of representation have
brought about neither the property redistribution and social chaos the conservatives
feared nor the effective democracy the reformers expected. The arrangements we
call ‘representative democracy’ have become a substitute for popular self-government,
not its enactment. Calling them ‘democracy’
only adds
insult to injury. The late Hannah Arendt, who wrote
most eloquently and thoughtfully on these matters, says, ‘Representative government
has in fact become oligarchic government’, in the sense that ‘the ageold distinction between ruler and ruled which the [American
and French] Revolution[s] had set out to abolish through the establishment of
a republic has asserted itself again; once more, the people are not admitted to
the public realm, once more the business of government has become the privilege
of the few’ [H. Arendt, On Revolution. New York, 1965, pp. 273, 240].
Must
we accept this as inevitable? Must we acquiesce in Rousseau’s view, with its implication
that in a globalized world, democracy is irrelevant?
Arendt thought not. From her own study of modern revolutions
and ‘social movements’ and from Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of
Participating
actively in local political life, people learn the real meaning of citizenship.
They discover that (some of) their personal troubles are widely shared, and how
their apparently private concerns are in fact implicated in public policy and
public issues. Thus they discover a possibility based neither on private, competitive
selfishness nor on heroic self-sacrifice, since they collectively are the
public that benefits, yet disagree on what is to be done. In shared deliberation
with others, the citizens revise their own understanding of both their individual
self-interest and the public interest, and both together [H.F. Pitkin & S.M. Shumer, ‘On Participation’ in: democracy
2, pp. 43–54, 1982].
Having
these experiences in a context of action and responsibility, seeing the actual
results in the world, they also realize (that is, they both perfect and become
aware of) their own capacities: for autonomous judgment, for deliberation, and
for effective action. Seeing themselves in collective action, they observe their
own powers and their shared power. People with this kind of face-to-face experience
among their neighbours can then also be effective democratic citizens in relation
to their more distant, national representatives. Local direct democracy undergirds
national representative democracy.
Tocqueville
claimed to have observed this in Jacksonian America.
He saw a people passionately engaged with their public life, in a not at all selfsacrificing way. Take away politics from an American,
he said, and it would be as if ‘half his existence (had been) snatched from him;
he would feel it as a vast void in his life and become incredibly unhappy’ [A.
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J. P. Mayer (red), vert.
G. Lawrence, New York, 1969, p. 243]. As recently
as the 1960s something like this kind of political engagement still seemed possible
in many lands. Today the outlook is considerably more bleak;
we democrats have reason to worry. I will conclude by just mentioning three big
obstacles that stand in the way.
The
first concerns the scope of public problems and private power. For local politics
to be able to provide the experience of active citizenship, it must be real. Something
that genuinely matters to people, some problem in their actual lives, must be
at stake. A mere pretend politics, a simulacrum of public action without significant
content or consequences, will not do. But in our world the conditions that trouble
people’s lives are - more and more - large scale. They are by-products of the
activities of huge, undemocratic organizations, be they national mafias, transnational
corporations, or even government bureaucracies and armies. If the local community’s
only water supply is owned by a transnational corporation
with headquarters elsewhere (or, effectively, nowhere) and an annual budget larger
than that of many states, then there may result local troubles of such overwhelming
importance that nothing else matters by comparison, but which cannot be locally
handled.
The
second, related obstacle is money, or rather wealth. Not so much the corrupting
role of money in elections which has been the focus of attention in America recently,
but the more general, age-old tension between the power of wealth and ‘people
power’, meaning the power of numbers and of commitment. (It is unfortunate that
Marx is no longer read since the demise of the
The
third obstacle is difficult to designate by a single apt name. It is about ideas
and their shaping. Deception, propaganda, and indoctrination have always played
a role in the rough and tumble of actual political life, but they take on new,
disturbing dimensions in our age of electronic media and satellite surveillance,
of ‘hype’, ‘spin’, and the ‘infomercial’, of ‘image’, ‘credibility’, and ‘virtual
reality’. Watching television from infancy, people not only acquire misinformation;
they become habituated to the role of spectator. The line between fantasy and
reality blurs (indeed, the line between television image and one’s own fantasy
blurs). As for those who set policy and shape the images, insulated from any reality
check, they soon become captive to their own fictions. All this does not bode
well for democracy, either. Am I being too pessimistic? Perhaps things look more
cheerful in other lands. I am painfully aware of the irony of writing today as
an American on - of all things! - democracy and representation.
I mean, where in the world has representative democracy had a better chance than
in
Can
democracy be saved? I am old; it is up to you.