TASK XAgree or disagree with the following quotations.

1. A politician is an acrobat – he keeps his balance by saying the opposite. Maurice Barres (1862-1923), a French politician.

2. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

TEXT 9 Representative Government*

Representative democracy is perhaps most obviously a system of government suited to situations in which it is for one reason or another impractical for the citizenry actually to show up and personally participate in the legislative process. But the concept of representation, as understood by our forebears, was richer than this. Pre-Revolutionary rhetoric posited a continuing conflict between the interests of “the rulers” on the one hand, and those of “the ruled” (or “the people”) on the other. A solution was sought by building into the concept of representation the idea of an association of the interests of the two groups. Thus the representatives in the new government were visualized as “citizens”, persons of unusual ability and character to be sure, but nonetheless “of the people”. Upon conclusion of their service, the vision continued, they would return to the body of the people and thus to the body of the ruled. In addition, even while in office, the idea was that they would live under the regime of the laws they passed and not exempt themselves from their operation: this obligation to include themselves among the ruled would ensure a community of interest and guard against oppressive legislation. The framers realized that even visions need enforcement mechanisms: “some force to oppose the insidious tendency of power to separate the rulers from the ruled was required”. The principal force envisioned was the ballot: the people in their self-interest would choose representatives whose interests intertwined with theirs and by the critical reelection decision ensure that they stayed that way, in particular that the representatives did not shield themselves from the rigors of the laws they passed.

Actually it may not matter so much whether our representatives are treating themselves the way they treat the rest of us. Indeed it may be precisely because in some ways they treat themselves better, that they seem so desperately to want to be reelected. And it may be that desire for reelection, more than any community of interest, that is our insurance policy. If most of us feel we are being subjected to unreasonable treatment by our representatives, we retain the ability – irrespective of whether they are formally or informally insulating themselves – to turn them out of office. What the system, at least as described thus far, does not ensure is the effective protection of minorities whose interests differ from the interests of most of the rest of us. For if it is not the “many” who are being treated unreasonably but rather only some minority, the situation will not be so comfortably amenable to political correction. Indeed there may be political pressures to encourage our representatives to pass laws that treat the majority coalition on whose continued support they depend in one way, and one or more minorities whose backing they don’t need less favorably. Even assuming we were willing and able to give it teeth, a requirement that our representatives treat themselves as they treat most of the rest of us would be no guarantee whatever against unequal treatment for minorities.

This is not to say that the oppression of minorities was a development our forebears were prepared to accept as inevitable. The “republic” they envisioned was not some “winner-take-all” system in which the government pursued the interests of a privileged few or even of only those groups that could work themselves into some majority coalition, but rather – leaving slavery to one side, which of course is precisely what they did – one in which the representatives would govern in the interest of the whole people. Thus every citizen was said to be entitled to equivalent respect, and equality was a frequently mentioned republican concern. Its place in the Declaration of Independence, for example, could hardly be more prominent. When it came to describing the actual mechanics of republican government in the Constitution, however, this concern for equality got comparatively little explicit attention. This seems to have been largely because of an assumption of “pure” republican political and social theory that we have brushed but not yet stressed: that “the people” were an essentially homogenous group whose interests did not vary significantly. Though most often articulated as if it were an existing reality, this was at best an ideal, and the fact that wealth redistribution of some form – ranging from fairly extreme to fairly modest proposals – figured in so much early republican, while doubtless partly explainable simply in terms of the perceived desirability of such a change, also was quite consciously connected to republicanism’s political theory. To the extent that existing heterogeneity of interest was a function of wealth disparity, redistribution would reduce it. To the extent that the ideal of homogeneity could be achieved, legislation in the interest of most would necessarily be legislation in the interest of all and extensive further attention to equality of treatment would be unnecessary.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 497