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Frank Ankersmit is Professor of History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Among his many books are Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001) and Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, 1997)

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POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ixIntroduction........................................................................1PART I HISTORY AND POLITICS1 History and Political Theory......................................................152 Edmund Burke: Natural Right and History...........................................353 Freud as the Last Natural Law Theorist............................................60PART II DEMOCRACY AND HISTORY4 On the Origin, Nature, and Future of Representative Democracy.....................915 Political Style: Schumann and Schiller............................................133PART III DEMOCRATIC THEORY6 Democracy as Antifoundationalism..................................................1637 The Network, the Expert, and Representative Democracy.............................1808 Compromise and Political Creativity...............................................1939 Respect...........................................................................214Epilogue............................................................................233Notes...............................................................................239Index...............................................................................263

Chapter One

Political theory is the discipline that focuses on the political order in which we human beings live. It may attempt to justify or to attack this order by means of philosophical or historical argument, or it may take any one of a number of other approaches. Hence the nature of the discipline is difficult to define. This is why, for a discussion such as the present one, it is most advisable to take into account the history of political theory: the history of a notion often presents us with the best means for grasping its nature. This history we will find in the textbooks on the history of political thought from "Plato to Nato," as one of them is actually entitled.

The tables of contents of these textbooks show that much agreement apparently exists as to who were the most important political philosophers in the period before 1800. Whether one lets classical political theory begin with the politician Pericles, the historian Herodotus, or the architect Hippodamus of Milete, all textbooks present Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and perhaps Polybius as the most important classical theorists. Agreement is even more unanimous for the period between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, which one may well see as the golden age in the history of political thought. All of the textbooks deal with roughly the same set of theorists, authors such as Machiavelli, Bodin, Althusius, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Bentham, and Kant.

However, far less consensus seems to exist among the textbook writers as to who are the most important theorists of the period after 1800; there is no universally accepted canon for this postclassical period in the history of political thought. Surely, Hegel and Marx will never fail to be discussed. But apart from these most obvious names, historians of political theory make their own way through the vicissitudes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political theory. Thus, George Sabine's book (after fifty years, probably still the best and most widely used textbook) does not discuss Tocqueville, whereas others often see in Tocqueville the most perspicuous analyst of (early-nineteenth-century) democracy. Ulrich Steinvorth does not discuss the utilitarians such as Bentham, James, and John Stuart Mill; perhaps too English for him. He does have, on the other hand, a lengthy chapter on Weber, who is ordinarily not on the top-ten list of the Anglo-Saxon textbook writers. And much the same unclarity exists with regard to the historical significance of people like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Barrs, Ferdinand Tnnies, Vilfredo Pareto, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek, or Hannah Arendt. Even whole movements whose historical importance can impossibly be doubted, such as nationalism, are dealt with in some textbooks but not in others.

Several explanations could be given of this state of affairs, but I shall restrict myself here to the conventional one, since that is also the best introduction to this chapter. The explanation proceeds in two steps. It is pointed out, in the first place, that history began to play an ever more prominent role in political thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, the most fruitful political thought in the preceding period was also inspired by concrete historical problems (think of Hobbes's Leviathan as a reaction to the Puritan revolution, or of Locke as reacting to the autocracy of James II), but these very concrete and time-bound political problems were always immediately translated into the ahistorical idiom of natural law philosophy. Nineteenth-century political theory, on the other hand, consistently refused to abandon and ignore the historical dimension of the political issues investigated by it: it always respected the concrete historical context of the kind of political issues with which it attempted to deal. One need only think here of theoreticians such as Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spencer, Tocqueville, or Weber. History no longer merely was the context, but became the very essence of political thought.

The second step concerns the tension or even outright animosity of the apriorism of philosophy in general and of political thought in particular, on the one hand, and the respect of the refractory complexity of the given implied by a historical approach, on the other. Because of this animosity, the disorientation of postclassical political thought is easy to explain: a historicized political thought apparently is a contradiction in adiectis. Since any statement can be derived from a logical contradiction, a discipline with a contradiction in its very heart can be expected to move in almost any direction. Needless to say, this has been the background of the crisis of historism occasioned by the alleged incompatibility of timeless values and historical change.

The issue has been most succinctly formulated by the German American political theorist Leo Strauss, whose ideas are still quite influential in contemporary American political thought. In his Natural Right and History (1950), Strauss argued how history and historism can result even in the death of political theory and of all political speculation. "There cannot be natural right," he writes, "if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows that all principles of justice are mutable." For Strauss-as for the neo-Kantians who became entangled in the crisis of historism-political theory is precisely this search for immutable moral and political truths. Natural law philosophy, which claimed to derive such immutable political truths from the nature of the human individual, was for Strauss therefore the only reliable model for all political thought. History in this view had to be eliminated from political thought. Even Hegel, who attempted to transcend history and historical change by presenting history as moving toward a moment of absolute and transhistorical truth, was rejected by Strauss. Strauss's objection was that Hegel does not offer a legitimation of these transhistorical or absolute moral and political truths, which present themselves at the end of history, that is independent of history itself: "One cannot simply assume that one lives or thinks in the absolute moment [i.e., Hegel's end of history]; one must show, somehow, how the absolute moment can be recognized as such." As long as we do not possess ahistorical criteria of what is morally and politically right, we will be unable to come to a moral and political assessment of what we may find, with Hegel, at the end of history. In sum, truth in history and in political theory are incompatible, and to found political theory on history is like building on quicksand.

This, then, will be the topic of this chapter. First, is Strauss right when he argues that a historical or historicist political theory is a contradiction in terms? And, second, we had best focus our thinking about this issue on the relationship between history and natural law philosophy. For if Strauss is right, the conflict between history and political theory will most clearly manifest itself there. And that means that we shall have to focus on the period before 1800.

HISTORY AND NATURAL LAW PHILOSOPHY

If we wish to grasp the relationship between history and political philosophy for this period, it will be necessary, before all, to obtain clarity about their status as disciplines or forms of knowledge. With regard to history, one had best start with Arno Seifert's erudite Cognitio historica: Die Geschichte als Namengeberin der frhneuzeitlichen Empirie (Historical knowledge: Early modern conceptions of history as empirical knowledge), which demonstrates that during this period the word "history" could have two meanings. In the first place, it could refer to the events of human history and the historian's account of these events. This obviously is how we use the word and how it was used also in Greek and Roman antiquity. It should be added, though, that when the word was used in this customary sense in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, one primarily associated it with classical history. It took some time before the word was generally used for the history of nations, wars, or illustrious persons of later periods. In the second place, the word could refer to the "experiential knowledge" that one might have in any domain of human experience and knowledge. This use is in accordance with the original meaning of the Greek word historein, "investigation," "research," or "information" in general. Even nowadays one sometimes still speaks of "natural history" instead of "biology"-and this is a legacy of the use of the word "history" intended here. Characteristic is how Kant still wrote about experimental physics: "Experimental physics is historical since it had to do with singular facts. Only thanks to general laws does it become truly rational. History merely presents us with material for rational knowledge." Till Kant, historical knowledge primarily was a cognitio singularum, a knowledge of individual facts, and thus had the character of all "prescientific knowing remaining close to reality itself." Historical events in our sense of the word were only a subclass of the totality of this knowledge. The result was that the more general properties of this kind of knowledge tended to rub off on history in our sense of the word.

Hence, at first sight one might observe here an anticipation of the neo-Kantian distinction between the idiographic historical sciences and the nomothetic natural sciences. But this would imply the projection of a modern notion of the relationship between the individual and the general onto an older conception of the relationship between what is historical and what is scientific. The difference is that, in the modern view, knowledge of individuals-even though lacking generality-may still be certain knowledge. Think of statements like "The cat lies on the mat." As Seifert makes clear, early modern use of the notion of history is expressed by the fact that "historical knowledge" in the period in question was ordinarily believed to be knowledge that is only "probable." To which it should immediately be added that the word "probable" must not be related to the modern notion of what is "statistically probable." Instead, this is an instance of the Aristotelian use of the word "probable," where it has the connotation of beliefs that are inevitably and irrevocably unreliable, uncertain, and incomplete. Or, as Notker Hammerstein put it: "The incomplete knowledge of alien experiences is the domain of the probable." Some seventeenth-century authors, such as Vossius, even went as far as to refuse to "the historical" not only the status of being a science but even that of being an art or a discipline.

In sum, in the sense discussed here, "history" opens up a domain of an insuperable epistemological uncertainty, where we can move only gropingly and where a successful contact with reality, in the form of knowledge or in any other way, can never be assured. Probable knowledge belongs to the domain of the doxai, of what is mere public opinion and where in open and public debate one view and its opposite may peacefully coexist together without the possibility of identifying which is right and which is wrong. It follows from this that the only way to historical truth left to the historian is to assert in his work doxai that are part of just anybody's stock of knowledge. A book like Voltaire's Essai sur mes moeurs, presenting a new and fascinating panorama of the past but without mentioning new, unknown, and therefore doubtful historical facts could therefore command a far greater respect than the works by the Cartesian rudits. Whereas since historism the presentation of new historical facts is welcomed, perhaps even seen as the essence of historical writing, the Aristotelian paradigm of historical knowledge requires the historian to capitalize on what is common knowledge already. From this perspective we should admire not only Gibbon's genius but even more so his courage for audaciously introducing in his Decline and Fall so many historical facts that were unknown to his audience. And, arguably, Gibbon's revolutionary mix of an Aristotelian and a Cartesian conception of historical fact was only acceptable to his audience, and could only become so immensely successful, thanks to the majestic rhetorical flow of his prose. His rhetoric transformed new facts into doxai; and without the indispensable support of his rhetoric he would have been a mere pitiable pedant in the eyes of his readers.

However, philosophy-and the same is true of moral and political philosophy-was considered to be a discipline that presents us with certain knowledge, like the sciences. Thus physics was often referred to as "the philosophy of nature." It follows from this that history could not possibly be of any help to us if we are looking for a science of society. Such a science of society-as natural law philosophy attempted to develop-could only have its foundations in the indubitable certainties that would be associated later on with those achieved by the Cartesian cognitive self. Such was the suggestion of Grotius-no Cartesian, of course-in the methodological prolegomena of his De iure belli ac pacis:

It has been my first care to relate those things having to do with natural law to notions that are so certain, that nobody could possibly deny them, unless he would do violence to himself. The principles of natural law are, if only the mind perceives them correctly, almost as obvious and self-evident as the things that we perceive with our senses.

And elsewhere he even equates argument in mathematics with argument in natural law philosophy. Hence, though Grotius was by no means hostile to historical argument (one may think of how he used [or, rather, abused] history in his De antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae in order to prove that the sovereignty of Holland had always resided with the Estates General and not with its rulers and their heirs [such as Philip II of Spain]), history had no role to play in his natural law philosophy. Similarly, most contract theories that were proposed since Grotius in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reduced history to the all-decisive event of the prehistorical foundation of society. One and a half centuries later the same was still true with Rousseau. Even if one agrees with Lionel Gossman, or with Horowitz in his seminal book on Rousseau of some ten years ago, that history is more prominent in Rousseau's political thought than contemporary scholarship on Rousseau was ever prepared to recognize, one must still concede that history remained for Rousseau an abstract category never comprising the fullness and concrete detail of, for example, a nation's history.

Against this background, Hegel's position is of specific interest. Hegel broke through this traditional disciplinary hierarchy of history and philosophy with his effort to develop a philosophia of historia. He wanted to bring the light of philosophical truth into this domain of what is merely "probable," the domain of historical truth; or, as he put it himself, "The philosophical approach has no other purpose than to remove the mere contingency of historical knowledge." And he hoped to attain this purpose by attributing to philosophical reason a role in history itself. "The only idea that the philosophy of history introduces," writes Hegel in his lectures on philosophy of history, "is the simple idea of Reason, that Reason rules the world and that history is a rational process." And reason suffices since it is active in the past itself and therefore will recognize and become aware of itself if it is applied to what is, in fact, its own past.

As is well known, historist historians accused Hegel of "discovering" in the past no other historical or political truths than he had already hidden in it himself. For people like Ranke or Humboldt, the Truth about the past could only be found out by an investigation of historical facts and not by idle philosophical speculation. In fact, this well-known and apparently so humble claim is a most momentous one if placed against the background of this history of the relationship of disciplines that we have been discussing here. For it amounts to a complete revolution of this hierarchy: to the historical fact is now attributed the absolute certainty that one had previously attributed to philosophy; philosophy was now degraded to the domain of the merely "probable." Hegel's philosophy of history embodies, therefore, a crucial moment in the history of the relationship between the two disciplines in question: history's rank had always been immeasurably lower than that of philosophy; then, Hegel elevated history to the status of philosophy and for a short moment the two held each other in a precarious equilibrium in his philosophy of history. But after Hegel their roles were reversed; philosophy was reduced to history's former humble status, whereas history became the sure basis for philosophy, especially for political philosophy. Within such a scenario Hegel's system could be seen as the result, exponent, or exemplification of this movement of the disciplines rather than its cause. Probably, therefore, one would be well advised to see in this movement of the disciplines a kind of longue dure in intellectual history that may generate developments on the "surface"-such as Hegel's philosophy of history-rather than being dependent on them. This is, of course, how the Foucault of Les Mots et les choses would have required us to look at the matter.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONby F. R. Ankersmit Copyright © 2002 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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