Rodney Barker

Hooks and Hands, Interests and Enemies: Political Thinking as Political Action

The familiar and well-established account of politics which describes two spheres, one of thought or ideas, the other of action or practice, is restrictive and distorting. But it has become entrenched in both common speech and political science. In everyday parlance the implication is frequently that the terms represent distinct, even mutually exclusive, forms of life. A man of action is not expected to do very much thinking, a thinker or an intellectual is supposed not to be very useful when the pipes burst or the car has a flat tyre. A similar distinction can be found in political science where a world has been depicted divided between actions, organizations, and practice, and reflection, justification, and normative enquiry. The distinction is made not only in the subject matter of political science, but within the discipline’s own manner of operation. There are types of research and enquiry which ‘merely’ advance understanding, and others which make a practical contribution to the tangible well-being of their societies. The one is presented as reflective, interpretative, passive, the other as engaged, having practical consequences, and an active response to public issues.

Democratic Legitimation: What Is It, Who Wants It, and Why?

The answers to the questions in the title of this chapter are that democratic legitimation, like a democratic polity, is many things linked by a common phrase, that different people want these different things for many different reasons and with many different expectations, and that it is both easier and more difficult than is often thought to know when their expectations have been realized.1 So before anything else, some definitions are called for. It might seem obvious what we mean when we ask whether a government or institution is democratically legitimate, or whether a polity is democratic, but the variety of answers given to such questions, and the variety of formulations of the questions, suggest that both the answer and the enquiry need to be as specific as possible. This will make this chapter a little like Chinese cooking: relatively lengthy preparation but then, when all the chopping and sorting is done, a fairly swift transit through the intellectual wok at the end to produce some answers. But just as not every dish is to everyone’s taste, so with definitions. And in taking both legitimation and democracy, neither of which can be discussed innocently of normative positions, and each of which is central to the concerns and the contentions of political science, the possibilities are equaled or possibly even outweighed by the dangers. Even so, the necessary preparation is to be as clear as possible about the key terms legitimation, legitimacy, legitimate, democratic, and democracy.

The pluralism of British pluralism

Despite the international character of political ideologies, an historically distinct British pluralism can be identified. But it is characterized by a tension inherent in all pluralism, between groups as sources of individual identity, and individuals as components of groups. That is not a cause for concern, since the tensions within political thinking are the source of its dynamism.

Political ideas since 1945, or how long was the twentieth century?

1945 is given too much importance as a turning point in the history of political thinking. Most of the changes which occurred at and after the end of the Second World War were intensifications of existing conceptions and aspirations, rather than new departures. By the 1990s, in contrast, a new intellectual century, however uncertain its features, had begun. Socialism and conservatism were dead, and in their place was a division between left and right, with elements of liberalism on each side of the divide. At the same time society has been replaced by societies, and both gender and religion have emerged as major themes. And yet, paradoxically, much of what was new drew on the recessive themes of the past.

Why are there no more socialists or conservatives

David Miliband (ed), Reinventing the Left, (Polity, Cambridge 1994). x. + 254 pp. ISBN 0–7456–1390–8 (pb).

Civil Disobedience as Persuasion: Dworkin and Greenham Common

Protests against nuclear weapons which involve conflict with the law have been criticized as ‘blackmail’ or obstruction by Ronald Dworkin and hence not as an acceptable form of civil disobedience. This is to misunderstand both their nature and that of civil disobedience. Such protests are an example of a particular kind of persuasive civil disobedience which cannot be disallowed without disallowing civil disobedience itself.

THE POLITICS AND POLITICAL IDEAS OF MOISEI OSTROGORSKI

EVERYBODY knows about Ostrogorski. He has been compared with Michels as one of the two pioneers of modern political science in the study of political parties. David Butler considers him important ‘not only as the first serious student of British parties, but also as an illustration of the possibility of separating description and analysis’, and as a pioneer of generalizations in comparative government. Duverger is equally complimentary, praising him as ‘the first to clear the way’ to the comparative analysis of the structure of political parties. For S . M. Lipset, he was ‘one of the most important originators of the sociology of organizations and of political sociology’ and ‘the first to argue for the need to go beyond the analysis of formal political institutions, to study the actual political behaviour of men and institutions outside the governmental sphere’.’ But though everybody knows about Ostrogorski, nobody reads him. There are uncut pages in the seventy-two-year-old first and only edition of his major work in university libraries, and there is remarkably little scholarly writing on him. He is frequently cited, sometimes even quoted, but studies which are exclusively or even primarily about him amount to encyclopaedia entries, one introduction to a heavily abridged version of his major work, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, and one article in a Japanese learned journal.2 A clue to the nature of this neglect may perhaps be found in some of the small amount of attention given directly to him. In 1968 S. M. Lipset abridged Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties for the use of contemporary readers. The argument for Ostrogorski’s importance in the introduction and the selective character of the substantial omissions from the text, suggested that two things were of interest to the editor. The first was those aspects of his work, or understandings of it which have influenced subsequent work in political science and can in some sense be said to be a first step in a tradition of such work. If the chief interest of a writer is his selective survival, then he is worth studying only insofar as he supports contemporary beliefs or says something which can be applied to contemporary interests. He is not interesting in himself but only as someone whose work, whatever its original purpose, can be employed in the pursuit of current research. Thus a large part of Lipset’s introduction is not about Ostrogorski but about recent work on a subject with which Ostrogorski dealt: parties in Britain and America. Asecond

Enemies of the People

‘The people’ has always been an ambiguous title. Even the emblazoned SPQR comes in at least two versions, as ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ or ‘Senatus Populusque Romae’, in the first version making the people the Roman people, in the second, the people of Rome, a slightly more subordinate appellation. And even though the people are there on the standards of the legions, they do not by themselves compose the polity. There is the senate as well, so whoever ‘the people’ are, they are in one sense only what is left over, not so much a category, as all those who fall outside simple categorisation. That leaves it open to all manner of narratives which claim to describe who ‘the people’ are, and to invest their particular account with the authority of the polity in its entirety. But the claim is always that, a claim, the partiality of which is continuously challenged both by descriptions of the diversity which characterises all those outside the senate, or by the presentation of rival narratives of alternative popular identities. This provides a partial explanation for the fact that the role of subjects and citizens in the narratives of antagonism and enmity has so far been presented as sporadic and peripheral. The original accusations may have come from ordinary subjects, or from political actors outside governing or ruling groups, but the principal exponents of sustained narratives of enmity have been leaders and rulers. Yet instances recur of spontaneous, popular expressions of enmity, from witch hunts to lynchings to religious riots, which appear to challenge this order of things, and to place the initiative in the hands of groups of subjects or citizens, or of their chosen or self-appointed representatives, or of journalists, broadcasters, or the owners or controllers of newspapers, radio, or television.

Competition, Antagonism, and Enmity

The ruler of the island of San Lorenzo in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle conspires with his colleague, the founder of a new religion, to formally persecute, but never actually destroy, the sect and its leader, and by so doing to legitimate his own power. He is ‘sane enough to realise that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless.’3 The suggestion that enmity narratives play a more than peripheral or disruptive role in government and politics may have been most graphically presented in fiction. But it has not been neglected in work employing other kinds of imagination, in the explanation and justification of government, and in the study of the circumstances in which government operates and in which the societies which it rules cohere or disintegrate. Questions about the role of expressions of enmity in politics have many and varied resources on which to draw, and a range of existing answers with which to work. Although accounts of the role of enmity have lain at the periphery of political explanation and theory, they have been a powerful minor theme, in particular within two traditions of political enquiry: the examination of the character, cultivation, and conditions of collective and public political identity, and the consideration and justification of the powers of government. In each, considerations of enmity have played a minor but powerful role. And whilst for most political speculation, expressions of enmity are treated as either an interruption of or a threat to desirable social life, in some at least of the work that specifically addresses the character and role of enmity, its articulation is seen as being beneficial and stabilising.

Patterns of Enmity: Varieties of Narrative

The rhetoric of hostility is a ubiquitous feature of politics and government. But the ways in which enemies are described, the nature of the perceived and alleged threats, the identification of enemies, the identity of the enmity narrator, and the context and consequences of narration, all differ widely. To say that enmity is a recurring feature of political life tells us only in the very broadest terms what to expect. It indicates a range of possibilities, but within that range an eclectic variety is all we can predict. Up to this point of the discussion, I have spoken of enmity and enemies as a single broad type, and discussed the various accounts of enmity in relation to this comprehensive category. But it is now both possible and desirable to make the discussion more precise, in order to distinguish the many points on a scale which can run from murderous calls for extermination, to restrained and civil competition in parliamentary politics.