Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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...