the party as part

1. FROM FACTION TO PARTY

The name 'party' came into use, gradually replacing the derogatory term 'faction', with the acceptance of the idea that a party is not necessarily a faction, that it is not necessarily an evil, and that it does not necessarily disrupt the bonum commune, the common weal. The transition from faction to party was indeed slow and tortuous – both in the domain of ideas and in fact. The second half of the eighteenth century had just begun when Voltaire concisely stated in the Encyclopédie: "The term party is not, in itself, loathsome; the term faction always is." With his versatile genius for synthesis Voltaire epitomised in this sentence a debate opened by Bolingbroke in 1732 and after that pursued for about a century.

That the name faction was loathsome was not, from Roman times until the nineteenth century, a statement in want of proof. In the whole tradition of Western political thought there is hardly an author who has not taken the same view. The interesting part of the sentence is, therefore, where Voltaire concedes that parties might be different, that the term party does not have by necessity a negative association. Voltaire himself can hardly be credited, however, for having sustained this difference. Faction, he wrote, is "un parti séditieux dans un état" ("a seditious party in a state"). The term party would thus seem applicable to the factions that are not seditious. But Voltaire went on to explain, instead, that a faction is "a seditious party when it is still feeble, when it does not rejoin [partager] the entire State." Thus "the faction of Caesar shortly became a dominant party which swallowed the Republic." And the distinction is further enfeebled, if not cancelled, by Voltaire's remark that "a head of a party is always a head of a faction."

A distinction with no difference, then? It would be unfair to address this criticism to Voltaire, for he only reflects the ambiguities and the perplexities of the entire eighteenth century. It is proper, therefore, to raise the question with respect to all the authors concerned: Bolingbroke, Hume, Burke, and the protagonists of the French and American revolutions. First, however, we must understand their terminology.

Etymologically and semantically speaking, 'faction' and 'party' do not convey the same meaning. Faction, which is by far the older and more established term,derives from the Latin verb facere (to do, to act), and factio soon comes to indicate, for authors writing in Latin, a political group bent on a disruptive and harmful facere, on 'dire doings'. Thus the primary meaning conveyed by the Latin root is an idea of hubris, of excessive, ruthless, and thereby harmful behaviour.

'Party' as well derives from Latin, from the verb partire, which means to divide. However, it does not enter in any significant way the vocabulary of politics until the seventeenth century – which implies that it does not enter the political discourse directly from Latin. Its longstanding predecessor with very much the same etymological connotation is 'sect', a term derived from the Latin secare, which means to sever, to cut, and thereby to divide, Since 'sect' was already available and established for rendering the strict meaning of partire, 'party' lent itself to being used in a looser and more blunted meaning. 'Party' basically conveyed, then, the idea of part; and part is not, in and by itself, a derogatory term: It is an analytical construct. True enough, the learned society of former times – whether it spoke Italian, Spanish, French, German, or English – did understand its terminology through Latin (and Greek). Hence the etymological derivation of party from partire, i.e. partition, by no means escaped the seventeenth – and eighteenth-century writers. Nonetheless, 'part' had long lost its original connotation. The term part enters the French partager, which means sharing, as it enters the English 'partaking' (let alone partnership and participation).

When 'part' becomes 'party', we thus have a term subject to two opposite semantic pulls: the derivation from partire, to divide, on the one hand, and the association with taking part, and thereby with sharing, on the other. The latter association is, in fact, stronger than the former derivation. A complication must be noted, however. While 'party' was entering the vocabulary of politics, 'sect' was on its way out. During the seventeenth century the term sect became associated with religion and especially with Protestant sectarianism. By this route the term party took on, at least in part, also the meaning formerly conveyed – in the political arena – by the term sect. And this reinforced the original linkage of 'party' with the idea of severance and partition.

The foregoing goes a long way toward explaining why 'party' had, from the outset, a less negative connotation than 'faction' and yet remained a close synonym for faction. There is little doubt that no eighteenth-century author, aside from Burke, really disentangled the two concepts. Yet all our authors – and notably Bolingbroke and Hume – were struggling, at some point, with a distinction that carried a difference. If as we read the literature we pay attention to the exact wording, whenever the two terms are not used interchangeably, the difference is that 'faction' applies to a concrete group, whereas 'party' is far more an analytic partition, a mental construct, than a concrete entity. And this explains why the distinction is quickly blurred and does not hold tight. If faction is the concrete group and party the abstract grouping, reference to the real world makes the two indistinguishable.

The foregoing also alerts us to the fact that authors who spoke of 'parts' but did not use the word 'party' were not really confronting the problem. This isparticularly the case of Machiavelli and of Montesquieu, who are often cited as the precursors in glimpsing the idea of party in a favourable sense. But they did not use the word. The relevant passage of Machiavelli to this effect reads that the "riots between Nobles and Plebeians ... were a first cause in maintaining Rome free", with the comment appended that in every republic one finds "two different tempers [umori], one of the people and one of the almighty [grandi]", so that "all laws made in favour of freedom result from their disunity". But Machiavelli made it quite clear, immediately after, that he was not prepared to apply this generalisation to his own time nor, indeed, in his words, to the "partisans from which are the parts of the...