Abstract
Representation is an essential element of political authority, together with power and judgment, the latest to be acknowledged in the Christian West, coming to recognition in the Middle Ages with the expectation of a plurality of national identities. Its initial points of reference were theological, to Israel and to the dual office of Christ as priest and king, but in modern developments it has been understood especially in terms of legal forms. Government represents an existing political identity, bound up with a tradition of continuing practice and constituted by a ‘common good’ which brings together the various interests within a society. ‘Recognition’ of government involves knowing it in relation to ourselves, by affective cognition, an emphasis lost in modern theories. Success and failure in representation are on a relative scale of more or less. It depends on realistic and truthful popular self-understanding.
To talk of ‘representation’ is to talk of one of the essential elements of political authority. Two other elements are also essential: one is the power necessary to enforce its requirements; the other the use of that power in the service of judgement, through courts, legislation and law-governed administrative decision. 1 The reasons for these two are clear: any duty we owe to political authority is a duty to support a stable and lawful social order, an order de facto and de jure, and no political agency that cannot command stability and sustain lawfulness can lay claim to obedience. But it might appear that these two elements were enough. The most interesting aspect of the development of political understanding in the Christian West is that they ceased to appear so. Representation, too, came to be thought essential. This is the relation of mutual identification between people and government, such as is expressed by the use of the plural possessive pronoun: ‘our terrible government’, ‘our gracious Queen’, ‘our rebellious citizens’ and so on.
For the early Christian fathers, who did not recognise representation, there could be no ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’ about government. ‘Identity’ and ‘belonging’ played no part in the moral claim of those who ruled. To Augustine (d. 430) it appeared that political authority arose as a providential disposition to confer civic unity, or ‘peace’, on a people whose moral disposition was not adequate to sustain it otherwise. God gave it, and there could be no arguing with how, or through whom, he gave it. It could hardly make a difference who governed us, provided we were governed equitably, for ‘take away national pride, and what are men but men?’ 2 From which it followed that there could be no expectation that an international system of government would be a plural one. If we were, as Tertullian (d. ca. 240) liked to boast, citizens of the universe, it was immaterial whether our little tribes and modest kingdoms were swallowed up into a vast empire. 3 World-empire was a fact of history, raised up by divine providence, as some thought, to facilitate the spread of the Gospel. Augustine argued that it was conferred upon the Romans to reward their self-discipline, even though it involved conquests and military expansions which were brutally violent and sacrilegiously ambitious. But since the unification of all peoples could have occurred unproblematically by consent, there was nothing morally impossible about it. 4 The historical crimes of Rome did not weaken imperial authority, nor did imperial authority palliate the historical crimes. God’s providence could make use of human vice in working out its design to bless.
It is to the Middle Ages that we owe the development of thought which bequeathed us the two aspects of the idea of representation: that a world-governmental system, even within the ambit of the universal Christian church, is necessarily plural, and that a mutuality of relation between government and people was necessary to achieve political authority. As early as the seventh century, in a phrase of Isidore of Seville, we find it assumed that the nations must be ‘ruled well by a power which they accept’. 5 It is apparent that these are merely two sides of a single idea, arising out of the collapse of the Roman empire in the West, that any peaceful ordering of the Christian world must be forged out of a plurality of nations. But such a system could be stable only if its members had stable identities; nations could not appear and disappear overnight, and the claim to rule could not be allowed to float free upon the tide of military strength. A conquering power might do all kinds of good, but it would do it over the head of the people, and what it did could not be owned by the community as its good, bringing recognition of obligation in its train. This brought to prominence the concept of the ‘kingdom’, a unified, mutually identifying totality of ruler and ruled within one determinate territory. The extent to which this model had taken hold became evident in the great revival of jurisprudence of the High Middle Ages, when the provisions of Roman law which had authorised the unique role of the emperor were treated as a model to be replicated, applied to each king within his kingdom. Discerning the right claimant to power became an element of political responsibility. Political counsel was not confined to the subjects treated in ‘mirrors for princes’; and to the category of ‘tyranny’, or misgovernment, there had to be added that of ‘usurpation’, which might possibly be good government but lacked a due relation to its people. 6
The relation of changing theory to changing circumstances is so obvious that the modern political historian can hardly help seeing straightforward causation in it, the ideology emerging in response to a shift in the location of power. Yet the direction that new thought took was not determined solely by the fact that events required it. There were alternative patterns of interpretation available, some of them seriously entertained. It was the biblical narrative with its accompanying theological reflections, and it was the prevailing self-understanding of the early mediaeval popes on whose shoulders the care for peace among Western Christians devolved, that guided the emerging kingdoms in the direction of representative regimes. 7
The first point of reference was Israel, the elect nation chosen by God to represent his holiness and glory to the world. The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Psalter and the literature we now think of as ‘Deuteronomic’, are highly informative about the terms on which Israel understood itself as a nation and its monarchy as God’s provision for its national identity. The law contains stipulations not only on how kings were to conduct themselves, but on how they were to be chosen, with special insistence on national identity. In their histories we find accounts of royal anointing and coronation, by which the people collectively identified and acknowledged God’s chosen ruler, and in the figures of David and Solomon models who encapsulated the ideal. This material was mined with determination and persistence as late as the seventeenth century to provide a model for the European kingdoms.
But the reference to Israel raised the question of how much those provisions of the Old Covenant could continue to offer direction within the terms of the New. And so we find a second point of Scriptural reference, which is the dual role assigned in the New Testament to Jesus Christ as priest and king. As Saviour of the world he combined the priestly and the royal functions, but his position in this respect was unique, not inheritable by any one person or institution in its entirety. Much discussion in the mediaeval period turned upon what Christ accomplished uniquely and finally, and what aspects of his ministry he bestowed upon his followers. The two offices, it was held, were bestowed separately. Yet in different ways each was a representative office. Christ represented all humanity in his death and resurrection—‘One has died for all, therefore all have died’ (2 Cor. 5:14)—and those who are given aspects of his work to take up must do so representatively. The Christian church was a universal composed of particular societies: on the one hand stood the unique solidarity of mankind in Christ, represented in the international ministry of the pope; on the other the solidarity of each nation in Christ, represented in the figure of its representative ruler. 8
So theologians in the Early Middle Ages began to think about the person of the king in Christological terms. Christ, drawing on a biblical image for political rule, presented himself as the ‘good shepherd’ (John 10); from New Testament times the pastoral metaphor was extended to the priesthood, but in this period was applied to political rule once again. 9 As in speaking of ‘Christ’s body’ Christians refer both to the body slain and risen and to the common life of the church, so the king could be said to have ‘two bodies’, a physical body as an individual and, extending beyond it in time and influence, the body of the realm as a corporate person. 10 His coronation was an anointing by the Holy Spirit for a consecrated service. 11 This development may seem, from some points of view, perplexing, seeming to replicate the saving relation of Christ to mankind, which was in principle unrepeatable. Yet what cannot be replicated may stamp its mark upon history not simply as an extraordinary event, a moment unlike all other moments, but as a power shaping all possibilities for the direction of life thereafter. The pattern for the exercise of royal power, and indeed of the priesthood, was essentially the same as that which governed all Christian discipleship: to be ‘in Christ’ is to be in relation to a unique and final work of salvation (‘once for all’ as the Letter to the Hebrews called it), and it is to be conformed in an analogous pattern to Christ’s dying and rising. The analogy confirms the uniquely re-creative effect of the decisive event. For all believers there is an ‘imitation of Christ’, a life that takes on the shape of his sacrificial and redeeming life in its self-giving and triumph.
As Christ represents all mankind as king, then, so must the king represent his nation. This analogy was no more than an analogy, but no less, either, extending the moral logic of the ‘imitation of Christ’ into a specifically political logic valid for the tasks of government. It conceived of rule not simply as power or even as the embodiment of law and justice, but as a form of Christological self-emptying in which the ruler became identified with the needs and tasks of his people. Pending the final appearance of Christ’s reign in the future, it carved out an interim space where the ruler’s service could meet the needs of others for common identity and agency. If the primary terms on which political identity had been conceivable hitherto were those of the civilising imperative of the empire or the blood-connexion of the tribe, here was a new way in which collective identity and action could be understood among the nations of Europe, a constructive political imagination which made possible, and was made possible by, the international community of the church. Rulers were responsible not only to their people, and the peoples not only to their rulers, but both also to the priesthood, representing the whole of the ‘catholic’ (i.e. universal) church in its sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving, and to its chief minister, the pope.
From these early theological reflections there grew, ultimately and through varied mutations, our modern conceptions of the legitimacy of governments which have the principle of representation at their heart. Political representation in government is a special case of a wider phenomenon, that one person may act ‘on behalf of’ others in a consciously shared community of interest. Many collective activities with no hint of political authority depend on the emergence of representatives to provide what we describe loosely as ‘leadership’. Leadership is an elemental phenomenon of human sociality, requiring no Christological theory to account for it. What the Christological understanding of political leadership adds to this natural and spontaneous, but also irruptive and unpredictable relation, is to bind it into the reflective service of God’s providence, making his purposes of peace and reconciliation visibly present in the ordinary life of civil communities. Representatives afford us a sense of ourselves in action, an ‘identity’ that is not the whole of what any one of us knows about him or herself, but locates certain specific endeavours within the wider collective undertaking. The distinctive feature of political representation is that it involves double recognition: the mutual recognition of people and rulers on the one hand, and on the other, the self-recognition of the people. Identifying ourselves through our leaders, we construct a picture of the world in which our involvement in the collective undertaking is of real significance. The picture may be true or false, realistic or delusory; it may disclose real occasions of cooperation with our neighbour, or it may hide them behind an illusion of solidarity, but without it we cannot work together.
Of the mutations that befell the idea of representation subsequently we may identify two especially important ones. The first, and perhaps the most fateful, arose from the attempts to express representation in legal form. This involved the projection back onto the people of an originating act. Two sources nourished this idea, one of which was the lex regia that determined the senate’s role in appointing an emperor, the other a suggestive passage in Aristotle’s Politics about the capacity of the masses to exercise sovereignty, but the striking thing is how adventurously these were used from the later thirteenth century, bearing witness to the power of the underlying idea of representation already in place. 12 The legal approach led in a variety of directions, one of which was to encourage the development of the idea and practice of the ‘corporation’, which in turn developed procedures for the election of representatives that were later to become all-pervasive.
The second was the development that set us on the threshold of modernity: national representation became extracted from the context of the universal church following the religious fragmentation of Europe. The relation of ruler and people was taken out of the context of a universal fellowship with authoritative moral and social norms, and became seen as determinative for the nature of human society itself, reverting to an ancient pagan thought of a founding contract among individuals. What was modern in the contractarians of the seventeenth century was not the idea of a political contract as such, but the fact that there was now nothing behind it, no ‘natural law’ of sociality which it could serve. This has the effect of dissolving the unity of the double recognition, destroying the moment of representation by losing sight of a recognisable people in the recognition of the regime. In Bodin (d. 1596) and Hobbes (d. 1679) popular self-recognition was simply ignored: unity was imposed upon a mass of individuals by the deed of political constitution, so that ‘it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one … And unity cannot otherwise be conceived in multitude.’ 13 Without a government to represent it, the people was nothing, and once constituted, it was no more than its government. The modifications of the next generation, in attempting to escape these authoritarian implications, actually did no more than transfer unbridled authority back from a single ruler to a political society and reduce the recognition of the ruler to one of mere delegation or commission. The people is apparent to itself as a totality of laws, relations and possessions. But nothing governs this wholly self-governing people, and nothing protects its members from itself.
To think about representation, then, forces us to think carefully about what there is to be represented in a government. If both the Hobbesian answer (a multitude of individuals) and the Lockean answer (a pre-existing political society) have the effect of dissolving the act of representation altogether, turning it into an act of power, on the one hand, or an act of service, on the other, the coherence of the idea clearly depends on a third answer being available. Political identity and authority can arise only together, in a vis-à-vis of leaders and people in which each evokes the other and neither has priority. There is a proper priority of people to government, but it is not that the people creates the government, but that government is a special service called forth by God’s providence within the people, formed to preserve and secure it. Through this special agency, a people assumes a judicial and legal form, a ‘state’, and government, representing its people’s form judicially and legally, makes the people visible and tangible to itself and to others. The people does not create the government, but evolves it in response to God’s call; the government does not create the people, but invests it with its public form. How, then, should we speak of the unformed reality of the people? The traditional term has been: a common good. Political authority can be valid only as it reflects and represents a certain community of goods participated in by those over whom it is asserted. Successful representation, on which the successful exercise of political authority depends, requires a coherence and mutual reinforcement between the activities of the regime and the general perceptions of the common welfare. 14 When that coherence fails, so does authority, and so does the identity of the people.
The Common Good
The term, once again, is Aristotle’s, but again the interpretation in the Christian West was shaped by theological interests, especially the New Testament conception of the church as the ‘community’ or ‘communication’ of the Holy Spirit. To speak of the common good is to speak of an ensemble of goods, a totality within which the multitude of interests and concerns arising within a community is grouped together. This totality is more than an aggregate of particular interests and concerns; it is a community formed by the mutual dependence of those interests and concerns which makes them held in common. The concept may easily be misunderstood by being taken in either of two opposite directions: breaking the community up into its particular members and their interests on the one hand, so that the common good is seen in purely distributive terms as giving each participant a due share of the opportunities for freedom; viewing the whole in isolation, on the other, so that it seems conceivable that the community could flourish at the expense of the flourishing of its participating members. Let us be content to say simply that ‘the’ common good is the good of the community and, as such, the good of those who comprise the community by communicating their interests with one another; it consists in the capacity of the members to realise their own fulfilment through their living and working together. 15
The common good is a value possessed and enjoyed, and at the same time a task laid upon those who participate in it. It presents a demand, in which three features may be remarked on. It is a wider demand than the agent would otherwise take notice of; it comes from the side of a projected universality, over against the particularity of the agent’s practical perspectives. It is a concrete demand made by an existing community to which determinate obligations are due. It is a self-referencing demand made on behalf of the agent’s own social self in relation to the community to which he or she belongs. An appeal to the common good cannot account for every moral duty we may perceive; it cannot elicit innovative or adventurous action, purely altruistic action or devoted religious service. Rather, it draws concentric circles around where we are, evoking wider loyalties but without supporting all possible or actual spheres of community, but only those with which our identity is currently engaged. It lays claim on us for an established order—not only the nation-state, to be sure, but any social order that we count on in exercising our agency—and warns us against the danger of neglecting existing circles of community. It summons us back from distracting ambitions, from speculative adventures and innovations. Conservative, but not blindly conservative, it may refuse support to social forms that no longer serve communications; it can be a rallying-cry, for example, to support the slashing of excess bureaucracy or meaningless ceremonial. But it cannot call for the overthrowing of established orders in the interest of wholly new ones.
Clearly the common good cannot be expressed in merely juridical terms, as a structure of laws, rights and so on—for these are political notions which presuppose the recognition of government as such. The self-recognition of a community is bound up with a tradition. Tradition is not the authority of the past, but the authority of the present continuous with the past, the past horizon of the present, as it is sometimes expressed, the reality of the existing community as it has come to be. It involves a sense of common history and of common practice. Contributing to it is the whole range of experiences that members who belong together in a society share: languages, localities, institutions, specialist communities, families, voluntary associations and so on. The elements may be continually reappropriated and reinterpreted, so that some assume greater, some lesser weight than before. But when it ceases to be possible to discern any traditional elements in an identity, and to anticipate their mutual reinforcement, the identity of a society as a ‘people’, a collective ‘self’, may dissolve before our eyes—this is the fear which dominates much popular discussion of immigration. Yet the common good is not only backward-looking, but authorises action to sustain and renew the tradition as received. It is a practical concept, framing the common task of continuity.
We have used the term ‘people’ to refer to the largest corporate totality capable of sustaining consistent and all-inclusive communications, an equivalent to what the Aristotelian tradition called by the unsatisfactory name of ‘perfect society’. There may be cooperation among peoples, to be sure, but beyond the limited scope of that cooperation each people acts and answers for itself. The community of action envisaged by a single people, on the other hand, is a genuine totality, which we may intelligibly call ‘universal’, though only in a qualified sense, since this ‘universal’ is bounded by a further horizon, the wider universe of other peoples and communities than itself. Human fellowship has a wider reach even than the largest collective totality; peace is not simply cooperation, but includes respect, distance and letting-be. If the people is the largest common ‘I’, there is always a ‘You’ for this ‘I’ to encounter, a goal of peaceful fellowship with another. The largest common good, then, the common good of the people, is also the widest available opportunity to contribute constructively to a fully universal good, the peace of mankind.
Recognition
The service given by representative government is to facilitate the action that this requires, sustaining a people’s common good which will otherwise find itself without means of sustaining and perpetuating itself. In awakening a people to a sense of itself, political authority simultaneously awakens it to recognition of its own role in defence of the common good, serving it as a concrete agency which it can understand as ‘ours’. ‘Recognition’ is not simply knowing something, but knowing it in relation to ourselves. Identity with another is known by feeling, and recognition is a movement of affective cognition, as when we recognise a familiar face or form as a Gestalt, grasped at once in a moment of acknowledgement and welcome. Here, again, tradition must play an important part. Political changes that involve transfer of power and responsibility into new hands are regulated by traditions which safeguard the people’s identity—in Britain, for example, the role of the monarch in accepting a government’s resignation and appointing a new one. A government cannot be ‘ours’ unless it is constituted in relation to a tradition-mediated ‘us’. But there is also a moment of disclosure and discovery. Underlying many ancient political conceptions, there is a visual aesthetic. The language of light, radiance and display permeates classical political symbolism, in notions such as ‘splendour’, ‘magnificence’, ‘glory’, eliciting something akin to erotic fascination. Ancient societies reckoned, one might say, to fall in love with their ruler’s image.
Modern theories of representation in the West have little place for this affective dimension. The understanding of ceremonial recognition was lost to Western political philosophy at the point where faith in God was lost to it, for it is an acknowledgement of the goodness of Providence. Yet the role played traditionally by the coronation of a monarch is still played by the excitement of a general election, not so ceremonious but every bit as instinctual, serving to seal the bond of identification between a people and its rulers. Traditional and modern forms differ in one important respect: where a coronation suppressed rivalry to present a tableau of unanimous satisfaction, an election exploits the affective power of contest and victory, allowing for a range of emotional reactions, all of them compatible with recognition. Not only joy but disappointment and anger can express acknowledgement of the representative agency as our own. Our anger with those who act for us is quite different from the anger we direct against our enemies. In feeling that they have let us down we acknowledge that it is our own agency that they have been exercising, and that their failures were our own failures.
The difficulty lies in capturing and channelling this spontaneous movement of identification within the framework of a constitutional law. Two general types of law governing the succession of political authority have prevailed at different periods in the Christian world: those that tied succession of government to inheritance, so that government was handed on within a recognised family by analogy with property (though emphatically not as property), and those that depended on fresh election, with popular choice (which might itself depend on representatives) involved every time there was a succession to be negotiated. Either form could produce a representative government, given favourable conditions; neither could guarantee that recognition would follow invariably and with the required strength. Neither, in other words, constituted the representative status of a government; they were devices to facilitate it, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful. When a major breach of social tradition has occurred or there have been very grave infringements of justice, real recognition may be lost, even with the most scrupulous conformity to the law governing succession of government. To represent a people is to be consistently recognisable to it, not merely to hold a legally unassailable title to do so. Government traditionally constituted may be perfectly representative, while democratically elected government can fail to win acceptance, as was shown most recently in the disasters that befell Egypt. Western democratic processes, exported to societies used to very different forms of representation, are always in danger of this fate. The strength of the democratic elements in the constitutions of the West has been that they evolved slowly and grew up within the habitual social practices of the nations that evolved them.
The representative’s sense of the people and its needs must correspond to a high degree with the people’s own sense of itself. What makes life cherished and valued to that people, and what makes it frustrating and difficult, must find a chord of sympathy. If there is not constant willingness to be informed by the people’s self-understanding, that may assert itself with defensive pugnacity. In this context we may reflect on the danger posed to representation by the very novel and very abstract doctrine favoured in some Western circles that government should not acknowledge any religious loyalties. Government needs at least to sympathise with the religious traditions of the people it would represent, not only with majoritarian traditions, but with those historic minority traditions that have a right of tradition. Governments may declare themselves ‘secular’ in a proper attempt to demarcate the limits of their authority in relation to religious practice, but secularity cannot mean a studied refusal to appreciate the role of religious practice and sentiment in the society that must be governed.
Success and failure in representation are on a relative scale of more or less. Failures can often be addressed by careful re-balancing, usually at the level of policy, occasionally at the level of constitutional adjustment. Sometimes, in the case of the most serious political crisis of representation, it has been necessary to re-draw the lines of political identity, dividing or uniting nation-states. The history of Europe should warn us against thinking along these lines too cavalierly: while the whole trend in nineteenth-century Europe, impelled by the Napoleonic project, was towards uniting small political units into larger states (Belgium, Germany, Italy), the twentieth century showed a strong inclination to unpick them again: Austro-Hungary, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia have all been broken up. (This without extending the story to non-European instances complicated by the collapse of the Western empires, such as India-Pakistan.) Currently we face an agenda enthusiastically pursued for the dismantling of the United Kingdom itself. To all such proposals there are two initial questions to be put, which ought to mark the threshold for any serious consideration: What is the grave malfunction of representation that these drastic measures are designed to remedy? What lesser remedies to improve representation have been tried and failed?
This draws our attention to the most important fact about representation in government: it depends upon a realistic and truthful popular self-understanding, and where that is lacking, there is no constitutional device that can correct it. If, to pursue the current British example, the people of Scotland have for several centuries recognised, and recognised themselves in, a government shared in common with England, Wales and (latterly) Northern Ireland, how have the factors that enabled that recognition materially changed? And how have the attempts to enhance the representation of Scotland through a devolved parliament noticeably failed? The enthusiasm for change is driven, to all appearances, by a self-understanding that ignores a large number of factors: the common language that unites Great Britain and Northern Ireland, strong participation by Scots in British institutions at every level, the location of British institutions on Scottish soil, extensive social travel and relocation within the island of Great Britain, extensive shared interests in work, culture and so on, comparable expectations of just social administration and compatible laws, extensive intermarriage over generations, a union that originated in agreement and owed a great deal to Scottish initiative, ties of responsibility formed by the three centuries of common history—not the whole of Scottish history, but a very significant part of it, and, most importantly, the recent part which has determined the tradition inherited today. To all of which more important factors can be added relative economic prosperity. 16 No government of Scotland could be representative without representing whatever Scots find normal to their lives, which includes not only where they live; but where they commonly go, for territorial boundaries are not a closed box, but a centre of relations with connexions that reach outwards. A Scottish self-representation that screened out these fundamental determinants of the national existence could only be a form of fantasy—which would be equally true of an English self-representation that screened them out. The common good on which day by day life depends is always forgettable in the excitement of a new enthusiasm, and to forget it is deeply destructive of civility. When a breach opens up between what a people thinks of itself and the daily realities with which it has to cope, the only conceivable outcome is violence.
We may wonder whether the frank cosmopolitanism of early Christian political thought did not, after all, have much to commend it. The New Testament spoke of rebellious ‘principalities and powers’ humbled before the triumph of Christ, and it is hard not to see nationalism, along with other over-rigidly determined collective identities, as a prime candidate for that role. But if national identity can sometimes become a focus of fantasy and false self-knowledge, the capacity to form communities which envisage their own identities is not itself a fantasy, but a created gift of human nature. Identities are anticipatory, provisional organisations of created human life, neighbourhoods which may help us forward in our journey to the Kingdom of God. The task is to receive them, as we inherit them from history, and to learn to see them as gifts of God’s providence which point outwards, to the service of further neighbours and of mankind.
We return at the end to where we began: representation is not the only condition for effective political authority, but one strand in a threefold cord. It can often be enhanced by making structures of government more reflective of the complex of power and interest that prevail in society. But only to the extent that the other strands are not prejudiced. Governments too weak to impose laws and defend national interests, or without the will to enact just judgement, are not good governments, however representative they may be. Weak government—government incapable of administering effective justice—is the end-result of over-concern with representative structures. This can take the form of attentiveness to sectional interests at the cost of the common good of the whole, or of excessive response to ephemeral changes in society at the cost of deep and lasting elements in the tradition. The point of representation is to enable, not to limit, the work of government in deference to the ebb and flow of popular enthusiasm. The most important safeguards against it are firm disciplines of law, which prevent rash or impractical laws being easily made and ensure consistent application of laws in place. The demon of identity is never wilder than at the service of an abstract idea, unconstrained by the hard realities of practical justice.
Footnotes
1.
I have defended elsewhere the thesis that ‘the authority of government is constituted by the coincidence in one agency of power, representation and the exercise of judgment’. See Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2.
Augustine, City of God 5.17.
3.
Tertullian, Apology 38. I add here and in subsequent footnotes a page reference to Joan and Oliver O’Donovan (eds.), From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) [hereafter, abbreviated as IG], p. 26.
4.
Augustine, City of God 5.17, 18.22.
5.
Sentences 3.49; IG 207.
6.
Cf. Honorius Augustudunensis (12th c.), IG 263: ‘From his root came forth Ninus, who first usurped the sceptre of monarchy for himself … Tyrants imitate him even now, who seize improper control of the laws of the kingdom.’
7.
The influence of Gregory the Great (6th–7th c.) is widely acknowledged. Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consideratione (12th c.) is illuminating throughout, but note especially 3.1 (IG 273-4): ‘You [i.e. Pope Eugenius IV] have been entrusted with the stewardship over the world, not given possession of it … You are not that one about whom the Prophet says, “And all the earth shall be his possession”. That is Christ, who claims this possession for himself by right of creation, by merit of redemption, and by gift from the Father … Leave possession and rule to him; you take care of it.’
8.
Though in the High Middle Ages the argument over whether the secular or the sacred ministry had pre-eminence was intense, the common ground about the essentials of the relationship was wide.
9.
There is no distinction made between secular and spiritual made in Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule (IG 195-200).
10.
See E. H. Kantorowitz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
11.
The royalist polemic of the so-called ‘Norman Anonymous’ (from Northern France or England in the early 12th c.) makes extensive use of the parallels between royal and episcopal consecration. See IG 250-259.
12.
The bold use of Politics 3.11 against the background of the other can be seen in Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis 1.12 (IG 432): ‘Let us say, then, in accordance with the truth and the counsel of Aristotle … that the legislator, or the primary and proper efficient cause of the law, is the people or the whole body of citizens, or the weightier part thereof…’
13.
Hobbes, Leviathan 1.16.13.
14.
On the mutually defining role between political authority, representation and the common good Thomas Aquinas lays consistent emphasis—for example, at Summa Theologiae I–II, 90.3 (IG 342): ‘The chief and main concern of law properly so called is the plan for the common good. The planning is the business of the whole people or of their vicegerent. Therefore to make law is the office of the entire people or of the public personage who has care of them.’
15.
Cf. John of Salisbury (12th c.), Policraticus 3.1 (IG 279): ‘The public welfare is that security of life which gives support both to all and to each.’
16.
In Scotland, currently, 8.5% of the British population accounts for 10% of GDP and attracts public spending at a rate 10% higher than the rest of Britain. See ‘Tax and Spending’, in Enlightening the Constitutional Debate (Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh and British Academy, 2014), pp. 37–64.