The article argues that by the 17th century, despite the increased intellectual exchanges of the time, two different kind of individualism were developing across the Channel — one labeled here as ‘centripetal’, the other one as ‘centrifugal’. On the French side, one witnesses a focus on forum internum, as the only site of uniqueness and authenticity. On the British side, the emphasis switched to forum externum and the equality of wills. The article explores the consequences of these different self-apprehensions of the individual in terms of different understandings of political representation. I claim that, despite today’s general consensus, representing ‘the people’ was not naturally assimilated with an ascending theory of representation. ‘The people’, understood as a whole, was apprehended in France as still higher than its representatives — kings, Estates, or Parlements. The idea of individuals willingly delegating their rights and/or authority to a representative remained for more than a century a peculiar British development. The consequences of this ascending understanding of representation are to be seriously reevaluated.
The GfK Trust Index for 2008 and 2009 found politicians being the least trusted class of professionals, with a general trust level between 14% and 18%, going as low as 6% (Greece) or 10% (France). For comparison, firefighters, teachers, postal workers and doctors enjoy levels of trust over 80%. Even lawyers appear to be trustworthier than politicians. In USA, the levels are somewhat higher (21%) yet they remain the lowest level of trust for any group of professionals. See GfK Custom research press releases for 2008 and 2009.
2.
See V. Braitwhite and V.-M. Levi (eds) (1998) Trust and Governance, New York: Russel Sage Foundation. C. Offe and U.K. Preuss ( 1991) ‘Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources’ , in D. Held (ed.) Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. p.143-171.
3.
In fact, rather than preceding the contractualist theory, the theory of the divine right of kings is better understood as a reaction to the latter, as Gordon J. Scochet persuasively argued: (1975) Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books. For a different perspective, but one that also argues in favour of the modernity of this theory, see Daniel Engster (2001) Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. For the ascending versus descending theories of representation see e.g. Walter Ullmann (1966) The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (1967) The Concept of Representation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Edmund S. Morgan (1988) Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. F. R. Ankersmit (1996) Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nadia Urbinati (2006) Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Philip Petit (2008) Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Jane Mansbridge (2003) ‘Rethinking Representation’, American Political Science Review 97(4): 515-528. Obviously this list is far from exhaustive.
4.
In the space of this essay, I am unable to discuss other European theories and assumptions about representation. However, considering the evidence, I think that France during the 16th and 17th centuries was quite representative of an entire continental way of conceptualizing the problem of political representation.
5.
Howell A. Lloyd (1983) The State, France and the Sixteenth Century, p. 153. London: George Allen & Unwin. One can see why up until now it has been generally assumed that the ascending theory of representation spread much sooner all over Europe. The ambiguity of the term ‘people’ was present during the 16th and 17th centuries as it is today. Not only could it signify a multitude as well as a whole but also it could have been used to designate either a conceptualized community (populus) or the lowest, uneducated and undisciplined part of society (plebs). See Hubert Carrier (2004) Le labyrinthe de l’état: Essai sur le débat politique en France au temps de la Fronde (1648-1653), pp. 121-2. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur.
6.
Quentin Skinner ( 1998) Liberty before Liberalism, p. 105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7.
After all, we still take for granted that the postal functionary or the police officer is a ‘representative’ of the government, although neither enjoys his or her authority as the result of a delegation of authority from us.
8.
François Guizot ( 2002) The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, tr. Andrew R. Scoble, introduction and notes by Aurelian Craiutu , p. 60. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
9.
Ibid. p. 57.
10.
Ibid. p. 60.
11.
Ibid. p. 293.
12.
Ibid. p. 288.
13.
For similar positions see also Alexis de Tocqueville or John Stuart Mill.
14.
François Guizot (n. 8), pp. 295-6.
15.
Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren (2006) ‘Rethinking Representation: Eight Theoretical Issues’, presented at the Conference on Rethinking Democratic Representation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, quoted in John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer ( 2008) ‘Discursive Representation’, American Political Science Review 102(4) (Nov.): 483.
16.
See Joan McCarthy ( 2007) Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self. New York: Humanity Books. Jon Elster (ed.) (1986) The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jennifer Rosner (ed.) (2007) The Messy Self. Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers.
17.
Dryzek and Niemeyer (n. 15), pp. 481-93.
18.
Pitkin (n. 3), p. 241.
19.
Ibid. p. 241; emphasis added.
20.
William Farr Church (1941) Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas, p. 86. London: Oxford University Press.
21.
J.H.M. Salmon (2007) ‘France’, in Howell A. Lloyd, Glenn Burgess and Simon Hodson (eds) European Political Thought: 1450-1700, p. 461. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.
22.
Quoted ibid.
23.
Baldus, Cons. 3. 283, fol. 88r, ed. Brescia, 1491 (= Cons., I, 333, ed. Venice, 1575), quoted in Joseph Canning (1987) The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis, p. 91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24.
‘representing the heavenly Harmony’: Marc Vitruve Pollion (1547) Architecture ou Art de bien bastir, p. 74. [Paris].
25.
‘representing in his verses all the divers accidents of the human tragedy’; ‘a vicious heart’: Joachim Du Bellay (1552), OŒuvre de l’ invention de l’ autheur, ed. D. Aris and F. Joubokovsky, pp. 42, 101. Paris: Bordas.
26.
‘Morphee, if you like to represent me this night mine Cassandre’: Pierre de Ronsard (1552) Les Amours, ed. Henri and Catherine Weber, p. 144. Paris: Classiques Garnier.
27.
‘these characters than, for knowing them better, I wanting to represent here for the eyes of the benign spectators’: Louis Des Masures ([1566] 1907) Epistres au seigneur Lebrun, ed. Ch. Comte, p. 8. Paris: Cornely & Cie.
28.
‘the astonishment of Bellinde cannot be represented’: Honoré d’Urfé (1607) L’Astrée. vol. 1, l. 396.
29.
Pierre de Deimier (1610) L’Académie de l’art poétique. Paris: J. de Bordeaulx.
30.
Pitkin (n. 3), pp. 242-3; emphasis added.
31.
‘Representing - keeping somebody else’s place, having his authority in your hands. The Pope represents God on earth. The Ambassadors represent the Prince. The Magistrates represent the King. It is also said in the ceremony of the Sacre that certain Lord represented the Duke of Normandy, the Comte de Champagne. It is also said during the successions, that a grandson represents his dead father when he comes to divide with his uncles in the succession of an elder’.
32.
Eric Voeglin talks about the ‘transcendental’ type of sense of representation, the sense in which a society is or can be ‘the representative of something beyond itself, of a transcendent reality’, ‘a transcendent truth’: Voegelin (1952) The New Science of Politics., pp. 54, 75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Yet, as will become clear later, there are differences between Vogelin’s transcendental representation and the interpretation that I propose. In his account ‘a society must articulate itself by producing a representative that will act for it’ (p. 41).
33.
Jacob Burkhardt (1966) Civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie, French tr. Paris: Livre de Poche. Otto von Gierke (1868) Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. 1. Rechtsgeschichte der deutschen Genossenschaft, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Quoted in Anthony Black (1991) ‘The Individual and Society’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c. 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Charles H. Haskins (1964 [1927]) The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. New York: Meridian Books. Colin Morris (1972) The Discovery of the Individual, quoted in Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Dominique Iogna-Prat (eds) (2005) L’individu au Moyen Âge: Individuation et individualization avant la modernite, p. 12. Paris: Aubier Edition Flammarion.
35.
Peter von Moos (2005) ‘L’individu ou les limites de l’institution ecclésiale’ in Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat (n. 34), p. 271.
36.
Black (n. 33), p. 591.
37.
For a more detailed discussion on these terms see Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat (n. 34), esp. pp. 25-9.
38.
Vittor Ivo Comparato (1996) ‘A Case of Modern Individualism: Politics and the Uneasiness of Intellectuals in the Baroque Age’, in Janet Coleman (ed.) The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, p. 149. Oxford: European Science Foundation and Clarendon Press.
39.
Joseph Goering (2008) ‘The Internal Forum and the Literature of Penance and Confession’, in Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington (eds) The History of Medieval Canon Law in Classical Period, 1140-1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX,. pp. 379-80. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press .
40.
Thomas Aquinas, quoted ibid. p. 380.
41.
Janet Coleman (1996) ‘The Individual and the Medieval State’, in Coleman (n. 38), p. 16.
42.
Iogna-Prat ( 2005) ‘Introduction generale’ in Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat (n. 34), p. 25.
43.
Ibid. p. 54.
44.
For detailed discussions on all these subjects see the contributions of Brigitte-Miriam Bedos-Rezak, Claude Jeay, Joseph Morsel, and Benoit Grevin: ibid.
45.
As Benoit Grevin e.g. demonstrates, in the medieval texts imitation was meant to reveal individuality. (2005) ‘L’écriture du latin médiéval (XIIe-XIVe siècle): Les paradoxes d’une ‘individualisation’ stylistique’, ibid. pp. 102-3.
46.
Alain Boureau (2005) ‘L’individu, sujet de la vérité et support de l’erreur: Connaissance et dissidence dans le monde scholastique (vers 1270-vers 1330)’, ibid. p. 306. ‘L’ambivallence actuelle de l’individualisme était déja ressentie au Moyen Âge .. .. Une histoire de l’individualisation ne doit pas être séparée d’une histoire des formes, réeles et rêvées, de l’aggrégation sociale. Les divers ordres communautaires que nous avons repérés préparent d’une façon proche ou lointaine les formes de la République, de la Nation, de l’État, du Parti, entités essentielles de la modernité, que l’individu ne cesse d’appeler et de repousser’.
47.
Panormitanus (1617) Commentaria in V Decretalium libros, c. 6 X, I 31 and c. 44 V, 39, n. 3. Venice Quoted in Moos (n. 35), p. 283.
48.
Gratien, Decretum , II causa XIX, qu. 2, 2, ed. Friedbeerg I, Lepzig - quoted in Moos (n. 35), p. 278; my tr. from French.
49.
Bernard Clairvaux (1963) De consideratione, 2. 3. 6, in Sancti Bernardi opera, vol.3, ed. J. Lecclerq and H. Rochais, pp. 414-15.. Rome: Cisterciennes Editions. Quoted in Moos (n. 35), p. 272.
50.
Nannerl O. Keohane (1980) Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
51.
See e.g. Ullmann (n. 3). See also most of the authors from Coleman (n. 38) or the ones in Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat (n. 34).
52.
See Lloyd (n. 5), pp. 20-3, but also Engster (n. 3).
53.
Lloyd (n. 5), p. 22.
54.
Keohane (n. 50), p. 83.
55.
Ibid. p. 87.
56.
Ibid. p. 121.
57.
‘What atrocious meanness was not produced by the zeal of religion? ... This intestinal war ... is a poison for the entire humanity’. Quoted in John Cruickshank (1996) ‘A Note on Lay Piety in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Keith Cameron and Elizabeth Woodrough (eds) Ethics and Politics in Seventeenth-Century France, p. 31. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
58.
‘If one asks what had produced such a generation (of unbelievers and libertines), one wouldn’t be wrong if one answers that there were the wars on religion that made us forget our religion. And it is useless for ones as for the others to say: it is the opposite party that engenders the atheists, for all parties are involved’. Quoted ibid.
59.
Ibid. p. 33.
60.
Michel de Montaigne (2009) Les Essais, complete edn, adapted in modern French by André Lanly, 1. 23 (146). Paris: Gallimard . Tr. in Keohane (n. 50), p. 110.
61.
Ibid. 3. 8.
62.
‘C’était un commandement paradoxe que nous faisait anciennement ce Dieu à Delphes: Regardez dans vous, reconaissez-vous, tenez-vous à vous, votre esprit et votre volonté qui se consommé ailleurs, ramenez-la en soi; vous vous écoulez, vous vous répandez; appilez-vous, soutebez-vous; on vous trahit, on vous dissipe, on vous dérobe à vous’. Montaigne (1998) Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. André Tournon, 3. 9, p. 332. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Éditions. See also Montaigne (n. 60), 3. 9.
63.
Montaigne (n. 60), 1. 5, On Conscience.
64.
Jean Bodin (1577) Les Six Livres de la republique, 1. 6. 46-7. Quoted and tr. Keohane (n. 50), p. 69; emphasis added.
65.
Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition (2nd edn), p. 41. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.
66.
Keohane (n. 50), p. 186.
67.
Ibid. pp. 186-7.
68.
Ibid. p. ix.
69.
J. G. A. Pocock (1985) Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, p. 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
70.
Peter J. Euben ( 1989) ‘Corruption’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, p. 227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
71.
Michael Lessnoff ( 1986) Social Contract, p. 32. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. J.W. Allen (1957) A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, p. 303. London: Methuen & Co.
72.
Richard Tuck ( 1979) Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development , p. 37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
73.
Allen (n. 71), p. 325.
74.
‘...good men of honour as representing the person of the people, which commit them to this and give them this power’. Francois Hotman (1574) Franco-Gallia, in French, ch. 1, p. 12. [Paris].
75.
Francois Hotman (1972) Francogallia, Latin text by Ralph E. Giesey, tr. J. H. M. Salmon, pp. 231-3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
76.
Ibid. p. 307.
77.
Guy Howard Dodge (1972) The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion: With Special Reference to the Thought and Influence of Pierre Jurieu, p. 63. New York: Octagon Books.
78.
‘... le movement est circulaire’. ‘[E]lle vient de Dieu immédiatement sur le Peuple & du Peuple elle monte aux Synodes & aux Evêques, c’est la maniére dont roule l’autorité des Sociétez confédérées’. Traité de la puissance de l’Église, pp. 106-7. Quoted in Dodge (n. 77), p. 89.
79.
Allen (n. 71), p. 323.
80.
Keohane (n. 50), quoting Bodin. I was unable to track the exact expression in his Six Books, book 1.
81.
‘. . . a virtue affectée aux affaires du monde ... une vertu avec beaucoup de plis, d’encoignures et de coudes pour s’appliquer et s’ajuster a la faiblesse humaine’. Montaigne (n. 60), 3. 9 (1199).
82.
Pierre Charron [1604] De la sagesse, tr. Keohane (n. 50), pp. 136-7.
83.
‘La grandeur et souveraineté est tant desirée de tous, c’est pource que tout le bien qui y est paroit dehors, et tout son mal est au dedans .. . . Le nom et titltre de souverain, la montre et le dehors est beau, plaisant, et ambitieux, mais la charge et le dedans et dur, difficile et bien espineux .. . . C’est une publique et honorable servitude, une noble misere, une riche captivité’. Pierre Charron (1986) De la sagesse, Text revu par Barbara de Negroni, 1. 69, pp. 322-3. Paris: Fayard.
