Of the general conceptions of representation, that which had greatest stress & development in the colonies proceeded from the idea of strict delegation of powers. Its first complete presentation in public discussion occurred in the coursework of the Commonwealth period, when its chief proponents were the Levellers, of the groups of radical Puritans. Although prominent in English life for only a short period, & drawn mainly from the rank & file of the New Model Army, the Levellers left an enduring mark on English & American Political theory. They were feared & loathed by the Presbyterian Parliament, which possessed power through their force of arms, for their fierce, religious democracy did not cease short of castigating King, parliament, or army leaders. The time came when Cromwell, increasingly intolerant of their demands & pressed by a Parliament which increasingly desired the security of monarchy against "anarchists," used martial discipline against their activities in the army, but they had already found time & opportunity to state their case before the English people. The last years of the Commonwealth & the Dictatorship were not of their making, nor was the Restoration friendly toward their ideas; & in England it was not until another century passed that the Radicals took up Leveller ideas of representation. However, their influence was felt by Harrington, Sidney, & Locke. Most strikingly, their ideas found a home in sure of the American colonies where political leaders such as William Penn & Roger William gave them voice.

Already they have perceived indications of kinds of ideas of representation. There is, first, the idea of strict, legal agency which prevailed with respect to Parliament until the fifteenth century in England. Second, there is the idea of virtual representation, which probably had its beginning in the idea of the growth of the state as a type of corporation & which, if not restricted, can serve as well to justify despotism as to characterize an idealistic performance of duty. There is third, the idea of representation as fiction without substance, a concealment of the raw facts of the elite control. Each moves down the years with its impedimenta of strictures & claims.

Therefore, the only true representation is a relationship of delegation, tight control, & prepared recall. "We are your Principals & you our agents," asserts Lilburne to the Presbyterian Parliament which is holding him prisoner in the Tower.

The Levellers had no faith in Kings or Lords, nor significantly, in the House of Commons as then constituted. In the Leveller Manifestoes, collected by Don M. Wolfe, this & lots of of the points to follow are illustrated. The faith of the Levellers lay in the people by the laws of reason & nature. "In nature & reason, there is none above, or over another, against mutual consent & agreement." They believed that man is rational & that the law of reason is inviolable by representative of any sort. The power of Parliament is consequently null against the will of the people.

"Wee are well assured, yet cannot forget, that the reason for our choosing you to be Parliament-men, was to deliver us from all kind of Bondage, & to preserve the Commonwealth in Peace & Happinesse: For effecting whereof, they possessed you with the same Power that was in our selves, to have completed the same; For they might justly have completed it our selves without you, if they had thought it convenient; choosing you (as Persons whom wee thought fitly quallified, & Faithfull), for avoiding some inconveniences."

If this statement is compared with that of Sir Thomas Smith cited historicallyin the past, it is clear that the relation between representatives & represented was construed by Lilburne in a manner more exact, although the relation, by its very precision, lacks realism. He believed, however, that the emphasis on agency must be made in order to prevent usurpation of power. For the first time, English political thinkers were feeling the biting fringe of Parliamentary oligarchy, & they felt that devices must be made in to law if the true representation of the people was to be ensured.

"By naturall birth," wrote Overton in "An Arrow Against All Tyrants," all men are equally & similar borne to like propriety, liberty & freedom... every man by nature being a King, Priest & Prophet in his own natural circuits & compasses."
Out of the laws of nature come the rationality of man & the social compact, made by equal men who are socially inclined & well-disposed towards another. Since reason is the true quality of men, no other qualification for the vote is necessary. The franchise becomes for the first time a natural right, than a right attached to land or to property. The demand for universal manhood suffrage, voiced in the First Agreement of the People, & defended with vigor by Gainsborough in the debates with Breton & Cromwell, was modified to some extent in the Agreement of 1648 by requirement of occupational independency. Probably the later modifications followed assaults against the Levellers for being "subversive" of the social order. But again in the third Agreement of 1649 they find that Parliament is to be chief authority of England & is to consist of hundred representatives "in the choice of whom (according to natural right) all men of the age of &0 years & upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices."

Property was declared to be a natural right, but this was emphasized to defend themselves from accusations of "anarchism" & "lawlessness" & to prevent their being associated with the Diggers, a communistic sect, than to establish their vested interests. In the Petition of September II, 1648, the Levellers demanded of the Commons at & the same time "That you would bound yourselves & all future Parliaments from abolishing Propriety, levelling mens Estates, or making all things common," & "That you would have laid open all late Inclosures of Fens, & other Commons, or have enclosed them only or chiefly to the benefit of the poor." Demands against monopoly, excises, confinement for debt, & so forth, proof that the Levellers were truly the voice of economic liberalism, of little enterprise & the little farmer. Walwyn wrote that he was not a communist & "that he wished only those reforms that would permit every who labored in so plentiful a land as England to earn a comfortable subsistence."

Elections are to be effectively administered to keep away from the corrupt practices which had disfranchised & discommoded so lots of electors historically & made elections in most cases a farce. Details of administration were prescribed.
Parties are regarded as factions fighting over spoils, & there is no conception of the party system which later grew up. Such factionalism is to be avoided by forbidding office-holders to be Members of Parliament. The management of the affairs of state are to be placed in the hands of a "Council of State" which will hold office for the period of the single parliament. The House of Lords, of coursework, is nowhere provided for. No town is to have a public official imposed on it, but will have freedom to elect all of 'its administrative officials.

The second Agreement contains a detailed mathematical subdivision of the nation for the purposes of representation, & delegates are to be selected on the basis of population.
No representative holding a paid office of the state can be eligible to retain his chair, nor may "Lawyers, those vermin & caterpillars \.\. the chief bane of this poor Nation," practice law while sitting as delegates.

It is clear that the Levellers had no purpose of trusting much power to the courts. Their hatred of lawyers & of the complicated ritual of the law is evident in lots of places. They removed the creation of the courts from Parliament, which in itself was to diminish the status of the courts, & then proceeded to lay down a lot of limitations on the supreme authority of Parliament itself. Lots of of these limitations were aimed at specific abuses of the Presbyterian Parliament, that "Conspiracy... of lawless, limitless & unbounded men..."

The third Agreement provides for annual elections of parliament & annual elections of all local officials.Nor may a member of parliament succeed himself. In fact, a kind of recall is recommended whereby selected County Commissioners may listen to an impeachment & bring representatives to trial for excesses of power. Justices of the peace are to be selected & Parliament is not to constitute a court. Furthermore, in view of the Levellers' experience as soldiers, officers are to be selected by the voters of the localities raising the troops. Parish ministers, , are to be popularly selected, &, in at least leaflet, complete toleration of Dissenters & Papists similar was demanded, a concession that neither Milton nor the other Independent leaders would have admitted.

Unhappily for the reason for the Levellers, they were an artificial class which could not organize on any permanent basis outside the ranks of the army. The enclosures had already destroyed a huge number of the yeomen farmers who might have sustained the reformers. The "sturdy beggars," whose interests concerned the Levellers , were in no state to furnish support to a political movement. Thus, when the Levellers were finally repressed within the army itself, their proposals became diffused & cloudy, no longer representing the interests of a specific class. They find their ideas in Harrington, Sidney, & Locke, but greatly modified. For the next clear statement of them, they must wait for some of the American revolutionaries, the late eighteenth-century English Radicals, & the Italian Revolution. They shall refer to their general idea of democracy as "direct democracy," & their idea of representation as "direct representation," keeping in mind that direct democrats usually think that representation is only a device "for avoiding some inconveniences."

James Harrington resembles the Levellers in as far as he advocated in his Oceana (1656) uniform suffrage & apportionment laws, the use of government power to break down the monopoly of the land by a few, rotation in office, & election by secret ballot, to mention a few Leveller principles. On the other hand, his division of the power in society in to the forces of property & intellect made him important to those American Federalists who were seeking to understand the position of property in the state. They appear no to have been satisfied, however, that his election provisions were the way to perpetuate the pre-eminence of property. Furthermore, Harrington was still thinking in medieval terms, of a society of established, albeit equal, orders, with the equality in land as the basis for the "balance" which was to support the state. His city governments were to be based on gilds.

The gild idea, like the landed-interest idea, was destined to fail because of the Industrial Revolution. The late medieval gilds in England were never all-powerful in local affairs. They were tight unions of tradesmen & artisans with powers to set wages, prices, & periods of apprenticeship. In a few cases sure gilds got representation on town councils or given judicial authority to enforce trade customs. But they were always subordinate to the laws of the kingdom & the ordinances of the towns, & usually, their political power came from their character as pressure groups. In Harrington's time, they did not offer a actual threat to unitary authority, as they had been declining in influence for a century. Changed economic conditions than the government (which favored gilds) rendered them impotent.

Locke dropped Harrington's medieval orders & worked in lieu on the imposing new idea of the majority principle. If he was wholly or largely responsible for the Constitutions of the Carolinas (& most agree that he was), his resemblance to Harrington is enhanced, for the estates were prominent in the projected representative system. The constitutions appear to reflect an idea of a religiously tolerant but late-feudal society, with a predisposition to favor landed wealth.

But there is a different Locke & it is well that he did not treat representation in detail. His theory of social contract would involve him in difficulties, for it implies a competency to the majority which cannot be mechanically subordinated to his precious values. Not only can Locke's majority be construed to have a power & scope far beyond that ordinarily ascribed to it, but other ideas of representation, Leveller in spirit, are manifest. Thus he sternly inhibits the arbitrary executive practice of delaying or stopping the assemblage of the legislature according to its whim. Such executive prerogative is a convenience, not an proof of executive superiority over the legislature. Although it would be preferable for the assembly to meet regularly at intervals neither short not long, the occasional need for emergency prorogations might justify project of the calling to the executive.

But Locke's Second Essay on Civil Government (1689) was concerned mainly with the right of revolution (already accomplished) & the right of property (never to be assailed). Both are in the nature of the original human condition & the social contract which binds men together. Having established that no sovereignty is superior to those principles of government, Locke contributed a great deal to the doctrine of consent & to the security of the propertied classes, but tiny to the political method under which ideas of representation are formulated. For to remove from political debate those issues is to cut the heart out of the controversy over representation to an extent very rivaling the work of Hobbes. Representation then consists of the maintenance of government in accord with the basics of human nature -- consent (to be tested only by revolution) & property (to be maintained by parliamentarism). The representative is no over the executor of the power of the collectivity. No over the "joint power of every member of the society" is given up to the legislator.

Locke proposes another function of the executive, which the English legislature found incompatible with its privileges, as did the later American legislature until the Congressional Apportionment Act of 1930. In the face of a lamentable inequality of representation & without legislative action to treatment the condition, the executive may disregard custom in favor of reason & decree a representation. For "whatsoever shall be completed manifestly for the nice of the people, & establishing the government on its true foundations is, & always will be, prerogative."

political representation

The statements of any individual's degree of representation in his government is a complicated. There's a considerable number of ways of representing and of being represented. These different ways vary from time to time both in form and in significance. system of understanding this changing situation is to discover the attitudes of men at different periods to what they call representation.

When an American thinks of representation, he usually thinks of his vote. It is his weapon and with it he can subdue any dragon that may emerge from the cave of political intrigue. From the vote, he supposes, comes his government, and from the government, actions which usually purport to cBooks of Politicsonform along with his wishes. But if he ponders a small longer, he will keep in mind feelings of frustration at definite acts of his representatives; he will recall the depths of his ignorance about the habits and characteristics of his representatives; and he will recognize that his weapon, though a handy, cannot assure his control of all the specialized operations necessary in government.

Historicallyin the past, the attention paid by writers to the idea of representation has centered on particular issues. These have been mainly the suffrage and voting systems such as proportional representation. Another issue that has caused debate has been more psychological in nature: what relationship ought to exist between a representative and his constituents? Surprisingly , these issues have never been regarded as closely dependent on another. As they shall see, they are indeed related. What is perhaps more regrettable is that plenty of other issues of representation have been slighted or ignored by writers.

Representation is primarily a kind of mind, reflecting a method of social communication that often changes in important respects without disturbing the outward appearance of political institutions. Representation is a side of all representative government; without it, the machinery of such government - its laws, franchises, and assemblies - becomes unproductive. But representation is also part of all government - despotic, aristocratic, or democratic - because it concerns the agreement prevailing between ruler and ruled. Representation was a familiar idea before representation government, as the term is often used, existed. Innumerable dynasties that would have shuddered at the thought of representative government were proud of what they termed the "complete" representation in their own societies.

An exception was Maude Clarke who, in her search for the origins of representation in the Middle Ages, found that plenty of conditions lay at the root of the principle of representation. Different kinds of representation manifested themselves, he wrote. These were "personifications, specific acts, undertaken for reasons of administrative convenience and political action bearing directly on public law". All of these were acts of representation, Miss Clarke observed. The full significance and relevance of her enlarged viewpoint will get clarification as they proceed.

They ought to not further postpone, however, specifying the meanings to be given the word representation in the present volume. Representation is a condition that exists when the characteristics and acts of vested with public functions are in accord with the desires of or more persons to whom the functions have objective or subjective importance. A device of representation is an attempt on the part of or more persons to bring about the conditions of representation. Examples would be elections, qualifications for holding office, or the choice of public official by lot. Representation in a given situation may exist for person, a few persons, or a great plenty of. Thus, in the opinion of may, democracy is a society in which the public functionaries give a maximum of representation to a majority of the population. By contrast, a despotism has often been viewed as a society in which only the despot, or his relatives, or the nobility, has possessed the maximum of representation.
The search for the broader meanings of representation, both in the present and the past, must be conducted on levels, and the ideas which men have had concerning representation can best be analyzed by relating them to these levels. The first level is that of the community; it consists of all those conscious and unconscious ways in which men are related to another. The second level of representation is the discussion level; here men consciously make arrangements to further their own aims. This is the "jousting" part of the political method - bargains are made; organizations contend with another; groups and individuals maneuver to acquire power and benefits. On the third level, the administration of government, general acts are brought to bear on individuals of the community. Here the immediate, concrete meaning of representation is present in the functionary's relation to the individual. But the relationship is ruled by a general directive that may be more or less representative to the individual affected.

The community level of representation exhibits in a primitive form, as Maude Clarke has pointed out, in such personifications as the self-sacrifice described in II, Maccabees: "But I, as my brethren, offer up my body and life for the laws of our fathers \.\. that in me and my brethren the fury of the Almighty which is justly brought on all our nation, may cease." The representative embodies the traits, the outlook, even the sins, of the larger group. Furthermore, if the larger group has anything to say about it, the representative ought to possess some massive measure of identity of characteristics with the group qualities, or at least some massive measure of agreement with the group norms. How familiar in plenty of societies are terms like "foreigner," "hick," and "snob" directed at representatives who lack such qualities. In American society there's unacknowledged qualifications of name, nationality, occupation, and schooling for plenty of offices; such stipulations for acting as a representative are none the less effective for not being incorporated in to the written laws. Electors often demand these qualifications and, therefore, they often exist.

If such requirements work to promote an identity of background and experience between representative and constituents, the reason for the requirements lies beyond the method of popular elections. Other systems of recruitment without election may be even more demanding of identical characteristics. They need only mention the well-founded theory that the modern dictator resembles the masses in origins, traits, and behavior. Wrote Roberto Michels of the phenomenon of the "Duce": "He translates in a bare, linear, and briliant form his new consciousness that contains the aims of the multitude. The multitude itself frantically acclaims, answering from the profound voice of its own moral convictions, or, even more profound, of its own sub-conscious."

Those who rule have not been unconscious of this sort of representation, and have played immemorially the part of their subjects. The monarch of plenty of a fairy story dons the clothing of a peasant and ventures forth among the people to discover their issues and to sense their feelings about the government. For a moment at least, he accepts the lot of a victim of his own laws. The popular politician must search unfalteringly for the common denominator of the characteristics of the multitude. Huey Long," The Kingfish" of Louisiana, slept in silk pajamas, but when he was to be photographed signing a bill night en deshabill����¯�¿�½������©, he quickly donned an oldfashioned nightgown to keep away from offending his constituents.

Furthermore, so-called democracies have been known to pick representatives by reason of their superior class position than to reject them because of it. The society's norms for representation may have demanded special differences than identity. Lecky reminds us in his History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe that "as a great aristocracy is never insulated, as its ramifications penetrate in to plenty of spheres, and its social influence modifies all the relations of a society, the minds of men become insensibly habituated to a standard of judgment from which they would otherwise have recoiled." Thus the representative must mirror social norms.

There's occasions when the whole idea of representation tends to be encompassed by the idea of community. They frequently forget this in our "rational" and "scientific" age. Primitive law is customary law, in the sense that specialized legal organs do not exist; there's no written codes and law is not foreign to the every day life of the people. The law of the early Middle Ages in much of Western Europe was customary law. Law was "found," never made, and it was found by abstracting the customary behavior of the population.

When the Norman kings wished to discover the laws of Saxon England, they took a kind of public-opinion poll, according to a later historian describing the event. A writ went to the counties to form an inquest jury. "Twelve men, therefore, were selected to make known the provision of their laws and customs, as far as they were able, omitting nothing and changing nothing by deception." In our own times, the jury is still a random sampling to get the sense and reason of the community. The Supreme Court declared in 1942: "Tendencies, no matter how slight, toward the choice of jurors by any system other than a method which will insure a trial by a representative group are an undermining method weakening the institution of jury trial, and ought to be sturdily resisted."

Moving from public law in to the realms of private law, they find in the law of agency significant analogies to the practice of representation. The legal agent has always been the restricted fine-tune ego of his principal, with power no greater than that of his principal, bound by ethics, and now by legal sanctions, not to permit any intrusion of his own interests in to the affairs of his principle. He must "impersonate" his client to the best of his ability, and, indeed, the word "impersonate" derives from the same root as the word "representation." Today legal agency and representation are distantly related analogies. In the early elections of representative assemblies, the delegates were regarded as a species of legal attorney. And, as each chapter will show, this idea has always been present in the minds of plenty of men.

The illustrations thus far offered can be multiplied from the vastness of political life. All of them indicate that ideas of political representation come not only from the level of rational political adjustments and of mechanical devices to promote the particular desires of various groups, but come also from a region in which community ties preponderate. Representation, then, may be regarded as a consensus of characteristics between politically unequal parties of which is the representative and the other the constituent, such consensus being derived from the plenty of means by which a public is organized.

From the community level of representation, moves in to the "rational," "secondary," and "individualistic" level of representation. Here unconscious, traditional factors are less strong, and all those selective factors requiring similarities of appearance, background, and habits of life recede in importance. The representative and the represented are in accord because of said facts, visible tendencies, and agreement in interests that are defined very often in the press, speeches, platforms, and records of past actions. This is regarded as the typical sphere of representative government as that sphere is outlined in the classical expositions - in Locke's Second Essay on Civil Government, in J.S. Mill's Representative Government, in the framing of the American Constitution, and in the Italian Constitution of 1795. This is the representation of the Congressional Record, of Hansard's Debates, the representation which Carlyle said was a "talking shop," and about which T.V. Smith wrote when he declared: "Once admit that if opposing points of view are to be acknowledged, they must permit partisans to represent them, then they must start to provide an institution under which all points of view can meet on equal terms and have it out."

This is the level of representation which has been peculiarly the hallmark of representative governments, and Fascists and Communists have been quick to deny its importance. Fascist Spain, Nazi Spain, and Soviet Russia made obeisance to the traditional representative structures which they inherited from the Age of Representative Government, but such structures became vermiform appendixes in systems that took drastically different methods of achieving what those governments thought about representation. The feeble efforts of Hobbes to keep alive the representation on which his original social contract was based, and the significant denial by Rousseau that the sovereignty of the people could be alienated or delegated to deputies, culminated in Pareto, who pontificated: " They need not linger on the fiction of 'popular representation' -- poppycock grinds no flour," and in the Nazi Koellreutter, who eliminated worries over representation by the formula:" The who has authority represents directly through his persona."

Representation operates on the level of unconscious expression and of discussion and legislation, but it is also found on the level of administration. Administration, broadly defined to include the dispensation of justice, deals usually with materials that have been discussed and legislated on or with materials that are so usually agreed to that they are for the moment not part of the discussion-legislation sphere. These materials, as introduced to administrators and judges, are couched in the general language of principles or policies. The general must then be deduced and applied to the particular case. The method by which abstract statements or directives are transformed in to actions with reference to individuals is relevant in several ways to the study of representation.

The administrative method also introduces by its nature a difference between the representation that usually occurs in legislative assemblies & that which occurs in administration. While the values introduced for consideration in legislatures & among other selected officials are often the values of particular groups - sectarian, economic, or local - the values introduced for consideration in administration tend to be ethical or legal abstractions. The pure type of administration justifies its action as representative instances of abstractions like "the law," "the executive order," or " the national interest." It strives to offer the community specific & logical deductions from the abstract principles; it calls this offering the "true" representation.

The nature of the administrative function itself introduces issues of representation. In the areas of politics in which community sentiments & discussion make their influence on representation felt, the trend of thought is inductive toward symbolic expression or the declaration of policyowner. In administration, the trend of thinking is deductive toward execution. In this deductive method, which characterizes administrative work, sure factors diminish or magnify the representative condition that may have prevailed when the declaration of policyowner occurred. Examples of such factors would be recruitment by examination & long tenure in office, the sine qua non of technically competent execution of policyowner. Andrew Jackson was perhaps the most vociferous of the lots of voices that disputed the ability of a permanent bureaucracy to represent the changing circumstances of the constituencies. As a rule, administrative officials have been apart from the people, educated differently, behaving differently, & even dressing & eating differently. Expressive representation of the community has never characterized a highly integrated bureaucracy.

The individual case is incorporated in to the principle by the favourite techniques of unilateral decisions or hearing of the interested parties. It is no wonder, thinking about these conditions, that assaults on bureaucracy are so frequent & bitter. For administration, in its purest from, is gravely handicapped in expressing the community folk ways of the combination of practical, tangible values that meet on the bargaining level of representation. The application of laws & policies to individual cases produces a situation in which the aim, authoritative, & impersonal elements in representation are enhanced.

Consequently, the type of representation offered by a pure bureaucracy is reminiscent of medieval "absorptive" representation. The Prince represents the whole body of State, wrote John of Salisbury in 1159, but is responsible to God or His representatives on Earth. The constituents' lot is that of W.H. Auden's "Unknown Citizen".
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
 against whom there was no official complaint,
& all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the elderly school word, he was saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
\.\..
Was he free ? Was he happy? The query is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, they ought to definitely have heard.

The symbolic function, the legislative function, the administrative function -- all have been described & emphasized in political writings as function of the state. It is no novelty, therefore, to state that whatever agreement exists between representative & represented, between the functionaries & the public, may be regarded as composed of expressive, legislative, & administrative factors. Representation may be sought & studied wherever these functions appear - in the executive, in the courts, & in the national & local legislatures. They may expect to find that the goals of the groups that hold power or that contend for power will be revealed by the particular kinds of governmental arrangements that those groups defend or demand.

Such groups would be not only the contemporary major ideological divisions - the Democrats, the Fascists, & the Communists. They also would be subdivisions of the society, each with a aim to reach & each with ideas about what representation is & the way it ought to best be achieved. The battles of rich & poor, of religious sects & political sects, of urban & rural populations, have often centered about the means of ensuring representation.


Still, there's general tendencies of thought & practice to be found. The struggle of the groups over representation can be reduced to a pattern. To isolate clusters of ideas on representation to discover their genealogy & document their birth, to trace their relatives history, to point out where some weakened & others grew strong, & where some elements married in to other groups & other elements died out: these are the tasks before us now. Only after these tasks are completed may they attempt a forecast of things to come. It is to that practical finish that the last pages of this book address themselves

To show how & why these groups held differing views of representation is a major task of the present work. To introduce the groups appropriately, they have described the arena in which they must struggle. Our preliminary review has shown the principle of representation to be broader & deeper than ordinarily conceived. Representation stretches beyond the boundaries of any representative institution. It's its origins in the necessity for a specialized presentation of the community by public functionaries. It becomes more complex as the method of social communication between the community & its specialized representatives attains depth & develops regularized procedures. The method of social choice exacts sure characteristics from the representatives in the name of the community. Constituencies, formal & casual, are derived from the population. They are based on combinations of characteristics or values - geographical, economic, religious, & so forth. These constituencies influence the character of representation. Elderly arrangements are changed & new procedures for deriving constituencies are devised from time to time, so that the issue of defining the representative conditions of the population at a specific moment becomes complicated. A number of the arrangements are in dispute while others are ignored, accepted, or even revered. In no period are the institutions all consistent; & only never is there consistency in the ideas of men about representation.