Andrew's Wiki
On Representation Government

“On Representative Government” (1960), described by Gallagher

• Overview
  • “a detailed blueprint for an intricate piece of electoral machinery” (Gallagher 228)
  • Government can fix social problems
• Plan
  • Increased activity in politics by everyone, including women and all classes
  • Universal suffrage “inevitable as well as desirable” (229)
  • No secret ballot: your vote is representation, not your personal taste; not about your person, but about your “disinterested political self” (232)
    • Sense of public obligation with your vote
• He recognizes its limitations
  • Representation tends “towards collective mediocrity,” allowing government to pass into hands of uneducated
• Solution: protecting minority representation (of the smart)
  • That way, voices of “ablest men” not silenced
  • People with “mental superiority” get more votes, so their voice is protected
  • Why? They are the least likely to vote with private motives in mind (He calls this “right reason”); most likely to keep best interest of public in mind
• A value-oriented “distortion” of representation by pure numbers
  • Unlike his father, doesn’t support “accumulation theory of value” (more is better) or “descriptive theory of representation” (accuracy of representation based on real social proportions) (232)
  • Believes that skewing towards the more intelligent would represent the hopes and desires of the population: to be wiser
• Underlying Assumption
  • Politics transcends class identities (Gallagher 233)

More

• His dad: James Mill’s ideas about Parliament (more types of people represented more accurately, the better it is, so it’s all about representing competing interests fairly)
  • “descriptive representation”
  • utilitarian gov: saying that gov should be “descriptive microcosm” of society, showing all the interests of the realm, for when you have more people who accurately represent more groups, you get a better government
    • Social fact leads to political value
    • Anti-utilitarian: Facts don’t equal values, people! Just cause it’s true don’t mean it’s right.
      • Mere description doesn’t show actual meaning (empirical facts don’t reflect truth), what Gallagher calls “an antidescriptive theory of representation” (190)
      • Utilitarians wrongly used exchange value as the model for value itself (if it’s valuable in the market, then it’s good)
• His concept of freedom, which Smith, Ricardo, Malthus,k Locke, and Hume pretty much all shared: your will is not free because it is determined by your predecessors and environment. However, you can act free when you may act in accordance with that will.