AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Lecture notes of Psychology

Download AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY and more Lecture notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! 21 POLITICAL REPRESENTATION AND POLITICAL EXPERIENCE: AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY F.R. Ankersmit Publicum ius est quod ad statum rei Romanae spectat, pri- vatum quod ad singulorum utilitatem: sunt enim quaedam publice utilia, quaedam privatim (Ulpianus) Introduction The simplest account of representative democracy runs as follows. On the one hand there is the citizen or the voter, on the other there is the State, and between the two you have intermediaries such as political parties, the media, public opinion etc. Admittedly, a most rudimenta- ry model of representative democracy, but nevertheless neither false nor even only misleading. All that has been said on representative de- mocracy by countless commentators since its emergence at the end of the 18th century can somehow and somewhere be fitted in this model, without upsetting it. Taking, then, this model as our point of depar- ture, we can say that the citizen or the voter is presented in it as the political system’s most elementary unit. This notion of the model’s ‘elementary unit’ is appropriate for sev- eral reasons. The notion correctly suggests that whereas the citizen or voter is truly the most elementary unit from the perspective of the po- litical system, this unit may possess its own complexity, if seen from a different perspective. Next, though this unit’s actual make-up may be highly relevant to its functioning in the system, this is nevertheless seen as a given rather than as a matter to be explored. Characteristi- 22 cally, in agreement with the etymology of the word ‘individual’, we ordinarily think of the individual citizen or voter as an entity that can- not be divided up into still smaller units. Think of our elections: the voter is asked to vote for a certain politician or party and emphatically not invited to explain the reasons he has for his choice. Clearly, then, ‘sub-divisions’ in or of the voter himself – such as what mental strug- gle may have led him to his political choice – are of no relevance from the perspective of the political system. The political system recognizes only individual voters and leaves no room for their ‘insides’, so to say (without actually denying the existence of this ‘inside’, for that mat- ter, nor that what happens in these ‘insides’ will be of consequence for the actual outcome of the elections). The picture that comes to mind is that of the chemist: he is well aware that the numbers of electrons in an atom’s outer rind is mainly responsible for its chemical properties, but will nevertheless accept this as a mere given and leave it to the physicist to investigate and explain it. These introductory remarks may give an idea of what I shall do in this essay. I want to focus here on the individual citizen or voter and will try to show what is wrong with seeing the citizen or voter as the most elementary unit of the political system. Next, when dealing with the problem in this essay, I shall not discuss what sociologists or (socio-)psychologists have already said about it since the days of Tocqueville and the mass-psychologists of the the late nineteenth cen- tury. I’m primarily interested in what can be said about the problem from a more or less apriorist, philosophical point of view, since politi- cal philosophers have, as far as I know, rarely addressed it. My claim will be that a philosophical analysis of the political sys- tem itself requires us to question the view that the individual citizen or voter should be seen as its most elementary unit. Hence, the idea is that the demarcation-line between the political system on the one hand and the individual citizen or voter on the other is more per- meable than is generally recognized. The political system truly pen- etrates into the domain of the individual citizen or voter. Once again, this will not be new to sociologists, political scientists and (socio-)psy- chologists. But what this should mean to the political philosopher still needs to be worked out. In carrying out this project, I shall focus on the distinction between the private and the public, since it will enable the political philoso- pher to penetrate the domain of the individual citizen or voter. More AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 25 see below, there is a politically relevant dimension to representation as such; a dimension, moreover, that may help us understand why it is wrong to see the individual voter as the political system’s most elementary unit. In order for the reader to recognize this, I must start with some more general observations about the notion of representation. In the first place, we should be quite clear about the differences between rep- resentation on the one hand, and true description on the other. One of the main weaknesses of contemporary philosophy of language is that it has been largely oblivious of this fact. The word representation is ordinarily used there as being synonymous with true description.2 However, by moulding representation on true description, philoso- phers of language have reduced representation to the traditional and well-known framework of a (mainly) scientistic epistemology, thus blinding themselves to how the notion of representation functions in art, history, politics and in large parts of daily life. Speaking more generally, most shortcomings of contemporary political philosophy, philosophy of history and of how we, as human beings, relate to our living environment, have their origin in a failure to see that it will need a philosophy of representation to deal with them. In this way all these disciplines are the victims of twentieth-century philosophy of language’s stubborn blindness to the issue of representation. As Arthur Danto once put it, the human being is an ens representans;3 and without a proper understanding of representation we can make no progress in grasping the main features of the condition humaine. The crucial datum is that epistemology is, and even ought to be, blind to the categorical differences between a representation and what it represents. An epistemology that accounts for the difference be- tween a represented and its representation fails to do what we expect from epistemology. Think of a landscape (a represented) and a paint- ing of that landscape (its representation). Here the systems developed by epistemologists since Descartes and Kant ought to be just as valid (or invalid) for what they say about our experience and knowledge of either the landscape itself or of its representation. Both belong to what Kant would call phenomenal reality - and epistemology will either respect this fact, or fail as epistemology. It follows from this simple observation that epistemology is necessarily incapable of expressing or articulating the problem of the relationship between a represented and its representation – let alone of adequately dealing with the prob- F.R. ANKERSMIT 26 lem. When dealing with that problem we must therefore abandon the epistemologist’s effort to develop schemata defining the relationship between a (transcendental) self or language user and what this self has knowledge of - and replace it by an analysis of representation that minimally respects the categorical differences between the repre- sented and its representation. Representation is a vast and quickly expanding topic, so I shall restrict myself to what is relevant in the present context. In his magis- terial The Transfiguration of the Common Place Arthur Danto insisted on the intensionality of representation. We have to do with intensional contexts when the way in which a sentence is formulated is part of its truth-conditions. For example, the true sentence ‘Jack believes that the water is boiling (p1)’ will only remain true in case we decide to re- place it by ‘Jack believes that the water’s temperature is one hundred degrees centigrade (p2)’, on the condition that Jack knows that water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade. So it matters to the truth of what we say about Jack whether it is expressed by either p1 or by p2. Next, Danto uses this to make us aware of an important property of representation. His claim is that when we represent the beliefs of others – as we do when writing history or when developing a repre- sentation of our political Umwelt – intensionality will separate our- selves from these beliefs - and from the people holding them. People whose beliefs we represent experience their own world directly, that is to say, in the light of the beliefs they hold to be true. They will typi- cally not question their beliefs, since they believe them to be true – this simply is how the world is to them. They will not say: ‘I believe that p’, in the sense of ascribing to themselves a certain belief – this is some- thing for the outsider to do. And if somebody were to say ‘I believe that p’, he takes a position ‘outside himself’, so to say; he looks at him- self in the way that another person might look at him. So this is what happens when we represent the beliefs of others: we move outside the context in which they may directly relate to their world – that is, in terms of the beliefs they hold to be true. We have then joined their beliefs together within a representation of the world that we ascribe to them. And, again, this is something that these others could never do themselves without becoming an essentially other person, capable of objectifying their beliefs in a way they could never do themselves – that is, without ceasing to be themselves.4 AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 27 Supposing Danto’s argument to be valid, we might add one more consideration. As noted a moment ago, we can properly say ‘I be- lieve that p’; by doing so we will step out of a former self and move on to another and different self that objectifies our beliefs by a repre- sentation of them. We then look at ourselves as another might do this; we move out of our own private world in which we experience the world directly through the beliefs we hold to be true. We have then taken up a position in the public domain inhabited by our fellow human beings (who also see us from the outside) that we share with them, insofar as they also have this capacity of moving from their private world to a representation of it. Hence, the faculty of representation makes us into the inhabitants of two worlds, the private one (that we possessed already) and the public one (to which we can get access thanks to this faculty of representation). In this way the distinction between the private and the public is not to be identified with the distinction between the human ‘individual’ (as the most elementary unit of the political system) and the political system itself as a ‘collective’ or ‘holist’ entity. Instead, even though the distinction between the private and the public can satisfactorily and convincingly be defined in terms of the notion of representation, it will be impossible to define it in terms of the distinction between (either ontological or methodological) individualism and holism. For the distinction between the private and the public is part of the individual al- ready. And, hence, insofar as this distinction is crucial for an adequate understanding of the political system, the individual citizen or voter could not possibly be seen as its most ‘elementary unit’. These are, admittedly, highly abstract observations. How can they help us understand politics? Let me start with one example. Think of Machiavellism – the claim, disputed so hotly for five centuries, that history or politics may sometimes compel the statesman to sin against the requirements of ethics. Two possibilities present themselves. The first being that we may, after some very hard thinking, conceive of some more sophisticated ethical system than those we presently pos- sess, a system that might succeed in endowing the problematic action with the sanction of ethics after all. If so, our problem would have disappeared, of course. The other being that this conflict between eth- ics and ‘the thing to do for the statesman’ stubbornly persists, in spite of all our strenuous efforts to reconcile ethics with politics and his- tory. The latter option is, of course, the one that Machiavelli put on the agenda – and that has worried us ever since. But why did only F.R. ANKERSMIT 30 And Mutz goes on to say that this often takes on the character of an ‘I’m doing better than we are’ that has so surprised political scientists when finding in their polls that citizens are systematically more op- timistic about their own private situation than about that of the na- tion. Mutz presents two explanations for this ‘personality split’ in the citizen and for what might be behind the ‘I’m doing better than we are’ mechanism. According to the former theory personal pessimism would threaten our feelings of competence and self-worth, so that we all tend to be more optimistic about ourselves than about what hap- pens ‘out there’. The second theory argues that cognitive errors are re- sponsible for the phenomenon. We tend to see others, and especially politicians, as prototypical high-risk individuals with the result that we compare ourselves favorably to them. Both theories indisputably have the aura of idle (socio-)psychological speculation – and Mutz admits as much. But, as we saw in the previous section, a more adequate explana- tion of Mutz’s ‘compartmentalization thesis’ is to be found in how the representation of politics by the citizen necessarily divides him into a public and a private self. So that explanation may show us how to reconcile theory and empirical fact. Next, Mutz emphasizes that the citizen’s tendency to ‘compart- mentalize’ his political psychology functions as an amazing check on the citizen’s alleged tendency to take his own private interest as his guide when deciding about matters of public interest. As becomes clear from her argument, when ‘the national judgment’ is at stake, citizens tend to be surprisingly open-minded and are rarely led by their own personal interests. At this level ‘republicanism’ seems to be innate in us, so to say, insofar as we almost naturally tend to privilege the public interest over our own. Of course, we may have political preferences that agree with our own private interests – but it would be stupidly dogmatic to see this as decisive proof that our opinions about the public interest should always be mere masks of our private interests. We can discuss the public interest from the perspective of the public interest only - and if Mutz is right, we do so far more often than the Marxist in us would have us believe. We can rephrase Mutz’s argument by saying that for the citizen there truly is a conflict when he has to weigh his private against the public interest. Self-evidently, there would be no conflict if the ‘Marx- ist’ were right – for then the private interest would meet with no op- AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 31 position in the citizen’s political psychology. Marxism, and our (in this case Marxist) intuitions about how the voter decides about politi- cal issues tacitly assumes that there should be a continuum between the private and the public – and that the private interest always makes use of this continuum in order to overrun its public rival. With the result that there should and could be only conflict between citizens and not within citizens themselves. (So this is where even Marxists are more ‘individualist’ than one should be.) But there is no such con- tinuum, since the domains and the public are truly incommensurable in the voter’s mind; this is why the voter always finds himself con- fronted with the impossible task of making one person (the one who will cast his vote in a certain way in the ballot-box) out of two fun- damentally different persons (his private and his public personalities) and why conflict is truly permanent. So, if we move downwards from the State, via the political party, to the voter, our terminus cannot be the individual voter himself (who is a mix of incommensurable com- ponents) but only his private and his public personality. And, again, it was representation that divided him up in these two components. Indeed, in this way the voter can be seen as the arena of the primal political conflict. And conflicts between voters belong to an essentially later stage – though these will be moulded on the most elementary one identified here. Having arrived at this stage, we would do well to remember Schattschneider’s thesis that ‘at the root of all politics is the universal language of conflict’.9 Politics is, basically, about conflict. Of course, the reverse does not hold: not all conflict is political. Nor is it true that politics is only about conflict. Politicians also have to assemble data, appoint people, implement decisions reached, talk to their electorate etc. – and, moreover, they will even agree amongst each other about a host of things, such as the basic rules of democratic government (as we may hope). Nevertheless, conflict is at the basis of all politics: take conflict out of politics and all political action becomes meaning- less and nonsensical theatre. So my account of politics is, admittedly, of the ‘foundationalist’ type (in the sense meant by Rorty); but it is a somewhat deviant kind of foundationalism, since it is a conflict and not some indubitable certainty (as with Descartes) that gives us the foundation of all politics. Next, when elaborating his claim about conflict being the founda- tion of politics, Schattschneider insists that the opposition between F.R. ANKERSMIT 32 the public and the private will give us the substance of all political conflict. a look at political literature shows that there has indeed been a longstand- ing struggle between the conflicting tendencies towards the privatization and socialization of conflict. On the one hand, it is easy to identify a whole battery of ideas calculated to restrict the scope of conflict or even to keep it entirely out of the political domain. A long list of ideas concerning indi- vidualism, free enterprise, localism, privacy and economy in government seems to be designed to privatize conflict or to restrict its scope or to limit the use of public authority to enlarge the scope of conflict. A tremendous amount of conflict is controlled by keeping it so private that it is almost invisible. (…) On the other hand, it is easy to identify another battery of ideas contributing to the socialization of conflict. Universal ideas in the culture, ideas concerning equality, consistency, equal protection of the laws, justice, liberty and civil rights tend to socialize conflict. These con- cepts tend to make conflict contagious; they invite outside intervention in conflict (…).10 So, in fact, political conflict always has a double edge. On the one hand, there is conflict itself, such as between a capitalist entrepreneur and one of his workers (or between us and the state). Next, there is the conflict about whether this conflict will be allowed to stay there, or whether it will be generalized over all the workers of this entrepre- neur, over, perhaps, all of the nation’s working proletariat or even, with Marx, over all of social history. It will also be clear – as Schatt- schneider much emphasizes himself - that the stronger party in the conflict will prefer to keep it private, whereas the weaker party will be in favor of socializing it. So, in this way the conflict between the public and the private in the individual voter has its resonance in all that we find in newspapers and in history books informing us about the nation’s political history. One more reason, then, to be open to how political conflict is pre- figured in our minds as individuals and to the fact that conflict is a reflection of what happens in ourselves. It is not the other way round, as we so often assume. The political conflict has its ultimate origin in how we – as individual citizens or voters - represent political real- ity; and the incommensurabilities arising from this do not have their counterpart in political reality. For we can say all kind of things about AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 35 ‘out there’. Normally, this is a complicated and ongoing process with- out any very clear and decisive turning-points – though the major political events of our lifetime may sometimes pull us ‘through the stage scenery of our previous private life’. Events such as the French Revolution may make us enter a new political reality with a new equi- librium between the private and the public – as was brilliantly argued a generation ago by Richard Sennett in his The Fall of Public Man. But even when rearrangements in the relationship between the private and the public have the character of processes rather than of events, this dimension of making a discovery - so wonderfully captured by Truman’s boat getting stuck in a piece of stage scenery - will be pre- served. Our present political melancholia A moment ago I mentioned the French Revolution. And if any histori- cal event matches Truman’s sublime experience of a rearrangement in the relationship between the private and the public, this must un- doubtedly be the French Revolution. From almost every perspective the Revolution was a major event in the history of the West, but it surely was the major event in the history of the West’s experience of the relationship between the private and the public. As nineteenth- century legal historians never tired of pointing out, the French Revo- lution announced the final end of feudalism and, hence, of the system defining all public relationships in the terms of private law. Feudal- ism had no public law in the modern sense of the term, because public competencies typically were private property. Offices such as tax-re- ceiver, public servant, judge or army-officer could be inherited, put up for sale and sold as if they were private possessions in the way that a house or a stretch of land can be owned. By taking all these competen- cies out of the hands of those whose private possession they had been, and giving them to the people or the nation, the public domain came into being. This was a tremendous rearrangement in the relationship between the public and the private and it had, in the collective po- litical experience of the time, an effect much similar to what Truman must have felt when hitting the boundary of his (private) world and discovering the public world hidden behind it. F.R. ANKERSMIT 36 In both cases the experience was traumatic – and we may well see the term ‘traumatic ’as the psychological equivalent of the philosophi- cal or aesthetic notion of the sublime. In both cases the experience re- sists being taken up in the kind of narrative used for telling the history of one’s life and giving meaning to what has happened or will happen in it. Next, both traumatic and sublime experience involve a loss of a former self. In the case of Truman and of the French Revolution it is not hard to spell out what this former self must have been: in both cases a private world was suddenly transformed into a public world. And as we know from both psychology and history, only an end- less telling and re-telling of the traumatic or the sublime experience may finally succeed in dissipating its threatening and overwhelming incomprehensibility and allow us to subsume it in the narrative of our lives. This is what the psychoanalytical treatment of trauma is all about; and we need only think of the libraries of books written on the French Revolution in the nineteenth century to see that it is much the same with history. Under such circumstances historians truly are the nation’s psychoanalysts. However, our contemporary situation is a wholly different one and, in fact, the very mirror image of the French Revolution. The pen- dulum now moves in the opposite direction. We now live in a time when the public domain has been privatized again (as so much else in our contemporary societies).12 Think of the privatization of former parts of the state or the policy of hiving them off as semi-independent, so-called Quangos.13 Think of the effort in most states on the European continent to cut down the size of the welfare state, and to shift back to the citizen many responsibilities that the state had taken on itself after World War II. As will be clear, this is the unmaking of the regime of the public and the private that came into being with the French Revo- lution and that was elaborated by liberals,14 socialists and Christian Democrats in the almost two centuries after 1789. What makes our own age unique in the history of the Western State is that now for the first time in more than half a millennium the State is on the way out again. This is where our contemporary political challenges are with- out precedent in the West’s history and why it is so very difficult to develop a consistent and workable response to them. Surely, there is no lack of political philosophies, ranging from Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau to Hegel, Marx, Hayek or Rawls, all in- vestigating the possibilities - and the dangers! - of an ever-increasing AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 37 State and public domain – but the problem of the shrinking State is a wholly new one; and the contradiction of sovereignty wiping itself out (the annulment of competencies is only possible for someone actually possessing these competencies!) has, until now, not attracted the inter- est of political philosophers. This issue, to be placed at the top of the contemporary political philosopher’s agenda because of our present political realities, still awaits a painstaking and adequate analysis. The only thing we can be sure of is that the problem will have to be ana- lyzed in terms of the notions of the private and the public, since only these notions allow us to properly conceptualize the political realities that have come into being during the last two to three decades. When attacking the problem (with the help of these notions), we had best start with the observation that it must confront us with the very opposite of Truman’s predicament, as sketched in the previous section. When Truman struck the cardboard sky with his boat, his world was suddenly enlarged immeasurably; it now came to comprise all of the ‘real’ world unknown to him before his sublime experience. And this must have had a tremendous impact on his identity: he must have realized that he now belonged to a world in which the life as he had lived it up till now, had never been more than the representation of a life - his life. He was thus compelled to undergo the transition that Danto had in mind when explaining what happens when we enclose a person, ourselves, or a historical period in a representation of them. If this happens to us (as was the case with Truman), we become an essentially different person. And in Truman’s case the transition is all the more dramatic since he had, as yet, no indication of his identity in his new world. Who or what would he be there; and what did he have to go on to answer this all-important question? Just nothing. It was as if he had returned to the state of a new-born baby and been compelled to start from there again. Our current political experience is the reverse of Truman’s: it’s the experience of an implosion of our public into a new private self. I emphasize that this certainly is a new private self; for these drastic rearrangements in the relationship between the public and the private cannot leave these compartments of our political selves unaltered. Truman’s private self was annihilated by his entry in the ‘real’ world; and so our new private self has swollen up beyond measure by hav- ing to absorb in itself large parts of the public world. It certainly will be no easy task for us to digest all this new and often dishearteningly F.R. ANKERSMIT 40 And he then goes on to quote Strasser: es erscheinen in den echten Gestimmtheiten überhaupt kein Ich, kein Ge- genstand, keine Grenze zwischen Ich und Gegenstand. Man müsste im Gegenteil sagen: die Grenzen des Ichs verschwimmen und verschwinden in eigentümlicher Weise. Ich und Welt werden in ein ungeteiltes Totaler- leben eingebettet. Stimmung ist Ich- und Weltgefühl zugleich.18 The insight is captured well in the lines I quoted from Leconte de Lisle, when the poet insists that sensations of sadness or joy evaporate when we (sorry, again!) are afflicted by the ‘nothingness’ of the ‘de- mons of noontime’. We (sorry, again!) are then carried back to a state in which these sensations and the objects and events that may occa- sion them have lost their character of being objective realities, realities outside ourselves (sorry, again!). In that state, subject and object have not yet come into being. And, as we have seen when discussing representa- tion, this state will announce itself at those moments when a former self is enclosed within a representation of that former self. In these rare moments of sublime experience the frontiers between self and not-self dissolve and the familiar and always inevitable notions of self and the world have momentarily lost their meaning. From a political perspective we have no reason to exalt these sub- lime experiences into something that we should strive for – supposing that the experience could be deliberately provoked at all – quod non. Obviously, there is nothing particularly attractive about Truman’s ex- perience – and we know from the history of aesthetics that this is true of sublime experience in general. This is no less true of the melanchol- ic variant of sublime political experience that we discussed in this sec- tion. For, as Hegel already pointed out most perceptively, melancholy may typically provoke in us the reaction of a ‘Panic’ fright. Hegel re- fers here to how the Arcadian shepherds reacted to the experience of the ‘demons of noontime’: das liegt z.B. in der Vorstellung des Pan; es ist dies das All [Hegel obvi- ously refers here to the meaning of the Greek word ‘pan’ (F.A.)], nicht als ein Objektives allein, sondern zugleich als das wodurch ein Schauer erweckt wird (…) In Griechenland ist er [i.e. Pan (F.A.)] nicht das objek- tive Ganze, sondern das Unbestimmte, das dabei mit dem Momente des Objektiven verbunden ist.19 AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 41 Obviously, a passage fully agreeing with the quotes from Bollnow and Strasser given a moment ago. Anyway, a ‘Panic fright’ is certainly something to be avoided in a world that is out of joint because of so many panic frights already, such as the one triggered by ‘nine-eleven’. Hence, a ‘melancholy’ electorate uncertainly hovering on the brink between a former self and a representation of that former self, may be a serious threat to the health and stability of a representative democ- racy. All the more so if such a representative democracy is ruled by irresponsible politicians ready to stimulate and exploit private fears for ill-considered public purposes. The ‘Panic frights’ resulting from this may well set the globe afire. Conclusion. All that I’ve been saying here is pure nonsense from the perspective of (contemporary) political philosophy. I have no problem with admit- ting as much. I am well aware that my proposal to see the citizen or voter as an uneasy mix of two incommensurable components – with- out there being a sovereign political self arbitrating between the two – will be decried as odd and profoundly counter-intuitive. Aren’t we all convinced of being ourselves the supreme master of how the pub- lic and the private are related in our (political) selves? I shall be the first to admit that ordinarily there is a great amount of stability in how we strike a balance between the two that may give the impression of resulting from rational and well-considered decisions. Stability, yes; but this stability is not the result of some well-considered decision consciously taken by ourselves. It may look as if it is, but appearances betray us here; for such sane and secure regimes in the relationship between the private and the public are, in fact, the results of ‘mere custom operating on the mind’, to quote Hume. Our political self is ‘compartmentalized’, as Mutz put it, and there is no ‘higher self’ regu- lating the relationship between the two. Certainly rearrangements in this relationship do occur - either fa- voring the public (as was the case in the two centuries after 1789), or the private (as in our own age of political melancholia) – but they are not the result of choices consciously and deliberately made by an ei- ther private or public self. For, as we have seen in Danto: in such rear- rangements we find ourselves in the no-man’s-land between a former F.R. ANKERSMIT 42 self and a later representation of that former self – and then there are no selves and, hence, no choices to be made. AN ESSAY ON POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY