Liberty of the Imagination by Cahill Edward;

Author:Cahill, Edward;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Publius and the Problem of Representation

Both before and after the Revolution, political representation was a widely contested question, particularly in Britain, where radical Whigs earlier in the century had challenged the constitutional theory of virtual representation, through which Parliament indirectly represented the “commons” of the entire nation. Such representation, they claimed, was a mere abstraction; the represented will of the people never assured the pursuit of their interests or implied the possibility of their intervention. In the same way, as Bernard Bailyn has demonstrated, American colonists, who had traditionally instructed local representatives on questions of government policy, refused to believe that their interests were represented in Parliament.66 As a result, when they considered the nature and function of representation for their own governments, they insisted on a less mediated distance between constituents and their representatives. But what kind of mediation and how much distance were among the most difficult questions faced by the Convention. None caused more disagreement and frustration, and most delegates understood that resolving these questions effectively was their most important responsibility. Anti-Federalist Edmund Randolph warns that “if a fair representation of the people be not secured, the injustice of the Govt. will shake it to its foundations.”67 Wilson, his opponent on many other matters, concurs: “A vice in the Representation, like an error in the first concoction, must be followed by disease, convulsions, and finally death itself.”68 As they debated the purpose of representation, the frequency of popular elections, and the size and shape of the federal legislature, they struggled—even within their own alliances—to find consensus. The question of African slaves created perhaps the most persistent and passionate disagreement, but it was in many ways emblematic of the debate and its outcome. While the final determination to let one slave represent three-fifths of a citizen was morally incoherent, like most of the Convention’s provisions on representation it was a compromise, reflecting the reality that, under most state laws, slaves were both human beings and property.

The Constitution’s scheme of representation, based on a periodically elected bicameral legislature of citizens, was also a compromise. As Madison insists in Federalist 55, because it derives from the “genius of the people of America” (344), it reflects both a “certain portion of esteem and confidence” in their social passions and a “certain degree of circumspection and distrust” concerning their selfish ones (346). The idea of “genius” here refers not to heightened imaginative ability but the essential spirit of a political community. But it implies an economy of the passions in which private and public interests are in tension with each other. Madison assumes that through representation such a tension would be transformed and channeled into what in Federalist 10 he calls a “public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people.” This process would “refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.” As the selfish passions of the people are filtered through the judgments of its representatives, such a voice would become “more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves” (82).

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