Legitimate Opposition by Alexander S. Kirshner;

Author:Alexander S. Kirshner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300243468
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

“[The tribunate] is a pernicious thing, born in sedition and promoting sedition” (Cicero 1928, Laws 3.19). This was the negative verdict of Quintus, a character Cicero used to defend an elitist perspective in the dialogue On the Laws. Quintus’s aphorism echoes the accepted view that the tribunate was the product of popular resistance to elite dominance. Nonetheless, it is also an admission: despite the radically undemocratic and inegalitarian character of Rome’s institutions, the tribunate provided popular actors with a credible institutional avenue to advance their ends—it was an element of an adversarial system of opposition. Quintus’s argument thus aptly captures two key features of legitimate opposition. It cannot be divorced from groups’ capacity to exercise extrainstitutional influence. And it is a virtue of the practice that, notwithstanding the existence of inequality, it provides citizens with the institutional means to exercise valuable forms of collective agency.

This chapter and chapter 4 pose a fundamental challenge to the democratic conception. Opposition precedes the development of political parties. We have misunderstood the intellectual revolution that ended with a partisan, organized form of legitimate opposition becoming synonymous with democracy. Can my claims possibly be correct? Chapter 6 makes the case, illustrating why the key to understanding modern opposition is not intellectual acceptance but the power of the modern state.

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