Nothing is more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicite submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ’Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
—DAVID HUME, “Of the First Principles of Government”
I
WE MAY PERHAPS question today whether force is always on the side of the governed—or even whether it always has been—but by and large Hume’s observation commands assent. All government rests on the consent, however obtained, of the governed. And over the long run mere force, even when it is entirely at the disposal of the governing few, is not a sufficient basis for inducing consent. Human beings have to be persuaded, if only to maintain a semblance of self-respect. They have to have opinions to sustain their consent.
The few who govern take care to nourish those opinions; and that is no easy task, for the opinions needed to make the many submit to the few are often at variance with observable fact. The success of government thus requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. And, to reorder Hume’s dictum, the maxim extends to the most free and most popular governments as well as to the most despotic and most military. The popular governments of England and the United States rest on fictions as much as do the governments of Russia and China.
Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine or that he can do no wrong, make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or that the representatives of the people are the people. Make believe that governors are the servants of the people. Make believe that all men are equal, or make believe that they are not.
The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways, for the make-believe world often molds the real one. In order to serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may be, a fiction must bear some resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the willing suspension of disbelief collapses. And because fictions are necessary, because we cannot live without them, we often take pains to prevent their collapse by moving the facts to fit them, by making our world conform more closely to what we want it to be. When the fiction takes command and reshapes reality, we are apt to call it, quite appropriately, reform or reformation.
Although fictions enable the few to govern the many, it is not only the many who are constrained by them. In the strange commingling of political make-believe and reality, the governing few, no less than the governed many, may find themselves limited—we may even say reformed—by the fictions on which their authority depends.
It would be possible to illustrate this point from the history of almost any people at any time. I think one could show, for example, that the exaltation of kingship in the fiction of the divine right of kings—and I presume it will be admitted that this was a fiction—could be used as a means of popular control over the king’s government. Anyone reading the parliamentary debates of the early Stuart period will find the members of the House of Commons seemingly beside themselves with enthusiasm for the claim of James I to be God’s lieutenant. In speech after speech they would outdo one another in expounding the wisdom, perfection, and omnipotence of that pretentious monarch, abasing themselves so abjectly that one begins to wonder what they were up to. What they were up to, it quickly becomes apparent, was attributing to the king a godlike character that they could then ask him to live up to. They did not say, “The king is wise and good; therefore let us do what he wants.” Instead, they said, “The king is wise and good; therefore it stands to reason that he must want what we want.” The king’s perfection and divinity became a lever by which his subjects could direct and control him.
In popular governments—governments wherein authority derives from the people rather than from God—the fictions that enable the few to govern the many exalt, not the governors, but the people governed. And just as the exaltation of the king could be a means of controlling him, so the exaltation of the people can be a means of controlling them. Popular government is a much more complicated matter than kingly government and requires more complex fictions to sustain it. It requires us to believe, or act as if we believe, that the people, as a people, can make decisions and perform actions apart from their government, that they can authorize individuals to act in their name and can also limit, instruct, or otherwise control those individuals. To endow the people with these fictional powers was a delicate matter for those who first undertook it, because it had to be done without encouraging the simpleminded to mistake fiction for fact. A too plausible, too persuasive argument for popular authority might result in what was always deplored as “confusion”—that is, for the people (or rather some fraction of them) to take direct action in matters that were best left to their superiors. The men who first promoted popular government did not think they were striving for a government by the many over the many. They had strong ideas about who should govern, and they did not, to begin with at least, propose to meddle with the structure of the societies in which they themselves commanded positions near the top. In locating the source of authority in the people, they thought to locate its exercise in themselves. They intended to speak for a sovereign but silent people, as the king had hitherto spoken for a sovereign but silent God.
Their opponents—royalists and loyalists—were quick to point out the probable consequences of deriving authority from the people, namely, that men in the lowest ranks of society might break silence and accept the invitation that seemed to be extended to them. The loyalists and royalists turned out to be right; as time went on, more and more of the advocates of popular sovereignty faced the fact and actually came to welcome and even to seek the extension of popular participation in governmental processes. The history of popular government is a history of the successive efforts of different generations to bring the facts into closer conformity with the fiction, efforts that have transformed the very structure of society. But in the early stages of popular government the problem was to gain credence for the fiction without upsetting the patterns of deference, without upsetting the settled opinions of rank and degree that gave stability to society and that enabled the few to command the many not merely in acts of government but in all the transactions of daily life. This is the problem we can observe in the establishment of popular government in eighteenth-century England and America, the problem of reconciling the fictional sovereignty of the people with an actual hierarchical social order.
It is doubtless stretching things a little—indulging in a historical fiction, perhaps—to give the name “popular” to the government either of England or of its colonies in the eighteenth century. But both had a popular element, or one at least that claimed to represent the people and that already played a dominant role in government: the House of Commons in England and the representative assemblies in the colonies. After 1776, when all government in America was presumed to rest on the people, the change from royal to popular authority came about, in effect, as it later did in England (and had done briefly in the 1640s), by representative assemblies taking full command. Popular government in both England and America has been representative government, and representation is the principal fiction by which the larger fiction of popular sovereignty has been itself sustained.
II
Representation began in England as a mode of ensuring consent to the king’s government. The king summoned representatives from counties and boroughs to come to his Parliament armed with powers of attorney to bind their constituents to whatever taxes or laws they agreed to. The power of attorney had to be complete, a blank check, so that the representative could not plead that he had to go back and consult his constituents. His consent, given in Parliament, had to be as much theirs as if they had come in person. “As if.” Representation from the beginning was a fiction. If the representative consented, his constituents had to make believe that they had done so.
The way in which any group of subjects was first persuaded to pretend that one of them could substitute for all of them is not altogether clear. It is possible that originally a representative could consent only in the name of individuals who specifically empowered him and that those who did not, even though in the same community, were not bound by his actions. We can observe such a situation in the first representative assemblies gathered in the colony of Maryland in the 1630s. The royal charter to Lord Baltimore gave him power to govern Maryland as he saw fit, including the power to make laws, but it also required him to obtain the consent of the free men (liberorum hominorum) to whatever laws he made. Baltimore delegated his authority to a governor, and in the first year after the arrival of the settlers the governor apparently summoned the free men to get their consent, as prescribed, to a number of laws. We have no records for this assembly or of how many persons attended it. But for the next assembly, in 1638, the records show that some free men attended in person while others delegated representatives, each of whom was entitled to his own vote and also to all the votes of those who had selected him as their representative. He did not represent anyone who had not specifically and individually empowered him; and a man could even change his mind, revoke the assignment of his vote, and attend in person. Thus we find in the records on the second day of the meeting: “Came John Langford of the Ile of Kent gentleman…who had given a voice in the choice of Robert Philpott, gentleman, to be one of the Burgesses for the freemen of that Iland; and desired to revoke his voice and to be personally present in the Assembly; and was admitted.” One could also transfer one’s proxy, as it was called, from one man to another after the session began. Thus “Richard Lusthead desired to revoke his proxie [given to Richard Gannett] and was admitted and made Robert Clark his proxie.” The records imply that elections of representatives were held in particular neighborhoods, but those who voted against the winner were not bound to recognize him as their representative. Thus Cuthbert Fenwick came to the assembly and “claimed a voice as not assenting to the election of St. Mary’s burgesses and was admitted.”
The result was a politically bizarre situation: within the assembly some men had only their own vote, while others had the votes of all their proxies in addition to their own. On one occasion an aspiring politician named Giles Brent had enough proxies to constitute a majority of the assembly all by himself. In the 1640s the assembly was gradually reduced to a strictly representative body, with each community in the colony choosing, by majority rule, a representative who would stand for the whole community, including the minority of free men who had voted against him. And he would cast a single vote in the assembly, regardless of the size of the community he represented.
It is not certain that the original development of the fiction of representation in England followed this pattern. What seems clear is that when representatives ceased to be mere proxies for individuals, whether in England or in America, they represented distinct, geographically defined communities. In England they represented counties or boroughs. In Maryland and Virginia they represented plantations or hundreds or counties, in New England they represented towns, in the Carolinas parishes. It was possible to stretch the fiction of one man standing for another or for several others to the point where he stood for a whole local community. But, in England and America at least, the community was always geographically defined. It was the Isle of Kent or the borough of St. Mary’s; it was Shropshire or Staffordshire, Norwich or Bristol; it was never the worshipful company of grocers or cordwainers, never the tobacco farmers’ union or the association of shipowners. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the fiction of representation was sometimes explained and defended as a means by which all the different economic or social “interests” in a country had a voice in its government, but representation in England and America has never in fact been based on anything but geographically defined communities.
This local geographical definition seems to have been essential to the credibility of the fiction. Once again the early history of an American colony illustrates the point. The colony of Massachusetts was founded by a trading company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, in which the stockholders, designated as “freemen,” were empowered to meet four times a year in a “General Court,” to make laws for the company and for its colony, and to elect the officials of the company, i.e., a governor and eighteen “assistants.” The company was given power, like Lord Baltimore in Maryland, to govern the colony as it saw fit, but was not required to obtain the consent of the free men of the colony for its laws. The majority of the company, gathered in England, determined in 1629 to transfer the meeting place of the company to the colony itself, and once there the small number of freemen (stockholders) who had made the voyage opened their ranks to all orthodox male Puritan church members. They accompanied this move, however, with a transfer of legislative authority to the elected governor and assistants.
Now, the charter did not authorize such a delegation of the freemen’s legislative power. Neither did it offer to ordinary settlers who were not freemen, that is, who were not company members, any right to be consulted about the laws that the company might make. But in 1632, when the assistants, acting in their newly assigned legislative capacity, levied a tax, the people in Watertown refused to pay it, on the ground that the government did not have authority “to make laws or raise taxations without the people.” Governor John Winthrop explained to them that the assistants were like a parliament, that they were elected by the freemen and therefore could do the things that Parliament did in England.
This seems to have satisfied the people of Watertown for the moment, but in truth the assistants were not like a parliament, for they were elected at large and did not represent particular districts or towns. Apparently this fact was quickly recognized, for two months later Winthrop recorded, “Every town chose two men to be at the next court, to advise with the governour and assistants about the raising of a public stock, so as what they should agree upon should bind all.” Two years later the freemen of the towns revoked the legislative power of the assistants and insisted that all laws be made in the General Court, which was now to include representatives (“deputies”) elected by the freemen of each town. Non-freemen still did not share in the election, just as the majority of Englishmen were excluded from voting for members of Parliament, but this defect seems not to have affected the viability of the fiction. What was needed was not that every man, woman, and child share in the choice of a representative but that the choice be perceived as that of a geographical community. A representative had to represent the people of a particular place; he ceased to represent when he lost his local identification. A representative assembly had to be assembled. It had to be composed from the parts of the whole. The fiction would collapse if it was stretched to have all representatives chosen by all voters, even in so small a society as Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. The local character of representation was present at the beginning in England as well as in England’s colonies, and it has remained to this day essential to the credibility of the fiction.
Closely linked to the requirement that the representative be attached to a locality was a need that he be perceived as a subject of government. In order to represent other subjects he had to be himself a subject. The Massachusetts assistants, though annually elected and bound by the laws they enforced, were perceived as rulers, not ruled, just as the king and his appointed council, though bounded by law, were rulers, not ruled. King and council, governor and assistants, were there to exercise authority over the whole society, representatives were there to give the consent of their particular counties or towns or districts to what the rulers did. As we shall see, the distinction began to blur very early, but it remained an essential ingredient in the fiction of representation and in the way people thought about government. In Massachusetts the Reverend John Cotton, who was by no means simpleminded, thought that a political system that confounded rulers and ruled—that is, a democracy—was a contradiction in terms. “If the people be governors,” he asked, “who shall be governed?” And in his view and John Winthrop’s the representatives of the people, the deputies whom the various towns sent to the Massachusetts General Court after 1634, were subjects, mere substitutes for the people who chose them. Like the first representatives whom the king summoned to Parliament, they assembled in order to bind their local constituents to obey the laws and pay the taxes agreed upon at the center. The very act of consent identified them as subjects, and the consent they gave was the consent of the particular localities that they represented.
If representatives had been, or had remained, mere subjects—if they had been merely the agents of their constituents, empowered only to consent for other subjects to measures propounded by the authority of a government of which they were not strictly speaking a part—then the fiction of representation would have been a much simpler and more plausible matter than it has ever in fact been. It is possible that in England the House of Commons continued for some time after its inauguration to be considered in the way that its members so often pretended to consider it, as a gathering of mere subjects, representing various communities of subjects throughout the land. But the representatives very quickly began to act like something more than mere subjects. Not content to give or withhold consent to measures presented to them by the king and his council, they concocted measures of their own, presenting them as petitions to the king, but nevertheless in effect making governmental policy, making laws. Already by 1530 laws were regularly enacted “by authority” of Parliament.
The representatives who sat in the Commons in the seventeenth century, still protesting that they were mere subjects, for a time in the 1640s assumed all powers of government to themselves. And after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 there was no longer even the pretense that representatives were mere subjects. They were subjects, yes, but not mere subjects. If there was any doubt, the Revolution of 1688 resolved it.
Similarly, in the colonies, representative assemblies took the initiative in government almost from the beginning. In Maryland the free men and their proxies, even before representation was fully developed, did not wait for Lord Baltimore or his governor to present them with laws for passage: they made their own and presented them to him. In Massachusetts, once the General Court resumed legislative authority in 1634, there was no doubt that the representatives would share in that authority. But they went further. The General Court was the supreme judicial authority of the colony. Winthrop insisted that the deputies sent by the towns not share in this authority, because they were mere subjects; but the deputies demanded the right to sit in judgment on judicial matters, and they got their way. In Virginia the authority to make laws lay in the Virginia Company, resident in London, but the company called a representative assembly in the colony in 1619, and that assembly presented the company with a series of laws, which, with the company’s approval, became the first laws enacted by a representative assembly in America.
As soon as representatives began to make laws and policy for the larger society to which their communities belonged, they did not cease to be subjects but they ceased to be mere subjects. By the same token, though they did not cease to be the agents of local communities, they ceased to be merely that. The laws they made were to bind not only their own communities but the whole realm, the whole nation, the whole society. In making policy for the larger body, they had to think in different terms from the needs and desires of their localities; sharing regal authority, they had to think regally, to think for the nation rather than the neighborhood. The well-being of the whole society might be different from that of any one part or even from that of the sum of all the parts. Insofar as they assumed authority and directed their attention to whatever they perceived as the welfare of the whole, representatives necessarily lost something of their character as subjects and as local agents and took on the trappings of a national aristocracy or ruling class.
Logically this meant a transformation in the meaning of representation, but chronologically, historically, it was not so much a transformation as a paradox or conflict present in representation from the beginning or almost from the beginning. It is quite likely that the persons selected by a community to represent it in Parliament were from the outset those who could command the assent of that community by virtue of their own local power and prestige. It is not impossible that the first representatives to the House of Commons were self-selected, without benefit of an election, as in effect a large percentage of members came to be or still were in the eighteenth century. And the local character of borough representatives in the Commons was already vitiated by the fourteenth century when nonresident country gentry began to buy and bully their way into possession of borough seats, elbowing out local but lesser dignitaries. A statute of 1413 required that a representative be a resident of the borough that chose him, but the lawyers in the House of Commons quickly interpreted this to mean that he need not be a resident of the borough that chose him.
As representatives assumed the mantle of authority, they stretched the fiction of representation to justify the attenuation of their ties to local constituencies. It may be counted as a step in this direction when they began, as early as the fourteenth century, to argue that they collectively represented the whole realm and could give the consent of every Englishman to what they did in Parliament. The English Parliament had never contained representatives from every town or village community. Though every county sent representatives, only selected boroughs were required or allowed to do so. But Sir Thomas Smith was able to state as a truism in 1583 that “everie Englishman is entended to bee there [in Parliament] present…. And the consent of the Parliament is taken for everie mans consent.”
From this premise it was possible to argue, though it might require an unusual logic, that each representative could and must speak and act, not for the local community that chose him, but for all the people of the realm. Sir Edward Coke, who was good at this kind of logic, may have been the first to state the idea in so many words. “Though one be chosen for one particular County or Borough,” he said, “yet when he is returned and set in Parliament, he serveth for the whole Realm, for the end of his coming thither, as in the writ of his election appeareth, is generall.” From the fiction that one man may stand in the place of a whole community and bind that community by his actions, Coke had extrapolated the more extended fiction that one man may stand for the entire people of a country, most of whom have had no hand in designating him for that purpose. The classic statement of this notion was to come in the next century, when Edmund Burke explained to the electors of Bristol why he owed them nothing but the courtesy of listening to their wishes before acting as he thought best for the whole country. But already in Coke’s formulation we are very close to the point where representation becomes representative government. At the time when Coke wrote, whatever authority representatives could claim over other subjects presumably came from the king. But it was only a short step from representing the whole people to deriving authority from them.
When Englishmen took that step in the 1640s, they did not affirm the sovereignty of each county or borough. It did not even occur to them to think that way. They were replacing the authority of the king, and the king had been ruler of all England. It was not a question of particular counties or boroughs declaring their independence from his rule any more than it was particular towns or counties in his American colonies that declared independence in 1776. There would have been no logical barrier to thinking of the people of every village as a sovereign body, but that is not what happened. The people whose sovereignty was proclaimed were the whole people of the country or colony, far too numerous a group to deliberate or act as a body. It was their representatives who claimed for them the authority that only a representative body could exercise. The sovereignty of the people was not said to reside in the particular constituencies that chose the representatives, it resided in the people at large and reached the representatives without the people at large doing anything to confer it. Again, there would have been no logical barrier to having the people confer authority by a nationwide election at large of any number of men to serve as rulers, but that is not what happened. What happened is that representatives elected by particular counties and towns assumed powers of government over a whole country and claimed that their powers came from the sovereign people as a whole.
It would perhaps not be too much to say that representatives invented the sovereignty of the people in order to claim it for themselves, in order to justify not the resistance of their constituents but their own resistance to a formerly sovereign king. The sovereignty of the people was an instrument by which representatives raised themselves to the maximum distance above the particular set of people who chose them. In the name of the people they became all-powerful in government, shedding as much as possible the local, subject character that made them representatives.
As much as possible. The English Revolution actually went awry when the Long Parliament (1640–49) became too long, when the representatives declined to return to their constituents for reelection or rejection. The representative’s national authority cannot be magnified to the point of eliminating his identity as a local subject without at the same time destroying the fiction of representation and putting an end to representative government. The conflict cannot be eliminated; it has to be muted and contained. One element may be emphasized over the other at different times and places, and the history of representative government may be read as a dialectical process in which one element rises or falls at the expense of the other. But if either is wholly missing, representative government either ceases to be government or ceases to be representative. When the local, subject character of the representative is emphasized too much, it becomes difficult to perceive him as a proper repository of the national authority with which the sovereign people have supposedly invested him. When his national function as ruler of the whole people is emphasized, he may lose credibility as the spokesman of other subjects in his local community. The fiction of representation has to sustain a continual strain from opposite directions.
The dimensions of the conflict have not always been apparent even to those engaged in it, but we may perceive it in operation at an early stage in the English republican theorist Algernon Sidney’s explanation of the representative’s national authority. “It is not,” Sidney argued in the early 1680s,
for Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone, but for the whole nation, that the members chosen in those places are sent to serve in Parliament; and though it be fit for them as friends and neighbours (so far as may be) to hearken to the opinions of the electors, for the information of their judgments,…yet they are not strictly and properly obliged to give account of their actions to any, unless the whole body of the nation for which they serve, and who are equally concerned in their resolutions, could be assembled. This being impracticable, the only punishment to which they are subject, if they betray their trust, is scorn, infamy, hatred, and an assurance of being rejected, when they shall again seek the same honour.
Sidney here takes pains to distinguish the representative’s obligations to the whole nation from his obligations to the electors who choose him as their agent. Yet he relies on the electors to remove him if he betrays his trust. What trust? The trust reposed in him by Kent or Sussex, by Lewis or Maidstone? No, the trust reposed in him by the whole body of the nation, which cannot be assembled for removing him—and by the same token was never assembled for entrusting him in the first place. If he betrays the trust so mysteriously placed in him, he is supposed to be subject to scorn, infamy, and hatred. But whose? Is it not likely that the man who wins scorn, infamy, and hatred from the rest of the nation may win praise, fame, and love in Kent or Sussex, in Lewis or Maidstone? And conversely the man who is faithful to his trust for the nation may win scorn, infamy, and hatred in Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone.
Sidney was not troubled by this contingency and would probably have responded to it, as he did to other objections, that while a representative assembly was not infallible, nevertheless “a house of commons composed of those who are best esteemed by their neighbours in all the towns and counties of England” would at least be less “subject to error or corruption than such a man, woman, or child as happens to be next in blood to the last king.” In the worst possible case, in other words, a group of men popularly chosen, however strong their local attachments and whatever their weaknesses, are a safer repository of power than a hereditary king.
Because representative government rests on conflicting fictions, or on a single fiction with glaring internal contradictions, it has often required such left-handed defenses. It is a pis aller, better than the alternatives. But Sidney’s ignoring of the possible conflict between local and national interests is a reminder that representative government, in order to work, in order to mute the conflict within the fiction, requires that the different communities represented be able and willing most of the time and on most issues to perceive their own local interests as being involved in, if not identical with, the interests of the larger society.
That perception was more easily sustained while the authority of government was derived from the king than when the representative body professed to derive it from the people at large. When authority came from the king, government was palpably something other, a force against which representatives protected their constituents or to whose actions they effectively bound themselves and their constituents. Representatives, like those they represented, could be thought of as acted upon rather than as actors.
Moreover, that authority itself was less likely to be swayed by any combination of local interests. A king might become a tyrant, pursuing his own interests rather than those of his subjects. But he was not as likely as the majority in a representative assembly to place the interests of particular parts of his realm above the interests of others or of the whole. Because the monarch was less likely to be geographically partial, there was less need than in popular governments for every community to have its own representatives to protect its special interests against those of other communities. Protection was needed, rather, against the more general danger of arbitrary government by the monarch, and this could be furnished by one set of representative subjects as effectively as by another.
Before representatives took over full command of government, there was accordingly little agitation by excluded communities for inclusion in the representative body. The great expansion of representation in Parliament in the sixteenth century came not because of demands by formerly excluded communities but because the rising and expanding gentry wanted seats in the House of Commons. Many of Parliament’s so-called rotten boroughs were rotten at their creation, incorporated only to give some aspiring gentleman a seat. Similarly the expansion of the electorate in the seventeenth century was not the product of a demand by the unenfranchised. It was in part an accident of inflation, which reduced the value of the property qualification for voting (established in 1430) and in part the result of contests for seats, in which an ambitious candidate brought unqualified voters to the polls and then succeeded in having their votes legitimized by Parliament. In other words, while authority was derived from the king, the expansion both of the suffrage and of representation in Parliament came from the top down, through the desire of members of an elite class for a share in the king’s authority. In the colonies, where the king’s authority was diluted by distance and representatives were correspondingly more powerful (in fact if not in theory), there was somewhat more concern about extending representation equitably. But even here, in Pennsylvania and in the southern colonies, where representation was most inequitable, there seems to have been little concern about the matter until shortly before the Revolution.
When the king’s authority was removed, as it was in England during the Commonwealth period (1649–60) and in America after 1776, the conflict of local interests with the sovereignty of the people at large became much more evident. In a Parliament where representatives chosen by a handful of voters had total authority over communities that could not vote at all, there were immediate demands for a more rational and equitable way of exercising the newfound sovereignty of the people. And a rational plan of parliamentary representation in England was in fact adopted in the Commonwealth period, only to be abandoned for nearly another two centuries after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. And in the independent American states after 1776 the apportionment of representation became a major concern, because particular communities and regions feared that without adequate representation they would not be adequately protected from their sovereign compatriots.
In this transformation, government remained, as it had to, something other, something external to the local community; but that something was no longer a king. It was now the representative body itself, or at least the representatives of other localities, acting rather than acted upon, exercising an authority derived from a people who could not exercise it themselves. With the authority of representatives thus magnified, it became all the more important to each community that its particular representatives retain a local identity and outlook and all the more important to every community to have representatives. Thus, just when representatives assumed larger responsibilities and larger authority, they were brought under greater local pressures to retain their local, subject character.
The Commonwealth experiment in England was too brief and inconclusive to reveal fully the strains that popular sovereignty placed on the fiction of representation. Even so, James Harrington, the most astute, if the most tedious, political philosopher of the period, sensed the problem when he attempted to divide the functions of representation between two bodies, both elected by local constituencies. Harrington envisaged a small senate or upper house, which would have the sole power to formulate policy for the nation by initiating all legislation. A much larger lower house would then pass upon the senate’s proposals, accepting or rejecting but with no power to alter or amend or to initiate legislation by itself. In effect, the senate would exercise the national, authoritarian function of representation—the powers that had once emanated from the king—while the lower house would exhibit the local, subject character.
Harrington’s proposal was, of course, never tried in England, but it was attempted in the Carolinas and in Pennsylvania. It failed for the foreseeable reason that the lower house was in no case content with half of the representative functions. The conflict therefore remained, in the colonies as in England. In England it was successfully muted until the great reforms of the nineteenth century. And in the colonies it was easily contained while authority continued to derive from the king. But the American Revolution brought it to an acute stage. As soon as the colonies substituted the authority of the people for what was left of the king’s authority, they had to contend with the danger that locally oriented representatives, in exercising the new authority, would favor one region over another or would sacrifice large-scale needs to parochial prejudice. And the danger was magnified by the nature of the quarrel with England that had preceded independence.
III
The Americans’ quarrel with England began, as everyone knows, with the attempt of Parliament to tax the colonists. When the colonists insisted that they could not be taxed by a body in which they were not represented, England maintained that they were represented—represented by men whom they had never seen or heard of. People from Massachusetts to Georgia were represented by men chosen for them by a handful of voters in the boroughs and counties of England.
This was carrying the fiction of representation too far from the facts, destroying altogether its local character. The fiction collapsed, and with its collapse the local character of representation emerged as a cardinal American principle. In resolutions, declarations, and petitions the colonists reiterated their conviction that the people of a particular locality could be represented only by someone whom they themselves had elected and empowered. By the time the colonial assemblies threw off English control in 1776, they were so firmly committed to this principle that any attempt to temper it appeared as a betrayal of the Revolution.
To be sure, the several colonial assemblies had to act together on a continental scale in order to make their bid for independence. But the Continental Congress in which they joined to do it was not a representative assembly. Since most of the members were chosen by the state legislatures, both before and after the Articles of Confederation of 1781, the Congress was an assembly, not of representatives, but of representatives of representatives. Since representatives could not properly transfer their powers, the Congress did not and could not have the powers that only popular election could confer. The only true representatives in America sat in the state assemblies.
And there they displayed their local attachments all too clearly. In most states, after independence, the number of representatives in the assembly was increased and the size of constituencies reduced, thus weakening still further the orientation and obligation of each representative to the larger whole. As the number of a representative’s constituents fell, representation became less fictional. Government moved closer to the people, but in doing so became less capable of exercising authority effectively, consistently, and sensibly for a whole colony, let alone a whole country.
Those who rescued American representative government from this predicament by means of the Constitution of 1787 restored the fictional purpose of representation—namely, to persuade the many to accept the government of the few. And they did it by an additional fiction. They invented the American people, a fictional body comprising all the people of the whole nation, endowed with sovereign powers superior to those of the people of any state or of all the states.
It was not one of those inventions for which the world was unprepared. The Revolution had created a fund of national feeling and a whole class of people who had committed their lives and fortunes to a common cause that seemed to be dissolving in victory. James Madison and his high Federalist friends at the Philadelphia convention drew on that feeling to gain credence for their new fiction—an American people capable of empowering an American national government.
Earlier efforts to correct the defects of the state governments had centered on giving greater powers to the upper houses of the bicameral legislatures, or to the executives, of the several states. But these had proved ineffective. Representative assemblies still dominated the state governments and retained their ascendancy by virtue of their perceived closeness to their local constituents. It was the Federalists’ aim to give to a national government, led by a select few, a claim to higher representative power than the mobbish state assemblies possessed. In order to reach their goal, they had to persuade Americans to accept representation on a scale hitherto unknown. The representative assembly of the national government, directly elected by popular votes, would be smaller in size than most of the state assemblies, 65 men to represent nearly 4 million. (Georgia, with a population of 82,000, had an assembly of 84 representatives; Connecticut, with a population of 238,000, had an assembly of 171.) The national representatives would have such large constituencies that they would lose much of their local character—and would gain, it was hoped, a larger vision along with larger power. With the authority of the newly sovereign American people behind them, they would be able to overcome the shortsightedness of the state governments.
It was touch-and-go whether Americans would accept the new configurations of fictions. Antifederalists cried out that the new representation was no representation at all, that national representatives would be too remote from their constituents, no better than the specious representatives the colonists had been told they had in Parliament. But the Antifederalists lost. Americans suspended their disbelief. The idea of representation recovered the fictional qualities it had been losing in the state governments, and the few were thereby enabled to govern the many without recourse to violence. The fictions of popular sovereignty embodied in the federal Constitution may have strained credulity, but they did not break it. Madison’s invention worked. It still does.