Political theory: Notes on the meaning of Guizot

Lecture 18 (p. 359) – wants to know about the division of legislative power.
- The philosophical school and the “other” school of thought
- Guizot has a “these people are stupid,” attitude towards what others are doing in history and philosophical
o What is it the philosophical school lacks that history has?
§ History has facts.
§ Guizot likes facts because what happened always happened, and the knowledge doesn’t change about the facts.
§ But facts by themselves are meaningless because you need a frame of reference to understand the facts.
§ Philisophical school is correct in using the Right as its end but also as its starting point
o
- What is Guizot’s problem with Rousseau?
o Rousseau is almost right
o Rousseau says that everyone has certain rights that cannot be restricted and that cannot be taken away
o Rousseau then says that the whole point of having certain rights that cannot be restricted means that people always give their consent to being governed.
o Guizot says - this is almost right
o He says that some people believe in representation, and since you voted for people who represent you, you have to accept everything they do –
§ Is this a good idea? No. Why? Just because you delegated things to someone, doesn’t mean that you have to like what they are doing – you need to hold them accountable.
§ Guizot says there are two things about representation: either the person who is elected is the slave to the electorate; or the electorate is the slave to the representative.
§ These won’t work – and so there is a problem with this because it takes away the will of someone.
§ Chapter 6, 7, and 8 of Part 1 – wants to divide things up
· Says that classifying things according to their external forms (government by the many, the few or the one) is error because sovereignty always belongs to some of the people, but not all of the people.
· P. 52 – ‘The classification which I am about to present……do not belong to our imperfect nature.” What is good for society isn’t always the thing that is done, because sometimes you may not do it because you don’t want to, or may not know what it is. So how do you make this thing into a principle of government? So that people put the needs of the society above the needs of the one?
o UNITY
o Pg. 53 – “Representative Government is….”
o Guizot says that having one republic is best – so England is the best example.
o There was no getting together in the woods to discern a social contract; instead something else happens
- Guizot’s history of England doesn’t start with the history of England – it starts with William the Conquerer who founded England and had the Tories (authority and tradition) and the Wicks (liberty); Tory – all power was vested in the King by God, and so even though the king has been letting things go, we should give him power.
- William doesn’t get all the power when he conquers - You had 2 people who were barbarians, but who had institutions that lasted for 100’s of years (the Normans)
- There is a division among aristocrats – some of them become rich and powerful and surround the king; some of them stay on their local turf because they are weaker.
- History is not the history of everyone, it is the history of actors (people who influence society on the political stage) – and most people are not actors because they don’t have freedom (politically or economically) and they are not doing anything. Free people require economic interests – if you are weak, you cannot resist.
- The barons – the rich aristocrats – want the kings to sign charters because the kings are abusing the barons. And the barons get the kings to sign the charters because they steal their sons, etc…..then when the barons leave the king ignores the charters…then the barons come back and get him to sign another charter….then the king ignores it…
- This history shows (for Guizot) that England went from a balanced power to an absolute king, then to trying to fix the problem…………so you can see from above, that there needs to be power to force the king to enforce the charters instead of doing things in an ad hoc fashion.
- People who are really poor have no power. Cities collapsed (like London) after the invasion and they became poorer so they had no power to stand up to the king or anyone else.
- But then the cities started growing more powerful – and the barons and the kings wanted them as their ally.
- If you have too powerful of an ally, you might become the subservient person rather than the dominant party in the alliance.
- So the king invited the barons, those who no longer attended court, and those representatives of the cities to advise him
- This is the history of the three part government in England
- The government of England has to be established based on the facts of the situation, and cannot be simply established in the forrest.
- Guizot says that everyone is not free to use their will (Children, mentally insane, mentally retarded) – parents don’t have free reign over their children, but there are responsibilities that arise out of things other than love.
- But in the history of England, it shows that there needs to be insitutitons to support and enforce the charters and those institutions need to be filled with people who have the inclination to be there and so that people cannot simply take power over others because they want to or rule based on their will.
- The determination is never final – you will not get representative government in a place where people do not have to prove themselves again in the future.
o Guizot is interested in publicity, elections because it requires everyone in power to go out and prove they are worthy of being in power again
o It is a constant deliberation and re-deliberation about whether the people in power are right and whether the laws are right
o It is never a final determination
o The search for the true Right is one that is continually going on
o It is the only way you can do it when people don’t know the law and have the willingness to follow the law all the time – because people are ignorant and not angels.
- So what does Britain do that almost makes them have a deliberative democracy?
o They have divided powers (Ch. 18 Part 2)
§ The 3 parts Britain has are a result of history – the great inequality of economics and power – House of Lords, House of Commons and the Kings
o Power doesn’t have to be divided that way, but it does have to be divided enough to have a 3-sided conflict to keep things in balance
o The other thing you need are decent rules of election
§ We are going to draw these from Britain’s fact, but they will show philosophical rules of Right
§ Britain ends up with election almost randomly: See his list of facts
§ Object of election is to obtain the most capable and best men in the country
· There is no real publicity when something is too big
· The community has to be small enough that you know the truth of who you are voting for and what is going on
o England discovers this by accident – counties and cities developed so small “the force of events”
o England lucked out

o So what does history offer, he says it become practical? What does that mean?
o The study of history never grows old – the old facts have new things discovered in them that were never revealed until now
o He says that history sn’t jus a random study of facts
§ He studies representative government because he wants to do something with it
§ And because all of Europe is developing representative government and so this is something history must be striving towards something/ that history is progressing.
§ Surprising idea – Europe has been tring to establish an idea of representation that works. England’s history is the history of moving from the tribal to the incredible inequality to move towards limits on absolute power of the king (charters/meetings etc),
· All of Europe is trying to do this, and everywhere is stinking except for England.
· So there must be something about England that is exceptional

Political theory and Guizot; Representation

Guizot is writing at a time when all of Europe is trying to develop representative government. Some places are failing, and some are failing miserably. During this time, Guizot sees that England almost has a real representative government. He wonders what it is about England that is enabling it to succeed in a representative government when the other countries in Europe are failing. In order to complete this study, Guizot looks at two things: representation and why the history of a political government is important to understand it.
Guizot wants to discover the meaning of the word “representation” as applied to the government of a community. He rejects the notion that “representation” can have a definition that is separate from the facts which surround the desire to define it. In this case, Guizot wants to define representation based in the surroundings of a representative system of government – The creation of Parliament in the English system.
Guizot says that the definition of representation, actually a doctrine of representation, is philosophical. He says that the doctrine starts from the principle that “Truth, reason, and justice – in one word, the divine law – alone possess rightful power (p295).” Guizot goes on to state that the way a society perceives this divine law, based on all the history it has gone through, creates “just ideas” within a society. These just ideas accompany loyal wills. However, just ideas and loyal wills are dispersed throughout society unequally. The distribution is based on the attributes of the individual. Each individual will have part of the just idea and loyal will within them.
Therefore, the concern of the society should be to collect all the fragments of just ideas and loyal wills and bring them into a whole and constitute a government. For Guizot, this is representation. It is the means to arrive at a government which will be legitimate. In order for this government to be legitimate it must subject itself to the reason of the individuals (meaning the decision of the individuals who have part of the just ideas and loyal will within them), over and over again. The process is never complete, but continues for as long as the government continues to be legitimate.
Guizot believes that representation cannot be understood in a country without also understanding the history of a country. Remember that Guizot believes in representation as a doctrine, a process – not simply some ideal. Earlier in his book Guizot stated that all fact, all history, is important to understand what comes next and that nothing happens in a vacuum. This means that, for Guizot, the formation of a representative government in a country cannot be understood without understanding the facts and the history in the country. Unlike Rousseau and others, Guizot does not place the start of a government, even a representative government, in the middle of a forest without any preconceived ideas or needs. Instead, Guizot starts from the notion that each man is not completely open to their own will, but instead recognizes that there are several laws – he calls them divine laws – that must be obeyed regardless. Guizot classifies these laws a truth, justice and morality.
For Guizot, representation is examined, for its definition, when it came into being – at the establishment of the English Parliament. For Guizot, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the English Parliament – the abuse of charters by the king – helps shape the form of representation that England ends up with, and can offer clues as to how others can get it as close to “correct” as England has done.
England has a history of having small towns/localities. Therefore, when the House of Commons, one of the three parts of the English representative government and the lower house in the English Parliament, came into being, it brought with it the “small town” representatives. There are advantages to having a small area which a person must represent. Guizot states that the representatives of the people must consistently justify themselves and that election, publicity and responsibility (the three institutions which allow individuals to reason whether the people they have chosen as representatives should still remain their representatives) are easier to achieve in a smaller population and geographical area. The small towns of England have this in their advantage. In small towns, so the stereotype goes, people know each other, talk to each other and can trust/verify the activities of other members of the town. If a small town’s representative was to do something against what the small town wanted, publicity would easily bring it to the attention of the town members. Bringing things to the attention of the town members increases in difficulty as the town grows. California’s system of having only 40 state senators for the whole population is opposite of Guizot’s ideal situation. The larger the area, the harder it is to have open elections, responsibility, and the harder it is to publicize information about the representative and what they are doing. For Guizot, size matters.
England maintained this history of having small groups of people choose their own representatives from the first time they were asked to send representatives to the King. The King asked for representatives from the cities, the small closely-knit communities, to advise him along with the barons when it seemed as if the cities might gain too much power. By bringing in local representatives to advise him, along with the traditional nobility advisors, the King founded the basis for the three-part division of power in England: The monarch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
This three-part division of power arose in England because of the great inequalities of economics and power among the nobility and the commoners, and even among the various factions of nobility. For Guizot it is this three-sided balance of power, and how it came about, that makes England the example for representative government. Although Guizot does acknowledge that representative government doesn’t have to be structured exactly like England, but that there should be three sides to the power struggle so that one side cannot overwhelm the others. Whether a representative government ends up like England or with another system will largely, according to Guizot, be based in the historical influence of the actual country.
Guizot uses the history of England to say that representation is a continuing process. For Guizot, this process, representation, isn’t simply an ideal; it is a constantly occurring justification of the legitimacy of the government and is aimed at bringing together everyone in the interests of just ideals. England happened upon many of these things by chance, simply because its history influenced events; like the King inviting representatives from the city (precursor to the House of Commons) to advise him. Facts in context make history, and since England is the closest thing to a true representative government Guizot can observe, Guizot uses England’s facts, its history, to explain the doctrine of representation and the relationship of representation to history and representative government.