Reflections on the BIAPT Annual Conference

Edinburgh Climate Change Institute. Image Rachel Hammersley

On a dark and bitterly cold morning in January I literally slipped and skidded down my street in order to catch a train to Edinburgh for the British and Irish Association of Political Thought conference. Despite BIAPT holding an annual conference since 2008 - and its forerunner the Political Thought Conference dating back to the early 1970s - I am ashamed to say it was the first I have attended. Given how interesting and thought-provoking the papers were, I hope it will not be my last.

Unfortunately the demands of work and home meant that I was only able to attend the first day of this three-day event. I was sorry to miss what looked like some excellent papers on the Thursday and Friday. This means that the comments below focus only on those papers I attended on Wednesday 7th January. The conference was held at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and topics such as climate change, environmental political theory and ecology featured prominently in the programme, but my only engagement with that topic came via the first keynote.

Hugo Grotius, by Willem Jacobsz Delff, after Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 26250. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

One of the recurring themes that spoke to my interests was popular sovereignty. It was explored in detail in the panel entitled 'Visions of the People'. Dario Castiglione explored the majority principle and its relationship to democracy and popular sovereignty. He emphasised the historical importance of majority rule in non-democratic - and even non-political - contexts, noting that many of those discussing the topic today forget this history, tending to see majority rule as specific to democratic government. He explained that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries majority rule was often used for collective decision-making in private contexts, for example in legal or business settings. He also helpfully highlighted some of the issues with majority rule explored by early modern thinkers. These included: the epistemic problem of whether majority rule produces the best result for the community; why and how the majority comes to represent all voters; and on what grounds minorities are obliged to obey the majority. Castiglione noted that in Roman Law the sense that the majority represented the whole group was a legal fiction. For some it can be justified simply on the grounds of numbers or force, but seventeenth-century natural law theorists sought a more robust justification. For Hugo Grotius and John Locke while majority rule was not natural, it was rational. For Locke, it was also moral, since it encompassed both respect for all - in allowing all to contribute to the collective decision - and the opportunity for agency (which the use of sortition would not). By contrast Samuel Pufendorf and Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered a different account, suggesting that majority rule was not rational but rather a matter of convention. Castiglione's argument was that there is a missing element to these discussions, derived from the notion of fraternity or solidarity, which can help to show how and why the minority remains part of the community despite their will not becoming law.

James Harris took as his starting point Philip Pettit's recent book The State, and the argument Pettit develops there about how and why the people as a body can have collective powers (both constitutional and extra-constitutional) against the state. In challenging Thomas Hobbes's view that it is incoherent to imagine the people as a body acting against the state, Pettit distinguishes between three understandings of 'the people': the unincorporated people ('the multiple citizens considered independently of the polity they form' (Philip Pettit, The State. Princeton University Press. 2023, p. 212)); the incorporated people (the people as a corporate body - effectively the state itself); and his own third conception which he calls 'the people incorporating' or the people in a properly political guise - embodying their potential for joint action (Pettit, The State, p. 212). James was unconvinced by this move, but it did generate interesting discussion on the relationship between the people and the state and just how popular sovereignty can be exercised.

The final paper on the panel, by Camila Vergara, approached popular sovereignty and the people from yet another direction, in examining the origins and development of two distinct versions of modern populism. The first, which she traces back to Mikhail Bakunin, reflects plebeian resistance to oligarchic domination. The second, which has its roots in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, is characterised by ethno-nationalism. Whereas for Bakunin, nationality was irrelevant, with the people's interests and their experience of exclusion and oppression transcending national boundaries, Schmitt saw the nation as key, with citizens sharing a common cultural identity. The consequences of these different visions, Camilla argued, are stark, where Bakunin's model is the basis for popular revolution and emancipation through the establishment of bottom-up federative networks, that of Schmitt is used to legitimise state power and disable any exercise of power from below.

Camilla and I had also discussed popular sovereignty on an earlier panel that focused on Arthur Ghins's forthcoming book The People's Two Powers. Here the emphasis was on the relationship between popular sovereignty and public opinion. As Arthur explained, these concepts have conventionally been studied separately but the relationship between them is itself important. Where popular sovereignty is a means by which the people engages in decision-making, generally via voting, public opinion provides an opportunity for the people to express influence via media such as clubs, newspapers and petitions. Arthur's book traces the different understanding of the relationship between these two concepts offered by various thinkers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. He demonstrates that as the century progressed there was a general move towards a position in which popular sovereignty was limited to the election of representatives, with public opinion providing the main opportunity for the people to influence politics between elections. Tracing the relationship between these two concepts across one hundred years of French thought he came to the striking conclusion that while we see public opinion as intrinsically democratic (and as a key component of 'Liberal Democracy') it was originally deployed in the 1790s and early nineteenth century against a version of representative democracy which emphasised popular sovereignty.

This aspect of Arthur's book points towards a second general theme that was explored in a number of the papers I heard - the problem of baked-in principles or assumptions stymying the efficacy of particular concepts. Arthur showed the extent to which modern liberal democracy is inherently anti-plebeian by exploring its origins. Public opinion is emphasised over popular sovereignty and the latter is understood as involving nothing more than the periodic election of representatives. At the same time for many of the thinkers he has studied public opinion was subject to elite control and even manipulation.

The Panel entitled 'Is Civility Reactionary' looked at a different 'baked-in assumption' namely the notion that civility is inherently conservative. As all three speakers noted, the literature on civility and incivility tends to be sharply divided, with formalists praising civility as a social lubricant while critics view civility as an instrument of social control and a means of preventing dissent. All three panellists challenged this view, arguing that there is a role for civility, as Carole Gayet-Viaud put it, as a living part of democratic culture. While the three speakers had the same overall aim and understood the existing literature in similar ways, the research and observations behind each paper were distinct. Gayet-Viaud is motivated by her ethnographic work on urban public life and especially the experiences of women in these settings. Bice Maiguashaca grounded her case in the experience of feminist movements and their use of techniques of solidarity and prefiguration both of which present an alternative to the eruptive and insurrectionary model of incivility emphasised in the literature. Suzanne Whitten's work on Northern Ireland has highlighted to her the importance of civility in building and sustaining a shared life for communities living in post-conflict societies. She explored the idea of plural civilities - of the need for a common set of civility norms in addition to (rather than instead of) the in-group civility norms of different communities, and she explored the ways in which these have to be carefully developed in order to build trust.

In her opening keynote address, Alyssa Battistoni explored another example of baked-in assumptions stymying progress - the commonplace that capitalism, and therefore our current political economy and political theory, are inherently antithetical to environmental perspectives. She began by setting out the view, expressed by many in the field, that climate change presents a challenge to political theory as a discipline; that the terms and categories are not adequate to address the problems it poses and that what is, therefore, required is its fundamental rethinking. While not entirely unsympathetic to this view, Battistoni mounted a strong response to it. She argued that we do not have time for a complete rethinking of political theory, the pressing nature of climate change is simply not compatible with an overhaul of our terms, concepts, and ideologies. Rather we need to do what is possible with what we have to hand. Moreover, she insisted that the history of political thought actually offers rich resources to help us deal with those issues. This is reflected in Battistoni's own recent book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, which draws on the history of political economy, and especially Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, to understand the relationship between nature and the human world. The book offers a diagnosis of why capitalism fails to address ecological matters, because of the capitalist understanding of natural resources as free gifts.

Of course offering diagnoses is one thing, taking action is another. This question of the practical relevance of political thinking was a third theme I identified across the papers I attended. Battistoni addressed this directly, acknowledging that the relationship between understanding and practical transformation is complex. There are limits to what academic political theory can do, and academic research rarely does the work of politics. Moreover, academic work and activism are directed at different audiences and have different underlying aims. Writing a book will achieve some things, she argued, but it does not and cannot achieve others. Nonetheless Battistoni was clear that the two can and do inform each other. This sense of there being a symbiotic relationship between academic work and activism was reflected in several other papers. The papers on civility offered a model in which practice informs thinking (challenging the very notion of civility as inherently reactionary) and the resulting theorising then helps to shape future practice. Similarly Camila Vergara's paper demonstrated how understanding the origins and development of different versions of populism has relevance for how we deal with those movements today. Despite the current state of the world, I left the conference reassured that political theory remains vibrant and convinced that, while it cannot offer simple solutions to today's pressing problems, it can help us to understand them more clearly.

Liberty as Independence

It is now over thirty years since I was an undergraduate. Even so I remember clearly how impressed I was by Quentin Skinner's ability to fill a large lecture theatre at 9am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings for his lectures on Liberty. It was clear why he succeeded in doing so; his lectures were rich, thought-provoking, and eloquent.

Skinner's most recent book, Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal marks the culmination of almost four decades of his thinking about the topic (though, of course, he has written on many other subjects in the meantime). This blogpost offers my reflections on a recent symposium to celebrate the book, that took place at Cambridge University

The idea of liberty as independence is grounded in the crucial distinction, set out in the Digest of Roman law, between a freeman and a slave. A slave is understood as being dependent on the will of their master and, therefore, constantly subject to that person's arbitrary will, whether or not they are physically constrained. By contrast, a freeman is not dependent on the arbitrary will of anyone else. In political terms, this requires living under the rule of law and having some input into the making of those laws. This understanding of liberty contrasts with what we might think of as the modern 'liberal' view, by which it is defined as an absence of impediments or restraint

Liberty as independence was initially closely linked to the Roman republican tradition - indeed it has often been labelled 'republican liberty'. Yet, as Liberty as Independence articulates, it was broader than that. In the first place, many of its advocates also incorporated into their thinking a crucial element of what Eric Nelson has presented as an alternative Greek tradition in republican thought. From this point of view, it is important to be free not only externally from the arbitrary will of other human beings, but also internally from one's own passions. Skinner presents this in a Roman rather than a Greek guise, citing Cicero's claim that 'A free man' knows how to 'govern his affections and desires' (Quentin Skinner, Liberty as Independence, Cambridge University Press, p. 19). Skinner also clearly demonstrates that this understanding of liberty was widely adopted in early modern Europe, not just by advocates of republicanism but also by monarchomach theorists, ancient constitutionalists, and advocates of theories of natural rights - including John Locke.

Liberty as Independence focuses on Britain in the century or so between the Glorious Revolution and the American and French Revolutions, when this view of liberty was dominant. It was adopted not only by the Court Whigs (who claimed to have transformed it into a reality) but also by many of their real Whig and their Jacobite opponents. The book then examines the process by which liberty as independence came to be eclipsed by the notion of liberty as an absence of restraint. This had been articulated by Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s, but only rose to hegemonic status in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions. The question Skinner poses at the end of the book is whether this shift marks a moral gain or a loss.

Statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau outside the Pantheon in Paris. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

James Harris's paper at the Symposium, 'No democracy, no Liberty', centred on a fundamental tension at the heart of the idea of liberty as independence. It requires that the  people have influence on or give consent to the laws by which they are governed, implying a close link with democracy. At the same time, however, to the extent that democracy operates by majority rule, some individuals will find themselves subject to a decision with which they do not agree. And on this account of freedom, that renders them unfree. This tension was explored in Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on America - where democracy is presented as necessarily posing a threat to liberty. It was also addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spoke of the need for individuals to be 'forced to be free' by coming to recognise the general will as their own (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later political writings. ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 53). Yet neither Rousseau's squaring of the circle, nor the Anti-Federalist solution of a bill of rights, seems a satisfactory answer to the problem.

Both Jessica Patterson's paper and my own considered how the theory of liberty as independence might help us to think about the debates over citizen militias that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Jessica highlighted the importance of 1780 for the doctrine of liberty as independence. In the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence - in which the colonists deployed this doctrine to justify separation from Britain - it was also used by advocates of reform in Britain and by opponents of the slave trade. It was particularly salient in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots of June 1780, which saw several days of rioting in London in opposition to the passing of the Papists Act (1778). To quell the disturbance, King George III eventually brought in 10,000 soldiers who fired on the crowd without first reading the Riot Act. While estimates vary, at least 200 people were killed and many others injured. For some at the time, including the Orientalist and reformer William Jones, this demonstrated why it was dangerous to be dependent on the arbitrary will of a ruler. In the aftermath of the Riots he published An Inquiry into the legal mode of suppressing riots with a constitutional plan for future defence, in which he argued that the solution to the threat posed to liberty by this sort of arbitrary power was to arm the citizen body. Jessica went on to highlight the influence of these ideas in the nineteenth century in the writings of Chartists, Owenites and Marxists

Sir William Jones by James Heath, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1799. National Portrait Gallery. NPG D36735. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

My paper too focused on citizen militias, William Jones, and his Inquiry. But where Jessica looked forward to the nineteenth century, I examined these late eighteenth-century arguments in the context of the 'Standing Army debate' of the 1690s. This was sparked by William III's decision to maintain his armed force after the Treaty of Ryswick had brought an end to the Nine Years' War. A number of real Whig commentators objected that a standing army constituted a threat to the liberty of the nation, and argued for the use of a citizen militia as a defensive force. It was these arguments that were revived by William Jones and other members of the Society for Constitutional Information in the 1780s. They reprinted several key tracts from the 1690s debate, as well as producing works of their own on the subject, including Jones's Inquiry and John Cartwright's The Commonwealth in Danger (1795). Jones, Cartwright, and others argued that ordinary citizens should be armed and trained militarily. Moreover this was presented as an essential counterpart to parliamentary reform, including the establishment of universal suffrage. This was, no doubt, an alarming prospect to many, and perhaps contributed to the displacing of liberty as independence by liberty as freedom from restraint at the end of the eighteenth century

Richard Price by Thomas Holloway after Benjamin West, 1793. National Portrait Gallery NPG D5556. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Niall O'Flaherty's paper, 'Against Absolutism: Measuring Liberty in a Constitutional Crisis', also argued that Liberty as Independence sheds light on the political debates of the 1780s and 1790s: both by acknowledging the importance to those debates of natural jurisprudence, and by demonstrating the shared ideology of the Whigs in the eighteenth century. In addition, Niall emphasised the value of Chapter 5 of the book, which draws on novels by Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett, focusing on their critiques of the unchecked power exercised by local justices. Niall argued that this highlights the importance of local government at this time, and the fact that the tyranny exercised over the poor was often discussed in political rather than moral terms. Here, the connection between the local and the national, and between the history of political thought and other branches of history, are illustrated. Niall also noted that one consequence of this broad commitment to liberty as independence was a range of views on what constituted 'arbitrary power'. Benjamin Hoadly, in the early eighteenth century, allowed a large degree of discretionary powers for the executive (as necessary to curb the Jacobite threat), whereas later figures, like Richard Price and Thomas Paine, insisted on fewer discretionary powers - or even none at all. Finally, Niall wondered about the motivations behind the shift from liberty as independence to liberty as absence of restraint, and the extent to which late eighteenth-century advocates of the neo-Hobbesian understanding of liberty were motivated by the fact that it offered a more practical means of addressing contemporary problems.

The symposium raised many topics for further exploration. One of the most important is the question of who constitutes 'the people' - i.e. those who are to enjoy independence through consenting to the laws under which they live. For some of the thinkers discussed in the book, the definition seems to be quite broad (Jones and Cartwright, for example, would have said all adult males) but for others it was restricted to those who were educated and held property. Liberty as independence, then, has the potential to be inclusive and emancipatory but it could also be deployed in a more exclusionary fashion. What are the implications of this for its adoption today? Another topic is the relationship between liberty as independence and citizen militias, questions were raised about the differences between the British and continental practices, and about whether being compelled to join a militia could be viewed as an invasion - rather than an extension - of an individual's liberty. Finally, there is perhaps more to be said about how liberty as independence might be applied to other spheres, such as the economy and personal relationships. Even though it was eclipsed by liberty as absence of restraint in the late eighteenth century, it seems that, as Quentin suggested in the conclusion to his book, it does still have 'a great deal to contribute to current debates about the improvement of our moral and political world' (pp. 276-7).