'Sympathize in All Their Distresses': Founding Era Affective Representation

• In Event: Poster Session: American Politics Research & Ideas and Institutions in American Political Thought
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Ideas and Institutions in American Political Thought

Abstract

This paper reconstructs early iterations of descriptive representation ideas articulated during the American founding period by a number of New York Anti-Federalists, including Melancton Smith, Brutus, and Federal Farmer. These Anti-Federalists’ writings and speeches were historic acts of public reason, fusing political ideas with rhetoric and institutional design. Their interventions drew on or resembled multiple traditions: republicanism, English constitutional history, liberalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment. The men of focus for this project argued that the selection of a relatively small number of representatives in Congress entailed by the 1787 Constitution would most likely ensure that the federal or national legislature would be dominated by elites because of the resources endemic to their social positions. These aristocrats could not feasibly possess the rich information and sympathy with constituents necessary for substantive representation. Elites in general are also habituated toward license. If they predominate, there is likely to be a paucity of virtue in the halls of legislation. The required ratio in the Constitution between representatives and represented was therefore a central concern for these influential opponents to simple ratification. They attested that if the minimum denominator of 30,000 constituents per representative were adopted, the quality of representation would almost certainly suffer. If citizens cannot not control the ratio between themselves and those they elect, then they are dominated in an important respect. If a few ruled in the above manner over the whole people, the government might be decidedly less popular and be more akin to an aristocratic usurpation. As opposed to elites refining and enlarging the public views as in a Madisonian view, or where non-elites would be better represented by economic elites in a Hamiltonian one, in the Smithean vision assemblies should be made up of people engaged in a diversity of professions from the larger polity. Rotation and recall would require that representatives would cycle back into the population from whence they came. So, legislators would be kept close and responsible to their constituents. Further, by expanding the sphere of representation, middling classes could form a majority without excluding elites from participation in rule—to exclude them would render elites hostile and dangerous to republican government. Representation, for Melancton Smith, “naturally suggests… that [representatives] resemble those they represent; they should be a true picture of the people; possess the knowledge of their circumstances and wants; sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek their true interests.” Smith, Brutus, and Federal Farmer thus articulated what I argue is a sentimentalist conceptual dyad between descriptive representation and sympathy that persisted and developed at least into the late 19th century for a range of political actors. I refer to this dyad as affective representation. Among other things, affective representation provides a means to engage concerns by scholars about descriptive representation and its essentializing tendencies. Affective representation provides a foundation for descriptive representation that participates in essentialism to a very limited degree, if at all. And, the complex of ideas proffered by these Anti-Federalists imperfectly converge with the Aristotelian principle of governing and being governed in turn. These political actors also claim to present a model of representation that can represent constituent will. Theirs was not the first example of arguments for, nor practice of, what scholars now think of as descriptive representation in the American context. In this paper I therefore also engage this discursive and political context, comparing and contrasting the various strains of representation thought and practice sharing a political moment with Smith and his interlocutors. This project is a work in the history of political thought, contributing to a larger history of descriptive representation in the US. It serves to advance and refine work on multiple chapters of my dissertation.

Author

• Douglas Scott Van Steel, University of California, Berkeley