Representing the Public’s Interest

Ask any politician what they stand for and they will assure you that they represents the public’s interest.  But what do they mean by that?  What do the terms “representation”, “public” and “public interest” mean and how does one go about representing them?

Modern History of Representation

We often think that the ancient Greeks invented representation.  But although they engaged in many activities we might consider to be part and parcel of representative government, the ancient Greeks did not have a word meaning “representation”.

The concept of representation (one person or one institution representing another person) began to emerge in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; in Church councils and the English Parliament.  In the beginning, representing others was seen as a cumbersome duty.  What religious leader wanted to trek countless miles to discuss the latest interpretation of the Bible?  What knight or burger wanted to take time out from more pleasurable and profitable pursuits to meet with the King’s representatives?  But over time, as Parliament came to be seen as a way to advocate for local interests and to curb the King’s power, representing the people in parliament came to be seen as more than a mere chore; gradually it came to be associated with personal freedom.  And by the time of the American Revolution, “No Taxation without Representation” was a rallying cry for freedom.

But who was being represented?  And how?

The Public

You would not know it from the almost fawning way it is used today, but the concept of the public, as the constituency whom the politicians are bound to represent and from whom they derive their authority is not an idea that was met with unalloyed joy.  Indeed, for quite a long time the public was looked upon with more than a grain of suspicion.

Rousseau, the father of the Social Contract, wrote in The Origin of Civil Society that “as soon as a mob has become united into a body politic, any attack upon one of its members is an attack upon itself. … the Sovereign People, having no existence, outside that of the individuals who compose it can have no interests at variance with theirs.”  In a similar vein, Tocqueville in Democracy in America lamented that a democratic public must of necessity be “a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”