Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a “collapse of the nation-state” across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role in Origins itself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.
For nearly half a century John Stuart Mill was a major critic of the forms of electoral corruption prevalent in Victorian England. Yet this political commitment has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article offers the first synoptic account of Mill’s writings against corruption. It argues that Mill’s opposition to corruption was not accidental or temperamental, but sprung from fundamental principles of his political thought. It also shows that Mill’s opposition to electoral corruption put him at odds with other leading liberal thinkers of his era, who thought that the existing ways in which wealth influenced elections had positive effects – or at the very least that they did not impede a healthy electoral contest from taking place. Mill’s fervent intent to eliminate corruption also distinguishes him from many liberal theorists today, who either do not write about electoral corruption, or consider it an issue to be managed and lived-with. Reflecting on Mill’s political thought alongside other liberal thinkers raises the question of whether liberal states can draw a definitive line between prevalent forms of corruption and legitimate modes of political action, and eliminate the former, or whether we must regard corruption as among the constitutive dilemmas of a liberal politics.
Over the past decade, Anglophone scholars have taken a growing interest in the French liberal theorists who wrote in the wake of Claude Lefort. One thinker in particular who has become increasingly significant in American political theory is Pierre Rosanvallon. 1 Of the many topics that Rosanvallon has discussed, it is the theme of representation which has most resonated with American political theorists, a theme which he has addressed as both an historian and a political theorist. The second volume of Rosanvallon's path-breaking trilogy on the history of France is centered on representation, and for several decades he has criticized contemporary democracies, above all France, for failing to be sufficiently representative.In Anglophone political theory, Rosanvallon is most commonly drawn upon by scholars seeking to defend a "constructivist" conception of representation. According to this view, it is not the nature of political representation to accurately reflect the interests and demands of existing groups and constituencies. As Nadia Urbinati writes, "representation . . . can never be truly descriptive and mimetic of social segmentations and identities." 2 On a basic level, this means a rejection of institutional arrangements that would posit representatives speaking and acting for constituents in a direct manner. More fundamentally, theorists of constructive representation deny that there is an underlying social reality that can serve as a standard by which representative arrangements can be straightforwardly evaluated: anyone that would attempt to make such a claim about who the relevant groups in society are, or what they want, would themselves be doing no more than producing one kind of contestable representation. 3 A correlate of this is that the relevant interests and identities that we think are represented in political life are in large measure produced by the process of representation in its many varieties, rather than existing prior to it. 4 Both Lisa Disch and Wim Weymans have attributed a constructivist theory of representation along these lines to Pierre Rosanvallon. 5 And while Nadia Urbinati has criticized aspects of Rosanvallon's political thought, it is clear that her own attempt to develop a constructivist account draws upon his work. 6 We contend, however, that this standard interpretation of Rosanvallon misses much of the ambiguity and complexity in his thinking about representation. We do not deny that Rosanvallon has frequently described representation as a constructive process. Yet one of the most striking (and overlooked) facts about Rosanvallon is that his early political writings from the 1970s-80s contain views of representation that can only be called "descriptive" 7exactly the conception of representation that Rosanvallon is so frequently mobilized to oppose. Nor does this view of representation ever disappear from Rosanvallon's thought. It informs his major historical writings from the 1990s, and it shapes the way that Rosanvallon continues to define the "crisis of representat...
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