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Parties and Party Systems

A Framework for Analysis

ECPR Press

the party as part

1. FROM FACTION TO PARTY

The name 'party' came into use, gradually replacing the derogatory term 'faction', with the acceptance of the idea that a party is not necessarily a faction, that it is not necessarily an evil, and that it does not necessarily disrupt the bonum commune, the common weal. The transition from faction to party was indeed slow and tortuous – both in the domain of ideas and in fact. The second half of the eighteenth century had just begun when Voltaire concisely stated in the Encyclopédie: "The term party is not, in itself, loathsome; the term faction always is." With his versatile genius for synthesis Voltaire epitomised in this sentence a debate opened by Bolingbroke in 1732 and after that pursued for about a century.

That the name faction was loathsome was not, from Roman times until the nineteenth century, a statement in want of proof. In the whole tradition of Western political thought there is hardly an author who has not taken the same view. The interesting part of the sentence is, therefore, where Voltaire concedes that parties might be different, that the term party does not have by necessity a negative association. Voltaire himself can hardly be credited, however, for having sustained this difference. Faction, he wrote, is "un parti séditieux dans un état" ("a seditious party in a state"). The term party would thus seem applicable to the factions that are not seditious. But Voltaire went on to explain, instead, that a faction is "a seditious party when it is still feeble, when it does not rejoin [partager] the entire State." Thus "the faction of Caesar shortly became a dominant party which swallowed the Republic." And the distinction is further enfeebled, if not cancelled, by Voltaire's remark that "a head of a party is always a head of a faction."

A distinction with no difference, then? It would be unfair to address this criticism to Voltaire, for he only reflects the ambiguities and the perplexities of the entire eighteenth century. It is proper, therefore, to raise the question with respect to all the authors concerned: Bolingbroke, Hume, Burke, and the protagonists of the French and American revolutions. First, however, we must understand their terminology.

Etymologically and semantically speaking, 'faction' and 'party' do not convey the same meaning. Faction, which is by far the older and more established term,derives from the Latin verb facere (to do, to act), and factio soon comes to indicate, for authors writing in Latin, a political group bent on a disruptive and harmful facere, on 'dire doings'. Thus the primary meaning conveyed by the Latin root is an idea of hubris, of excessive, ruthless, and thereby harmful behaviour.

'Party' as well derives from Latin, from the verb partire, which means to divide. However, it does not enter in any significant way the vocabulary of politics until the seventeenth century – which implies that it does not enter the political discourse directly from Latin. Its longstanding predecessor with very much the same etymological connotation is 'sect', a term derived from the Latin secare, which means to sever, to cut, and thereby to divide, Since 'sect' was already available and established for rendering the strict meaning of partire, 'party' lent itself to being used in a looser and more blunted meaning. 'Party' basically conveyed, then, the idea of part; and part is not, in and by itself, a derogatory term: It is an analytical construct. True enough, the learned society of former times – whether it spoke Italian, Spanish, French, German, or English – did understand its terminology through Latin (and Greek). Hence the etymological derivation of party from partire, i.e. partition, by no means escaped the seventeenth – and eighteenth-century writers. Nonetheless, 'part' had long lost its original connotation. The term part enters the French partager, which means sharing, as it enters the English 'partaking' (let alone partnership and participation).

When 'part' becomes 'party', we thus have a term subject to two opposite semantic pulls: the derivation from partire, to divide, on the one hand, and the association with taking part, and thereby with sharing, on the other. The latter association is, in fact, stronger than the former derivation. A complication must be noted, however. While 'party' was entering the vocabulary of politics, 'sect' was on its way out. During the seventeenth century the term sect became associated with religion and especially with Protestant sectarianism. By this route the term party took on, at least in part, also the meaning formerly conveyed – in the political arena – by the term sect. And this reinforced the original linkage of 'party' with the idea of severance and partition.

The foregoing goes a long way toward explaining why 'party' had, from the outset, a less negative connotation than 'faction' and yet remained a close synonym for faction. There is little doubt that no eighteenth-century author, aside from Burke, really disentangled the two concepts. Yet all our authors – and notably Bolingbroke and Hume – were struggling, at some point, with a distinction that carried a difference. If as we read the literature we pay attention to the exact wording, whenever the two terms are not used interchangeably, the difference is that 'faction' applies to a concrete group, whereas 'party' is far more an analytic partition, a mental construct, than a concrete entity. And this explains why the distinction is quickly blurred and does not hold tight. If faction is the concrete group and party the abstract grouping, reference to the real world makes the two indistinguishable.

The foregoing also alerts us to the fact that authors who spoke of 'parts' but did not use the word 'party' were not really confronting the problem. This isparticularly the case of Machiavelli and of Montesquieu, who are often cited as the precursors in glimpsing the idea of party in a favourable sense. But they did not use the word. The relevant passage of Machiavelli to this effect reads that the "riots between Nobles and Plebeians ... were a first cause in maintaining Rome free", with the comment appended that in every republic one finds "two different tempers [umori], one of the people and one of the almighty [grandi]", so that "all laws made in favour of freedom result from their disunity". But Machiavelli made it quite clear, immediately after, that he was not prepared to apply this generalisation to his own time nor, indeed, in his words, to the "partisans from which are the parts of the city born", for these 'parts' bring the city to its 'ruin'. Actually, when Machiavelli referred to a concrete group, he wholeheartedly subscribed to the condemnation of sects and factionalism.

Montesquieu went, prima facie, a little bit further than Machiavelli. In the Considerations on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the Romans, Montesquieu wrote:

What is spoken of as union of the body politic is something very ambiguous: the true one is a union of harmony, following which all the parts [toutes les parties] even if they appear opposed, concur to the general good of the society, just like some dissonances in music concur to the overall ... harmony ... It is as with the parts of this universe, eternally linked by their actions and reactions.

Now this argument is highly abstract, and the imagery – musical and cosmological harmony – is a very old one. If Montesquieu seemingly went a step further than Machiavelli, this was because he was willing to extend the point of Machiavelli from the Romans to the English of his time. Yet one must go through all of Montesquieu to find a few, allusive indications of a favourable understanding of the 'parts' of a republic, whereas there is no reference to parties in the crucial chapter of L'Esprit des Lois in which he outlines the English constitution. And there is no question, on the other hand, that Montesquieu fully concurred in the general condemnation of 'factions'.

Machiavelli and Montesquieu did not really enter the problem, then, because the crucial step – along the transition from 'part' to 'party' – resided in conceiving party as an object term, that is, as a concrete noun that pointed to a concrete entity or agency (distinguishable from a faction). This breakthrough occurred only with Burke, almost one half-century after Montesquieu. And to perceive the distance that had to be covered before arriving at Burke one must begin with Bolingbroke, the contemporary of Montesquieu who was indeed the first major author to write extensively about parties.

Bolingbroke's stance is this: "Governing by party ... must always end in the government of a faction ... Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties." It might seem that Bolingbroke only draws, here, a difference of degree: While faction is more evil than party, both are misfortunes of the same family. Buthe makes it clear that the difference is also of kind, for parties divide a people 'upon principles.' Thus, according to Bolingbroke, there is a real, not a nominal, difference between the 'national parties' of the seventeenth century, which reflected a "real difference of principles and designs", and the divisions of his time, in which 'national interests' were no longer concerned and are "made subordinate to personal interests" – this being "the true characteristic of faction." To be sure, Bolingbroke also uses party and faction interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. But this is often consistent with his argument that the degeneration of parties into factions is inevitable; and when the two things merge, the two terms must equally be merged.

It should be recognised, nevertheless, that Bolingbroke's notion of party is somewhat ambivalent, depending on whether his reference is to the parties of the Great Rebellion that led to the constitution settled in 1688 or to the 'country party' of his time, i.e., the party for which he himself stood. His position with respect to the latter is most interesting. On the one hand, he is very close to legitimising it, for "A country party must be authorised by the voice of the country. It must be formed on principles of common interest." On the other, Bolingbroke hastens to add that the country party is "improperly called party. It is the nation speaking and acting in the discourse and conduct of particular men." Yet the country party is, if only for emergencies, a necessity – a necessity for a good cause. Bolingbroke concedes that there are parties "we must have"; but only the parties, or the coalition of parties, that join issue with the enemies of the constitution. This is the case of the country party, which upholds the constitution against its usurpation by the court faction (which is indeed a 'faction'). Thus the country party is not a party among other parties (in our sense) but – as is implied by the wording – the country against the court, the subjects against a sovereign who does them wrong. If the king does no wrong, if he rules in Parliament as the constitution prescribes, then the country has no reason for becoming a party. Hence we have the notion of a non-party party, i.e. of a party that is to end all parties. This is, in fact, the purpose of Bolingbroke. In the dedication that introduces the Dissertation upon Parties Bolingbroke represents his work as the "attempt to extinguish the animosities, and even the names of those parties that distracted the nation for so long, so fatally at first, and so foolishly at last." In short, the intent of Bolingbroke is to "reconcile parties and to abolish odious distinctions."

It is fair to conclude, then, that Bolingbroke was antiparty. Since governing by party always ends in governing by faction and since parties stem from passion and interest, not from reason and equity, it follows that parties undermine and endanger governing by constitution. And constitutional rule is what Bolingbroke stood for. His ideal was an ideal of unity and harmony. Yet Bolingbroke did draw, more than anyone before him, a distinction between factions and parties. And his passionate and lengthy analysis, restated in numerous writings, forcefully brought parties to the fore and obliged his contemporaries and successors to reckon with the problem. This is borne out by the fact that Hume, shortly after, and first among the major philosophers, took up the subject.

Hume stands halfway between Bolingbroke and Burke, though he was closer to the former than to the latter – both in his ideas and in time. Hume's first Essays on parties appeared less than ten years after the Dissertation of Bolingbroke, while Burke joined the issue in 1770, some thirty years later. Hume is, as one would expect, less sanguine on the matter than Bolingbroke. Only on factions is he equally vehement, for "factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation." On parties Hume is more lenient. He goes, in fact, one important step further than Bolingbroke, for he concedes that "to abolish all distinctions of party may not be practicable, perhaps not desirable in a free government." Yet the ideal of Hume remains very similar to the ideal of Bolingbroke: The end of artificial and odious distinctions. In his time Hume detected "a universal desire to abolish these party distinctions," i.e., those "entertaining opposite views with regard to the essentials of government." He called this desire "tendency to a coalition" and saw in this coalescence "the most agreeable prospect for future happiness." While granting that the parties of the Great Rebellion were 'parties of principle', he saw no such nature in the 'new parties' that subsequently arose "under the appellation of Whig and Tory", for here "we are at loss to tell the nature, pretensions and principles of the different factions." Hume's major contribution was thus the typological contribution outlined in the essay of 1742, Of Parties in General. The reader is somewhat baffled, in this and other essays, by Hume's intermingling of 'party' with 'faction' – for Hume surely was less consistent than Bolingbroke in allocating the two words. It should be borne in mind, therefore, that Hume was classifying, and that the distinction between party and faction as drawn by Bolingbroke was insufficient for sustaining a classification. If party also ends in faction, it appeared to Hume – presumably – that his typology had to be of any and all political groupings. Let us say, then, that Hume establishes a typology of partisanship that begins with a basic distinction between (i) personal and (ii) real groups – the latter being the factions and/or parties "founded on some real difference of sentiment or interest." While "parties are seldom found pure and unmixed", Hume suggests that 'personal factions' are typical of small republics and, generally, of the past, while 'real factions' are typical of the modern world. Hence Hume's analysis concentrates on the 'real factions', which are subdivided into three classes: factions from (i) interest, (ii) principle, and (iii) affection.

In Hume's judgment, factions from interest are "the most reasonable, and the most excusable"; and while these factions "often do not appear" in despotic governments, "they are not the less real; or, rather, they are more real and more pernicious upon that very account." Instead, Hume goes on to say (and the switch to 'party' should not pass unnoticed): "Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon that has yet appeared in human affairs." This novel phenomenon is far less justifiable. But here he enters, albeit by illustration, a crucial distinction between 'political' and 'religious' principles. The latter are Hume's real target: "In modern times, parties of religion are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and ambitions." The former, the parties of political principle, receive a very different treatment: "Where different principles beget a contrariety of conduct, which is the case with all different political principles, the matter may be more easily explained." And this different and more tranquil understanding results quite clearly from the essay that follows, Of the Parties in Great Britain.

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Excerpted from Parties and Party Systems by Giovanni Sartori. Copyright © 2005 Giovanni Sartori. Excerpted by permission of ECPR Press.
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