Conceptual relativity is a funny sort of concept. There’s a sort of general relativity that we broadly accept, and regularly make use of, that I’ve been thinking about recently. That’s the sort of relativity that we apply to people in the past, that makes us go “oh, he didn’t know any better”. I’m thinking about this, at the moment, in connection with the question of representation in politics. That’s not representation politics in the sense of “seeing someone like me on TV”. It is connected to critiques of representation politics, because what I’m interested in is expectations, limits, and how we should relate to representatives. The representatives I’m interested in, though, are the people that we elect, namely our MPs and senators. The questions that I’m specifically interested in are: What do they represent? How do our assumptions about what they represent shape our expectations for how they should act?

There are quite a few ways to answer the question of what they represent. We might say that they represent: our immediate material interests, our idealised or ‘objective’ interests, our values, the ‘community’ as a member of that community… I think that there are conflicts between these different roles and that this creates conflicting expectations for how they ought to act. This then leads to all sorts of political conflicts, both minor and major. It’s worth, maybe, taking a step back in discussions sometimes and asking: What is it that you expect from this politician, and what’s the right way for us (as a movement, or a community, or an individual) to act in relation to them at this moment?

What’s the relationship here to historical relativity? Well, I’m thinking about it in terms of how we take historical examples as role models or guides. In doing so we often have to provide a satisfactory explanation for why some positions they took were wrong, but that wrongness isn’t relevant to us right now. Relativity is one way to do so, but we wouldn’t necessarily accept that sort of relativity when applied to somebody active in politics today. There’s a sense in which thinking about the the way that we think about the past can give us models for reasoning about how we can relate to present-day political actors. The question I have is: What are the extents of this relativity? When do we take it to be appropriate? When do we (or ought we) resist it?

Maybe. This is all very tenuous and unedited and I would probably endorse none of it.

Reading this week… Working my way through Hobsbawm’s tetralogy. Incredible stuff, I hadn’t realised the first time I read The Age of Revolution just what a masterpiece of narrative history it is. He has an incredible grasp of movement. I cannot recommend these books highly enough.