I probably should have looked a little more closely, before raising some of those questions about political representation. It’s completely unsurprising that there’s been quite a bit of work on the topic, and it’s going to be good to read up on it over time. I am at least a little heartened that my main question – how do we deal with the conflicting expectations we have for representation? – is something that’s been discussed quite widely. Even if there’s not an answer-answer that satisfies me, it’s good to have an idea of where to start looking as I try to figure it out.

There are two sorts of related questions that I want to keep in mind as I start looking into this literature, though, that may or may not fit so well with some of the trends I pick up from skimming some abstracts… These related questions both come out of a sort of inchoate or underlying Marxist attitude that I just can’t seem to shake, and I’m not sure if that will be clear. One way to tie these questions together is: If I think our political institutions are flatly inadequate to the task of ensuring good lives for people, what does this mean for how we relate to them and to the people who work within them?

The first sort deals with the concept of identification and gratification; this is partly empirical, partly theoretical concern. It’s supposedly obvious that people will identify with their leaders, in some sense. If they don’t directly identify with their leader, then they might identify leaders with figures in their life: their father, etc. Freud tried to give an account of this sort of phenomena in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and the Frankfurt School took up elements of this analysis in their work on fascism. The particular piece I’m thinking of is Adorno’s “Anti-Semitism and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”. This is all a bit hazy, I’ve not read enough of this stuff to be sure I’m getting it right, and it’s been a while since I read any of it! But, I think one thing I want to keep in mind when working through some of these problems with representation is thinking: Well, what sort of need is being fulfilled here? What sort of identity is asserted? If, as I think is likely, representation as an institution within democracies has expectations associated with it that conflict in such a way so as to prevent them from being met, which ones get dropped?

I’m secondarily interested in political leadership, and what personal qualities it requires. I read a lot of Che Guevara’s work last year, and something that struck me about it was how important he took cadre-formation to be. He expected cadre to work towards building a communist society in every aspect of their lives, and the expectations placed on them were a lot higher than the expectations we place on elected officials. I guess that this is sort of a question of the party… What is it, what should it look like, what should it do? None of these are unique questions, and I don’t think that they are newly pressing questions – they’ve been pressing for a very long time. But, it will be interesting to see how and whether ‘mainstream’ political theory deals with them.

I’m still working through Hobsbawm: He rocks.