Representing the People: On Greg Conti's Parliament, Mirror of the Nation

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel brings together scholars with a range of expertise in political theory and history of political thought to discuss Gregory Conti’s new book, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy. The 2019 theme of “Populism and Privilege” is auspicious for discussing Conti’s work – the latest entrant in Cambridge University Press’s influential Ideas in Context series – because his book takes us back to a period when the foundations of the modern, mass-democratic state were being laid, while an older set of privileges and inequalities persisted. Conti offers a novel reading of the political thought of the period, arguing that during the Victorian era two important contemporary values received widespread support – the ideals of descriptive or mirroring representation, that is, representation that is inclusive of the diverse groups and identities that comprise society, and deliberation – but that these values were thought to be in conflict with the competing ideals of democracy and political equality. Conti then shows how the attempt of democrats to demonstrate the consistency of democracy with the values of inclusivity, deliberation, and mirroring representation led to a burst of innovative thinking about the aims and institutions of representative government, out of which emerged such landmarks of modern constitutionalism as proportional representation. In addition to canonical figures, Conti explores a wide cast of authors, politicians, and reformers to reconstruct a rich but neglected set of debates about the normative tensions and institutional tradeoffs that accompanied the birth of mass democracy.
This panel will discuss these contributions, as well as provide an occasion to think more broadly about the surge of new research on the political theory of representatives institutions, which one of our panelists has aptly the “revival of representation.” In doing so, it will also engage with the substantive questions that Conti raises for contemporary political theory about how to understand the relationship between ideas of democracy, deliberation, and descriptive representation. Finally, we will consider methodological questions about how intellectual history can inform contemporary political philosophy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Chair

• Samuel G. Zeitlin University of Chicago

Presenters

• Jennifer Pitts University of Chicago

• Shannon C. Stimson Georgetown University

• Lucia Rubinelli University of Cambridge

• Greg Conti Princeton University