In her 2008 book titled On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, Nancy Rosenblum noted that political parties have historically been the “darlings of political science” but remained as yet “orphans of political philosophy” (pp. 1–2). The reason, she suggested, is that political philosophy has traditionally suffered from a “holist” bias, which has led it to see political parties and partisanship as threats to its more cherished concepts of “justice,” “order,” and “good government,” rather than as potential contributors to these goals (pp. 25–30).
This is not the case any longer. In the decade or so that has passed since the publication of Rosenblum’s seminal contribution, a number of important books have approached the topic of political parties from a theoretical perspective, reasserting its centrality for normative political (and especially democratic) theory. These include Russell Muirhead’s The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age (2014), Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship (2016), and—more recently—Fabio Wolkenstein’s Rethinking Party Reform (2019).
Matteo Bonotti’s new book belongs to this welcome strand of recent political thought, but approaches the issue from a more specific perspective. Its stated goal is to “refocus the normative examination of parties and partisanship, by narrowing it down to a specific aspect of contemporary political theory, that is, Rawls’s political liberalism” (p. 2). This has the merit of making clear the specific standpoint from which Bonotti proposes to vindicate the normative value of parties and partisanship, but it simultaneously restricts the book’s target audience.
Although Rawls’s political liberalism has occupied a prominent place in recent academic political theory, Bonotti’s restriction of focus to the question of whether parties and partisanship are compatible with it implies that the book will be of limited interest for those who are not versed in the details of Rawlsian literature and debates. Unfortunately, Bonotti does not explain why he takes this particular lens to be specifically relevant—or useful—for studying political parties.
The key argument of the book is that political parties and partisanship can play a normatively desirable role within a Rawlsian conception of political liberalism, because “when party politics is a fair scheme of cooperation, the participation of [citizens] in politics through political parties produces two desirable outcomes for liberal democracies. First, it relaxes the tension between the citizens’ political and non-political obligations, by allowing them to have a greater influence upon political decision-making.… Second, it provides them with a motivation to comply with the laws of their political community, thus enhancing the stability of the polity in which they operate” (p. 39).
Precisely because of this desirable political function, however, Bonotti also maintains that “partisanship generates its own distinctive kind of political obligations, additional to any political obligations people may have qua ordinary citizens” (pp. 19–20). These obligations include a duty of “fair play” with respect to other political parties or partisans, which implies an obligation to respect their equal right to compete for public attention and political power within a framework of established rules of competition. The obligations also include a “duty of civility,” understood in Rawlsian terms as an obligation to justify their political platforms and proposals in terms that can at least in principle be accepted by any reasonable citizen committed to the basic democratic values of freedom and equality.
This argument has the signal merit of relating Rawls’s political liberalism to a dimension of real-world politics that Rawls himself had addressed only fragmentarily in his published writings and that has also remained a blind spot in the secondary literature on Rawls’s thought. In addition, it offers a clear normative framework for evaluating the behavior of democratic partisans at a time when many believe that partisanship is experiencing a hypertrophy—and perhaps even going off the rails—in several contemporary democracies.
There are, however, also a number of limitations in the analysis, most of which stem from the book’s unwillingness to engage with the extensive historical and empirical literature on parties and partisanship in the real world. First, Bonotti does not give any account of what might actually motivate real-world partisans to comply with the rather stringent normative requirements that his theory seeks to impose on them. As a result, the enunciation of the parallel duties of fair play and civility sounds a hollow note when one tries to imagine what it would mean to persuade real-life partisans such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, or Matteo Salvini (who are not even political liberals to begin with) to comply with them.
Second, Bonotti gives little consideration to the thorny problem of what to do with parties and partisans that fail to comply with these requirements. When he does consider this issue, his thought reveals a worryingly hard edge. Taking issue with Rawls’s own refusal to suggest that the duty of civility ought to be legally enforced, Bonotti envisages imposing hard sanctions on parties or partisans that fail to behave as he thinks they should. In this regard, he writes, “It would not be excessively difficult to monitor campaign speeches, both in public spaces and on television, in order to check whether candidates and other party affiliates make reference to comprehensive doctrines in support of their policy proposals. Those who do could be fined and/or prevented from speaking again in public for a specified length of time” (p. 75).
Although Bonotti himself concedes that this proposal is at odds with the basic liberal commitment to free speech, he contends that “it needs to be assessed whether and why freedom of speech is essential to political liberalism, or whether it might sometimes be legitimate, on the basis of the constraints on public reason, to impose restrictions on it” (p. 73). The abstractness of his normative theory is therefore not just a conceptual or methodological problem. In practice, it might lead to the theory’s application contradicting some of its own foundational values.
Finally, a third significant limitation of Bonotti’s account is that he gives surprisingly little attention to the dimension of partisan organization. Even though partisanship is defined as “participation in politics through political parties” (p. 1), Bonotti does not seem to make much of the fact that parties are collective endeavors and therefore necessarily involve organized systems of rule and cooperation between partisans. This has been a primary area of focus in the existing empirical literature on parties and would also appear to be an obvious candidate for further normative theorization. However, Bonotti elaborates the normative obligations of partisanship as if they applied exclusively to individual partisans—and, more specifically, partisans involved in the activity of public justification of their political proposals. As a result, his theory appears truncated from an essential dimension of partisanship, which is that of organized collective action.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the contributions that the book does offer are sufficient to make it an important and welcome addition to the existing normative literature on political parties, as well as to, perhaps especially, the secondary academic literature on Rawls’s conception of political liberalism.
