Mansfield on political parties

Harvey Mansfield's Statesmanship and Party Government (1965) is a discussion of the contrasting ideas of Bolingbroke and Burke on political parties, with a preference for the latter. Bolingbroke sought to abolish parties—or at least, everyone else's parties; Burke, Mansfield says, saw a certain type of party as an imperfect but more reliable substitute for great statesmen, who might not be on the scene when they were needed. Burke's view was a fairly radical one in his day: previously only Machiavelli had spoken out in defence of parties. The traditional view, which can still be seen in the Federalist, was that parties which disagreed on minor issues threatened to give rise to dissent on essentials later on, which would be fatal to society; while on the other hand, if the parties managed to confine their disputes to inessentials, they would prove distracting, degrading and instruments of irresponsible ambition. One still encounters this latter suspicion among naive members of the general public, who for some reason resent the fact that they are governed by politicians who habitually lie about their views in order to conform to a party line. The "experts", on the other hand, now overwhelmingly assure us that parties are wholesome and indispensable features of democracy, or at any rate inevitable ones.

Mansfield's book is unusual in that it goes into the question of whether parties are, in fact, a good thing. Mansfield seems to agree with Burke that they can be; on the other hand, the type of party Burke was talking about was very different from the modern one. Burke's ideal party seems to have been not a mass organization, but a small group of nobles (i.e., the hereditarily rich) aligned on some particular, non-ideological principle that shocked no one's sensibilities; such a principle would substitute for the more discerning judgment of the statesman. The party should be made up of noblemen not merely because this was the practice in Burke's time, but because in a large society only aristocrats would be likely to have the "prolonged acquaintance" and "stability of association" that would permit them to develop mutual confidence (p. 177). The spirit of distrust is the cause of feeble government; trustworthiness among governors is preferable to the exceptional ability aimed at by Bolingbroke. Under Burke's party system, unprincipled men or demagogues would be excluded from the parties and thereby prevented from rising to office (though they could still play a useful role as independent critics of the officeholders).

The party of honest men would exhibit a kind of low-grade but solid civic virtue, tinged by collective self-interest, but far preferable to the false idealism of ideological parties. Burke believed that the collective self-interest of the aristocracy was generally identical with that of the society as a whole; and that its leisure and broadness of outlook enabled it to correctly assess this interest, so that its decisions would tend to promote the good of the country. The aristocracy should lead, not rule against popular wishes. The role of the House of Commons would be to ensure that this remained the case.