Taking Sides

• Author: Nadia Urbinati
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797572
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium: On Partisanship

797572PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718797572Political TheoryReview Symposium
book-review2018
Review Symposium: On Partisanship
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(1) 97 –105
Taking Sides
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797572
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Nadia Urbinati1
There is a little square in the city of Bologna called Prendiparte, named after
a medieval family that owned the tower facing the square. In Italian “prendi-
parte” means both “to participate” and “to take sides,” a very telling pair of
definitions that casts light on a vision of politics we have somehow lost. For
us and our shared conception of democracy, participation is associated with
procedures that regulate the way we express and aggregate individual prefer-
ences in a game whose task is that of neutralizing or overcoming partisan
positions. Preferences are of course on one side and tainted by biases and
interests, but good participation is so conceived and theorized as to “de-par-
tisan” it as much as possible. State-provided central information, the media,
and the calculus of interests are some of the methods modern democracies
offer citizens so that they can acquire information in order to make loyalty to
causes less vivid and compromises easier. Taking sides (“bad”) and partici-
pating (“good”) have taken divergent directions and can be hardly attached to
the same word anymore.
In medieval and humanistic cities like Bologna, politics was an art of
dealing with conflicting interests that were never simply “individual” but
vested in social identities; people associated not by free choice but accord-
ing to family links, classes, and professions; representatives were not, as
they are in our democracies, capable of attracting different interests because
they were themselves members of the corporate group they stood for. Siding
with a part and participating were synonyms in societies in which citizen-
ship was not an abstract and artificial identity but the political transcription
of social groups. When today we praise republicanism as the cradle of mod-
ern political liberty, we should specify that premodern republics were oli-
garchic orders in which unequal social affiliations defined the dosages of
1Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University, Department of Political Science, 420 W.
118th Street, New York, NY 10027, United States.
Email: nu15@columbia.edu

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Political Theory 47(1)
political power. What gave old cities social vitality was their more or less
successful institutional experimentation in the attempt of pacifying their peo-
ples and avoiding civil wars (elections and lottery—which were used together,
not as alternative procedures of selection—were examples of that experimen-
tation). When their procedural imagination succeeded, social conflicts were
capable of translating into the more or less stable well-being of the city and
its citizens, who were, in this important sense, the owners of their city.
Since ancient times, and certainly for some of the most seminal political
leaders (Solon) and theorists (Aristotle), politics was said to pertain to μέρος
“side” (pl. μέρη) not γένος and not εἷδος either—meaning that politics was
not supposed to mimic the eternal repetition of the natural laws or the immu-
table metaphysical forms of being. Politics belonged wholly in the mutable
domain of human things, not science or theology, in which the only known
regularity was that of costumes and traditions, in which ethical principles
were rooted. Politics, thus, was a field defined by mores and ethos, or the
knowledge of the virtues human beings needed to live together in peace and
well—wherein “living well” referred to both the material conditions of life
(instrumental to persons’ freedom from natural necessities) and the norma-
tive conditions of civil peace (the accommodation of conflicts and a just dis-
tribution of power among citizens). Politics and conflict, politics and
performative virtues, and politics and distribution of power defined the
domain of justice and the horizon of the institutional order. Partisan politics
was a fact and a source of worry at the same time, mostly identified with
factional alliances and seen as pestilential because no institutional order was
truly capable of taming and completely neutralizing it, not even a mixed con-
stitution. All in all, politics was a grandiose art for containing and taming
factions. The ancients did not know of the difference between faction and
party because they did not employ elections, which would institutionalize
political competition. It is curious to notice that the meaning of partisanship
and participation started diverging when thanks to elections society could
endure partisanship as a form of participation with no great danger to its sta-
bility. Modern electoral democracies live out of partisan competition and yet
the representation they want to give of themselves is consensual rather con-
flicting and epistemic and impartial rather than judgmental and partisan.
The ancient context...