On the history of political parties

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A forthcoming piece I’ve written makes the point that political parties are themselves an artifact of bourgeois society. They were unknown to antiquity, absent from Athenian democracy and the Roman republic alike, to say nothing of the Middle Ages. Moses Finley wrote that, in thinking about the ancient world, “we must concentrate our minds and our imaginations on a political system without modern parallels: there were no structured political parties and there was no government in the sense of an appointed or elected group of men formally entrusted for the moment with the right or the duty to make policy proposals.”¹

Research remains to be done on the history of the party-form, building on the classic literature. To that end, I’ve compiled a reading list, which I hope to use to write an article along with someone else who’s interested in the topic:

• Henry Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties (1733–1734), pp. 1–191
• David Hume, “Of Parties in General” (1742), pp. 65–70
• David Hume, “Of the Parties of Great Britain” (1742), pp. 71–76
• Moisei Ostrogorsky, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Volume 1: England (1902)
• Moisei Ostrogorsky, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Volume 2: The United States (1902)
• Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911)
• Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (28 January 1919), pp. 32–94
• Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Function in the Modern State (1951)
• Jacques Camatte, “The Origin and Function of the Party Form” (1961, 1974), pp. 7–81
• Peter Nettl, “The German Social-Democratic Party, 1890–1914 as a Political Model” (February 1964), pp. 65–95
• Monty Johnstone, “Marx and Engels and the Concept of the Party” (1967), pp. 121–158

Ostrogosrky, in particular, seems promising. Though he was Russian, he wrote his two-volume treatise originally in French. Later on Evgenii Pashukanis would translate it back into Russian. For obvious reasons, Michels is also a fascinating figure. Weber’s lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” was delivered partially in response to the October Revolution, making reference to Trotsky. He was a socialist for many years, before his rightward turn. Duverger was likewise a communist.

I would of course welcome any further suggestions, either in terms of primary source literature or secondary histories. Any articles by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bordiga, etc.

My working thesis is that when the first modern parties took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, liberal statesmen were horrified by the idea of permanent organizations made up of professional politicians vying for power, while sowing the spirit of faction. Thus did George Washington, for example, rail “against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”² Gradually, as the franchise was extended, legislative blocs turned into machines for winning elections, looking to oversee an elephantine bureaucracy renewed by periodic plebiscites. Bourgeois parties saw civil associations as mere constituencies, politically as voters and economically as donors.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass proletarian parties hoped to conquer state power so as to transform society and thereby abolish the state. Membership meant paying dues and other obligations. Registering as a Democrat or Republican in the twenty-first century United States, in other words, is not the same as belonging to the SPD or RSDLP over a hundred years ago. Such parties had been the most advanced section of a working-class movement already mobilized against the capitalist order.

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¹ Moses Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 75.
² George Washington, “Farewell Address” [19 September 1796], Political Writings (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 497.