Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics

Introduction
This is a book about how different kinds of politicians ought to act. By this I mean not which policies they should pursue or which interests they should further--in a democracy, the people decide that--but how they should pursue them.
The work is organized around the idea of a political office. My use of this phrase needs explaining, since its several everyday meanings contradict one another, and my own specialized use differs from all of them. In British usage, a public "officer" or "official" tends to mean a civil servant. In American usage, the word "official" tends on the contrary to mean an elected politician, and "officer" is mostly limited to military and police use. Michael Walzer's well-known treatment employs yet a third sense of the word: for him, an office is something one competes for, and attains, based on standards of merit or just entitlement.1
My usage is based on that of Cicero, whose book on "offices" (De Officiis) refers to recurring public duties or responsibilities.2 A similar usage appears in the work of John Rawls, who uses "office" to mean any public role stemming from a morally justified social or political practice, including nonpolitical roles such as "promisor" and baseball player.3 So understood, an office may be defined as a social or political position that embodies ethical value: a position, devoted to a characteristic kind of action, whose existence is judged to serve worthy purposes, and whose grounding in those purposes gives rise to particular duties and privileges that derive from the position. Like Rawls, I prefer "office" to terms like "role" and "function" because the usual sense of the latter words is descriptive and value-neutral, while talk of office retains a moral connotation. By an office, then, I mean a position, profession, occupation, or status that has both social and ethical meaning.
Political office means something narrower, of course. What counts as "political" is endlessly controversial: among plausible definitions are those so narrow that they include only formal occasions of state sovereignty and those so broad that all private choices count as political. My own usage is somewhere in between: a political action is one which attempts to influence others on matters that require common decision. In this case my definition does seem to track common intuitions. Surely few people would call civil rights marches or community organizing drives "nonpolitical" (whether one favors them or not); on the other hand, few would call a preference for zucchini over broccoli a political choice, except to be contrary.
To talk of office is to stress the moral character of political action. Each office, even when there are no written rules governing it, involves obligations and licenses different from those of ordinary citizens. The term "office," with its emphasis on a particular job or task, also stresses the diversity of political action and the variety of moral requirements associated with different kinds of action. One office is not like another: different modes of political action have different requirements and should be judged by different standards. This work will argue for an approach to ethics and politics that I call "governing pluralism," which attempts to do justice to this diversity in political action and to the ethical diversity that goes with it.
I shall address, and distinguish, the habits of governance proper to three offices. They are all taken from the politics of the United States, but with the hope that conclusions reached will apply to modern democracies more generally. One is formal, and elected: United States senator. Two are informal and unelected: the hortatory moral activist, articulator of high public principles, and the political or community organizer, builder of movements and assembler of pressure on the basis of interest. These are not the only political offices in the United States or a similar democracy, but focusing on them has both commonsense and scholarly advantages. Those who fill these offices address issues of fundamental importance in public life, do so with great fanfare and under great public scrutiny, and labor under the burden of great responsibilities. Such officers--as opposed to, say, campaign canvassers or city planners--are the kind of people we think of when we praise great "leaders" or castigate inept or irresponsible "politicians."4
The responsibilities of these offices have received comparatively little attention from ethicists and political theorists, who tend to stress the duties of executive, judicial, and administrative positions. The proper performance of these duties is of course very important.