Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Doubtless you have heard someone object, at one time or another, You don’t speak for me! or They don’t speak for us! Versions of this complaint are commonplace when a represented group or its members raise objection to their informal representative. Consider Malcolm X’s speech at Michigan State University in 1963: “Most of the so-called Negroes that you listen to on the race problem usually don’t represent any following of Black people.” Or blogger George Cook’s objection: “Rev. Sharpton does not speak for all African Americans and he doesn’t speak for anyone I know on many issues.”. Or the phenomenon of Malala Backlash, whereby many critics in Pakistan have raised concerns that Yousafzai’s “fame highlights Pakistan’s most negative aspect; her education campaign echoes Western agendas.” Or the following indirect exchange between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States Senator Dianne Feinstein during the final stages of the United States’ negotiation of the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015:

Netanyahu: “I feel that I am the emissary of all Israelis, even those who disagree with me, of the entire Jewish People.]

Feinstein: “No, he doesn't speak for me on [the topic of Iran]. . . . I think it’s a rather arrogant statement. I think the Jewish community is like any other community, there are different points of view.”

In each case, the complainant raises a version of the complaint They don’t speak for me! or They don’t speak for us! But, now that you are a conscriptionist about political representation, you realize that it is the representative’s listening audience that decides who informally represents a particular represented group or its members (audience uptake), and so there is no guarantee that the complaints of the represented will successfully unseat an informal representative. Complaints of this form are, when taken literally, false. After all, if an audience has taken Netanyahu to speak for the entire Jewish community, then, on the conscriptionist view of informal representation, Netanyahu does speak for the entire Jewish community, and so Feinstein’s objection seems somehow inapposite. The objection that Feinstein and others raise is not that Netanyahu does not get received as the informal representative of all Jews—in fact, quite the contrary. It is the very fact that Netanyahu does garner such a reception that makes Feinstein and other objectors concerned. So, what is the force behind an objection like Feinstein’s? It seems to be the following: The views that Netanyahu espouses on behalf of the Jewish people are not my views, and I am a Jew. It matters to Feinstein and other Jews who disagree with Netanyahu’s espoused positions to raise complaint against him precisely because he is an informal representative of the entire Jewish people (since some audience has taken him to speak for all Jews). The complainants are, in effect, attempting to reduce or counteract the audience uptake received by the offending informal representative. This makes the complaints of the represented part of a three-way conversation between the representative, the represented, and the audience. A complaint like Senator Feinstein’s may be understood as an attempt by the represented party (here, Feinstein) to speak directly to the audience, appealing to that audience to revoke the uptake it has conferred on Prime Minister Netanyahu. We can deepen our understanding of the relationship between the informal representative and the represented by focusing on the ways in which that relationship is a wide-ranging and many-voiced deliberation between the representative and the many and varied represented parties for whom they speak and act. The relationship between the representative and the represented should be understood as a dialogue, an ongoing exchange of ideas, reasons, explanations, and justifications between the representative and the represented. This chapter provides a schema for thinking about one of the most important features of that ongoing exchange: the legitimate complaints of the represented. After identifying and investigating those complaints that can only sensibly be raised by members of a represented group against those who represent them, I argue that these complaint-types arise uniquely in a representative-represented relationship precisely because they correspond to the duties that informal representatives have to the represented—duties discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter is, in its way, an effort to vindicate what is truly to be found within the common though misleading objection You don’t speak for us!—to understand what gives that form of objection its rhetorical force.