Partisans and their Doubles

Partisanship involves efforts to harness political power not for the benefit of one social group among several but for that of the polity as a whole, as this benefit is identified through a particular interpretation of the public good. In this sense partisanship differs from the activities of factions and interest groups, although the latter are often assimilated to it. In this paper I examine the important differences between factions and parties, drawing on a history of the concept of faction as it appears in Aristotle, Machiavelli and Hobbes. I then examine the modern idea of parties and its relevance in the thought of authors such as Hume, Bolingbroke and Burke. I conclude by reiterating the importance of the idea of a public good to the distinctiveness of partisan commitment and respond to some objections on the impossibility of distinguishing between factions and parties