H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PREVE

 G.: Preve begins, as he ought, with a campagna elettorale. S.: And what do you know about them? G.: Elections? S.: Elections, electoral rights, electoral machinery, electoral vanities, electoral weather. You sound suddenly as if you had canvassed Yorkshire. G.: I have canvassed nothing but undergraduates, which is a subtler and less remunerative electorate. S.: Still, you are serious about elections. G.: Entirely. Elections are one of the few civilised ways of discovering that one is unpopular before lunch. S.: Then let us begin locally. What were the electoral rights of an Oxonian of your sort. G.: They accumulated slowly and oddly, as most rights do in Oxford. As a scholar, none to speak of in the governing sense. S.: At Corpus. G.: My alma mater was Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and that was that. One belonged, one learned, one suffered, one did not govern. [H. P. Gric...7), pp ...] S.: Then Rossall. G.: Yes, I was Master at Rossall School for a year, and I do not think my election mattered there. S.: Why not. G.: Because schoolmasterly authority is less elective than disciplinary. One is appointed into a weather, not chosen by a polis. S.: That is almost Greek enough to be false. G.: Most good Oxford sentences are. S.: Then Merton. G.: Senior scholar at Merton, again not much election in the sense that concerns us. Scholarship is not sovereignty. [web.stanford.edu] S.: Then St John’s. G.: First probationary lecturer, then fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. There at last election begins to matter. [pdcnet.org] S.: Because. G.: Because one is part of the governing body. S.: Governing body. G.: Yes, in the Hobbesian manner, S., a body that governs. S.: Rather than a body governed. G.: Oxford generally contrives to be both at once. S.: Then being a fellow meant being a member of the governing body of St John’s College, Oxford. G.: Precisely. And there election acquires institutional bite. One votes, one is voted upon, one learns how much civility can be packed into procedural hostility. [pdcnet.org] S.: Yet the war came. G.: And during the war one had very little ordinary electoral life in the collegiate sense, though I kept an eye and a hand on political elections in the country at large. S.: Prime ministers at the tip of the tongue. G.: Quite. Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, the succession was never far off. S.: So even when you were not electorally active, you were electorally attentive. G.: That is fair. S.: Now, Vice-President of St John’s College, Oxford. Did election matter there. G.: It did, though I realised it only by stages, as one realises many university dignities, by hearing one’s own name uttered in the passive voice. S.: Step by step, then. G.: First, one notices a vacancy or forthcoming vacancy. Then one notices that certain older men become suddenly affable in a way that suggests a file is moving. S.: Then. G.: Then one hears that the governing body will meet. Then one is told, perhaps obliquely, that one’s name has been mentioned. Then one is informed that one has been elected Vice-President. S.: As if struck by lightning in committee form. G.: Exactly. S.: Could you have refused. G.: The office. S.: Either the office or the running for it. G.: The office, yes, in principle. Running for it is more delicate. One often does not exactly run in Oxford; one allows oneself to be run. S.: That sounds faintly indecent. G.: Much of college administration does. S.: But could you have said beforehand, no, I do not wish my name to go forward. G.: Yes, I think one could. The governing body permits refusals of ambition, though not always cheerfully. S.: So one may decline candidature without abolishing the office. G.: Precisely. S.: That differs from your CUF lectureship. G.: Very much. As a CUF University Lecturer one was elected, if you like, into a teaching post, but one’s actual lectures could be on what one thought fit within tolerable limits. S.: Elected to teach, not elected in content. G.: Exactly. Oxford still allowed a lecturer the pleasure of deciding what boredom to impose. S.: Whereas the committee for examinations was another matter. G.: Entirely another matter. Examination committees are small republics with bad tempers. S.: And the Examinations Schools. G.: Yes. One might be elected or appointed into examining responsibilities, but there the machinery is more formal, more rule-bound, more public in its consequences. S.: So there are electoral layers. G.: Always. College, faculty, university, nation. Oxford is federative in its confusions. S.: Meanwhile the pupils were making noise with their own elections. G.: To the student representative bodies, yes. Undergraduates discover democracy just in time to misapply it to committees about coffee. S.: Unfair. G.: Slightly. But only slightly. S.: Then the Vice-Chancellor. Is he elected. G.: Yes. S.: I thought he was elected by the Chancellor. G.: No. That is one of the common confusions produced by magnificently named offices. S.: Then how is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford chosen. G.: Step by step, since you insist on constitutional choreography. The office is filled by a formal process in which a nomination is made and then approved through university procedures. In modern Oxford practice the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford is appointed by the Chancellor after a recommendation from the appropriate body, but the role is not simply the Chancellor’s whim. [philpapers.org], [people.cs....utgers.edu] S.: That sounds less like election and more like mediated appointment. G.: Oxford specialises in mediated appointment while calling it self-government. S.: Then the Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is elected. G.: Yes, very definitely. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford is elected by Convocation. That is one of the more dramatic survivals. [wstarr.org], [paperzz.com] S.: Step by step again. G.: Very well. A vacancy occurs. Candidates are nominated. Members of Convocation vote. The winner becomes Chancellor. Oxford thus manages to combine medieval costume with recognisable electoral arithmetic. [wstarr.org], [paperzz.com] S.: So the Chancellor is elected, not self-creating. G.: Quite. S.: And yet the King is not. G.: Our dear Defender of the Faith is not elected, no. He succeeds by hereditary principle from William the Conqueror onward through the monarchy’s own line of constitutional transformations. [philpapers.org] S.: So the university elects its Chancellor, but the realm does not elect its crowned continuation. G.: Exactly. Oxford is in that sense more republican than the kingdom and less honest about it. S.: What about the Pope, who once mattered rather more to Bologna than to Oxford. G.: The Pope is elected. S.: By the cardinals. G.: Yes. The Pope is elected in conclave by the College of Cardinals. It is rather like Oxford, only the togas are more definite in colour and the stakes somewhat larger. [pdcnet.org], [theologie.uzh.ch] S.: Since 1949 on his own piece of land next to Rome. G.: Better to say the Vatican City State, established by the Lateran Treaty of 1929, not 1949. [pdcnet.org], [philpapers.org] S.: Good. You corrected me in time to save a footnote. G.: The best Oxford correction is the one that prevents publication. S.: Then Ancient Rome. Did it all begin with Cicero running for office and losing a couple of times. G.: Not quite that neatly. Cicero certainly ran through the cursus honorum and won the consulship; he did not simply stand as a serial loser. He was elected quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul, all in due order. [en.wikipedia.org], [cla.csulb.edu] S.: So no romantic story of noble repeated defeat. G.: No. Cicero’s story is one of rather alarming success for a novus homo. S.: Then your correction is that Roman electoral life begins well before him. G.: Of course. The Republic is saturated with election. Cicero merely gives it style, prose, and self-consciousness. S.: So from Cicero to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford there runs a line of men wanting others to formalise their vanity. G.: That is one summary. S.: And Preve. G.: Yes, back to Preve. No propaganda without election. S.: Is that really the line. G.: It is a good enough line for philosophy. Propaganda presupposes a field of possible uptake, and election is one of the clearest institutional fields in which persuasion must organise itself. S.: So a campagna elettorale is not just noise. G.: No. It is structured noise with counting at the end. S.: Which Austin might have approved. G.: Austin would have said something like no aberration without modification, or no modification without aberration, and then refused to tell us which because the interest lay in the examples. S.: So for you it is no propaganda without election. G.: Or at least no recognisable electoral propaganda without some imagined or actual electorate. S.: Then your own life at Oxford taught you that by degrees. G.: Yes. First as one with no governing vote. Then as one within a governing body. Then as one watching offices filled by procedures of varying opacity. One learns that election is not a single thing but a family of practices. S.: Scholars, fellows, vice-presidents, vice-chancellors, chancellors. G.: Quite. Add committees, examinations, boards, faculties, and one has enough elective life to make Hobbes sigh. S.: Yet you said as a scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, nothing electorally weighty. G.: Correct. S.: As Master at Rossall School, not really electoral. G.: Correct. S.: As Senior scholar at Merton, still not really. G.: Correct. S.: As probationary lecturer at St John’s College, Oxford, approaching it. G.: Yes. S.: As fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, fully within it. G.: Exactly. S.: Then Vice-President, elected. G.: Yes. S.: Which means that by then election mattered personally. G.: Deeply enough to be inconvenient. S.: Did you enjoy it. G.: I enjoyed understanding it better than submitting to it. S.: That is very Oxford. G.: Oxford enjoys institutions chiefly as things to anatomise while inhabiting them. S.: And your pupils. G.: They enjoyed elections in the student sense, which is to say loudly and with insufficient Latin. S.: You are impossible. G.: Merely formed. S.: Then Preve’s thesis title, Temi di propaganda politica nella campagna elettorale per le elezioni del 18 aprile 1948. G.: Yes. A title of almost excessive explicitness. S.: It says propaganda, campagna, elezioni all at once. G.: Which is why it pleases me. It leaves very little unsaid, which for a philosopher of implication is often a relief. S.: And yet even there, the unsaid remains. G.: Of course. Every campaign says more than it states: who belongs, who threatens, what future is implied by a slogan, what fear is concealed in a promise. S.: So Preve studies not merely propaganda but the pragmatics of collective choice. G.: Nicely put. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it. S.: Then what is the moral. G.: That an election is the one civilised circumstance in which large numbers of people consent to be simplified by language for a limited time. S.: Grim. G.: Accurate. S.: And Oxford. G.: Oxford teaches the same lesson on a smaller scale. First you learn that you have no vote. Then that your vote matters. Then that offices are filled by processes half elective, half sacerdotal. Then that even the Chancellor of the University of Oxford is elected, though the Defender of the Faith is not. Then that the Pope is elected, though more gorgeously. Then that Cicero had been doing electoral seriousness long before any of us. [wstarr.org], [philosophi...-berlin.de], [pdcnet.org], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So Preve is right to begin with an election campaign. G.: Entirely. No campaign without an electorate, no electorate without uptake, no uptake without language doing more than it says. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently electoral.