Interests and the Politics of Choice

HE TERM INTEREST emerged as a politically significant incorporation into the English language in the seventeenth century. As satisfaction of the king's subjects and particularly the honoring of a citizen's rights became a fulcrum point in political disputes, a search began for a vocabulary suitable to the demands and issues of the time. Interest gradually came to bear a major portion of the weight of political argument, and eventually philosophical discussion of politics came to revolve, just as political life itself had, around the issues of the interests of individual citizens and the public. Recent work in political theory has focused on the dual linkage of the term with the world of facts and the world of values. Framing their concern in metatheoretical terms, these analyses treat interest as a descriptive term, or as a normative term, or as a particular blend of descriptive and normative elements. While this literature has provided a forum for diverse theoretical perspectives, it has generally failed to ground itself in concern for the real world of politics-the world of power and persuasion. The exploration of the language of politics can shed light on our political world, but only if we keep one eye on that world as we develop our analyses. Here I would like to offer a new analysis of the concepts of interest, and at the same time, ground that analysis in the function of interest in persuasion. Recent articles on interest have pushed the analysis closer to the point of the term interest. ' But I believe two failings have kept us from seeing the point clearly and simply. First, these analyses have dealt with only