Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880

Modern Pluralism

Pluralism is among the most vital intellectual movements of the modern era. Liberal pluralism helped reinforce and promote greater separation of political and religious spheres. Socialist pluralism promoted the political role of trade unions and the rise of corporatism. Empirical pluralism helped legitimate the role of interest groups in democratic government. Today pluralism inspires thinking about key issues such as multiculturalism and network governance. However, despite pluralism’s importance, there are no histories of twentiethcentury pluralist thinking. Modern Pluralism fills this gap. It explores liberal, socialist, and empirical ideas about diversity in Britain and the United States. It shows how pluralists challenged homogenous nations and sovereign states, often promoting sub-national groups as potential sites of self-government. In it intellectual historians, political theorists, and social scientists collectively explore the historical background to present institutions and debates. The book serves to enrich our understanding of the history of pluralism and its continuing relevance. m a r k b e v i r is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include The Making of British Socialism (2011), Democratic Governance (2010), and The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999).

Modern Pluralism Anglo-American Debates Since 1880 Mark Bevir

ca mbr idge u ni v ersit y pr ess

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107017672 © Cambridge University Press 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Modern pluralism : Anglo-American debates since 1880 / [edited by] â•… Mark Bevir. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-01767-2 (hardback) 1.╇ Liberalism–History–20th century.â•… 2.╇ Cultural pluralism–History– 20th century.â•… I.╇ Bevir, Mark. JC574.M63 2012 320.51–dc23 2012000287 ISBN 978-1-107-01767-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgments

1 A history of modern pluralism

page vii viii 1

m ar k bev ir



2 From liberal constitutionalism to pluralism j a c o b t. l e v y

21



3 Guild socialism

40

m a rc st e a r s



4 Pluralism and method at the turn of the century

60

av i g a i l e i s e n b e r g





5 Value pluralism in twentieth-century Anglo-American thought ja n-w er n er mü l l er 6 Corporatism and its discontents: pluralism, anti-pluralism and Anglo-American industrial relations, c. 1930–1980

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105

b e n j ac k s on





7 The rise and fall of the democratic dogma and the emergence of empirical democratic theory joh n g. gu n n e l l 8 Liberalism, pluralism, multiculturalism: contemporary debates

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154

ru t h a bbe y



9 The revival of radical pluralism: associationism and difference

179

m a r k bev i r a n d toby r ei n er

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vi



Contents

10 Beyond pluralism? Corporatism, globalization, and the dilemmas of democratic governance

214

r o b e r t a d c o c k a n d m a r k va i l

Index

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Contributors

ru t h a bbe y:

Cardinal O’Hara Professor, Political Science, University of Notre Dame r o b e r t a d c o c k : Assistant Professor, Political Science, George Washington University m a r k b e v i r : Professor, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley av i g a i l e i s e n b e r g : Professor, Political Science, University of Victoria j o h n g . g u n n e l l : Emeritus Professor, Political Science, SUNY Albany b e n j a c k s o n : University Lecturer and Fellow, History, University College, Oxford j a c o b t . l e v y : Tomlinson Professor, Political Science, McGill University j a n - w e r n e r m ü l l e r : Professor, Politics, Princeton University t o b y r e i n e r : Assistant Professor, Political Science, Dickinson College m a r c s t e a r s : Professor and Fellow, Politics, University College, Oxford m a r k va i l : Associate Professor, Political Science, Tulane University

vii

Acknowledgments

Modern Pluralism derives from a conference that I organized at the University of California, Berkeley in October 2009. For their generous support of that conference, I thank the Center for British Studies and the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley. For superb administrative support, I am grateful above all to Candace Groskreutz. I also thank all those who contributed so much to our discussions at the �conference: Clare Chambers, Kinch Hoekstra, Phil Parvin, Sarah Song, and James Vernon.

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A history of modern pluralism Mark Bevir

Pluralism may appear to be on the rise. Many societies are being transformed by a plurality of cultural groups, each with different and perhaps legitimate norms. Many states are being transformed by the new governance with its plurality of organizations working in all kinds of overlapping legal and regulatory frameworks. These social and political trends mean that pluralist issues are prominent in many contemporary debates about public policy. For a start, the increasingly diverse nature of many societies has inspired various discussions about multiculturalism.1 What are the social and political implications of cultural diversity? Do we need to rethink our morality and even our laws to respond to cultural pluralism? In addition, the changing nature of the state has inspired various debates about governance.2 Has the state been hollowed-out, supplemented or supplanted by a patchwork of public, private, and voluntary organizations formulating policy and delivering services through markets and networks? What are the implications of this new governance for accountability and other democratic values? Given the prominence of pluralist issues in contemporary public debates, it is not surprising that recent years have seen an upsurge of scholarly interest in the history and prospects of political pluralism. Recent works on the history of modern pluralism have concentrated on its rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Recent 1 D. Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 2 M. Bevir, ed., The SAGE Handbook of Governance (London: SAGE, 2011). 3 J. Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2001); A. Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); J.€Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); C. Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–25 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); C. Nicholls, Pluralist State: The Political Ideas of J. N. Figgis and His Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); D. Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and M. Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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works on the prospects of pluralism have concentrated mainly on contemporary debates about multiculturalism and governance. There is, therefore, a gap in the literature. What happened to pluralism between the late nineteenth century and today? Modern Pluralism fills this gap, tracing the history of pluralism through the twentieth century and thereby enriching our understanding of the nature of pluralism and its contribution to current policies. Modern Pluralism brings together intellectual historians and political scientists to recover the history of various traditions of pluralism. In doing so, it further illuminates contemporary debates on multiculturalism and governance.

Pluralism and the state

Multiculturalism and governance are examples of pluralism. Pluralism in general refers to a belief in, or sensitivity to, the diverse kinds of objects and properties that exist.4 In politics, pluralism refers more particularly to a belief in or sensitivity to diversity in society and government. Yet, pluralism is itself, perhaps unsurprisingly, a diverse entity. Different pluralists have focused on varied, although not necessarily incompatible, types of diversity. They have highlighted the diversity of cultures and governing organizations, and of occupations, civil associations, interest groups, religious faiths, and moral values. Moreover, different pluralists have placed different emphases on either the more empirical claim that diversity exists or the more normative claim that political arrangements should foster or at least recognize diversity. Pluralism generally contrasts with a monistic focus on one substance or attribute. In politics, pluralism usually contrasts, more particularly, with an empirical belief in or normative commitment to a homogenous nation and a unified sovereign state. Observers have long characterized states as relatively centralized, uniform, and hierarchical, even as possessing something like a monopoly of force or authority over their territory. The very word “state” evokes a public institution separate from any society of private individuals. It suggests an entity that can have a separate existence, at least in law, apart from its citizenry. The state, so conceived, is a contingent historical phenomenon. The theory of the state arose haphazardly and with considerable controversy during the Renaissance and Reformation, culminating in the great texts of Bodin and Hobbes.5 The concept of the state presupposed 4 See recently J. Turner, “Ontological Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010), 5–34. 5 Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1978).

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medieval ideas, notably that of a persona ficta€– a group having the status of a person quite apart from the people who form the group. Arguably, it fused various sources, including French discussions of sovereignty and Italian works of advice to princes. By the seventeenth century, the word “state” was being used to refer to civil associations of persons who were subject to a particular sovereign. Even then, however, the theory and practice of the state appeared only fitfully. Throughout the seventeenth century, people were just as likely to use concepts such as “body politic.” Besides, the consolidation of a single territory under a single authority was by no means assured.6 On the contrary, the claims of the emerging state were challenged and resisted by social groups who were often jealous of their historic rights, liberties, and powers. Republicans juxtaposed absolutist concepts of power with more democratic and plural ones. Some of them advocated a separation of powers in order to prevent the dominance of any one faction or institution.7 Still, even if democrats challenged absolutism, they often accepted something like a sovereign state. Typically, they too believed in the state as an association of persons who were subject to a sovereign. They just argued that the relevant sovereign was not some absolute monarch, but rather the people themselves. In this respect, republicans and absolutists were often arguing about different forms of legitimate power within the state, not about the existence or desirability of the state itself. Republicans argued that citizens, as the body politic itself, were the original source of sovereignty. Absolutists argued that sovereignty was located in the person of the monarch, who alone could give direction to the state. On the one hand, these and other theories could lead to very different concepts of the state; but, on the other, these different concepts of the state can generally be seen as sharing some common features, perhaps most obviously the idea of a unified people and an indivisible sovereignty. By the mid-eighteenth century, the concept of the sovereign state thus dominated the theory and practice of public and international law in Europe. Sometimes the sovereign was literally a person, as proposed by absolutist theories. At other times, the whole body of the people formed a sovereign that was then treated as a single fictive person for legal purposes. Either way, the state appeared to be at For intellectual history see A. Black, Guild and State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (New Bruswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003). For political practice see L. Coley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and S. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 7 J. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975). 6

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least somewhat distinct from the society it governed and almost entirely independent of any external authority. Modern pluralism seems to have arisen less as a challenge to the state than as a reaction to an individualist challenge to the state. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, liberal radicals and utilitarians challenged the legal and political standing of the state. The most famous example is perhaps Jeremy Bentham’s critique of all legal fictions, and his insistence that law and government be based on actual individuals and their pleasure and pain.8 Many radicals began to argue that the state was just those individuals who happened to make up the government at some particular point in time. They toyed with the idea that the state had no standing, as reality or as legal fiction, apart from the temporally specific set of individuals who formed a government. One important strand of modern pluralism arose in reaction to the individualism of the radicals. Lawyers and theologians argued that groups are at least in some senses persons. They sought to defend the standing of groups, corporations, and churches. F. W. Maitland and Neville Figgis, following Otto von Gierke, looked back to the middle ages and early modern Europe to explore the independent legal and metaphysical status of various associations.9 Generally, they emphasized the role of contractual relations and relations of trust in the formation of associations. These relationships provided the legal basis for the existence of groups as persons. Contracts and trust could thereby free associations from certain types of control and regulation by the state. In addition, these pluralists sometimes suggested that the personality of associations was something more than a legal fiction. Maitland in particular argued for the real personality of associations. He suggested that an association could act; it did not have to rely on individual members acting on its behalf. These pluralists often owed a direct or indirect debt to Rousseau and Hegel. They were holists who believed that a group is in a metaphysical as well as legal sense more than the beliefs and actions of its members. Sometimes they even implied that the principle good for individuals is the integrity of the groups to which they belong. In this view, individuals are free when the groups to which they belong can maintain their own ways of life without external interference. Equally, however, these pluralists typically applied their view of groups to the state itself, arguing that the state too is an association with a legal and arguably real personality. In doing so, they raised the question of the D. Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 9 Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, chapters 3, 5, and 6. 8

A history of modern pluralism

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relationship of the state to the associations under it.10 Figgis in particular argued that all associations, including churches, should have principles that are consistent with those of the state. Maitland and Figgis thereby forged a distinctive liberal tradition of pluralism. Liberal pluralists were not the only nineteenth-century thinkers to react against the individualism of liberal radicals and utilitarians. Many others, including some radicals, suggested that individuals were part of unified nations and civilizations that developed through history in ways that typically led to statehood. The most obvious examples are the idealists, who, once again following Rousseau and Hegel, evoked the state as the final expression of the common life of a people and even as an object with a will of its own.11 Yet, appeals to unified nations as the basis of sovereign states were far more widespread than idealism. The nineteenth century saw the nationalization of histories and literatures throughout Europe and beyond.12 The classic national history narrated the formation and progress of a unified nation-state based on some kind of shared character, language, and ethnicity. Statehood was thereby presented as an integral moment in the progress of nations. A second strand of pluralism arose in reaction to these nineteenthcentury concepts of the nation and especially the state. Philosophers and political scientists argued in a way that sometimes echoed the radicals and utilitarians that the state was just the legal and political processes of government. Some added that the processes of government depended on the activity of competing groups in society, and this activity might bear little relation to the constitution and formal laws. Graham Wallas and Arthur Bentley rejected an overly legalistic approach to the study of politics.13 They argued, first, that political scientists should study actual processes and behavior rather than formal arrangements, and second, that political power was dispersed across 10 Pluralists such as Figgis and Charles Gore were, for example, actively engaged in debates about the disestablishment of the Church of England. 11 S. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 1972); and P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12 S. Berger, M. Donovan, and K. Passmore, eds., Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999); and P. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830 –70, trans. R. Fransiscono (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). The sovereign state also served as a key principle in political science as it arose out of history: see R. Adcock, M. Bevir, and S. Stimson, eds., Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton University Press, 2007). 13 A. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (University of Chicago Press, 1908); and G. Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Archibald Constable, 1908).

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various social groups rather than concentrated in legislatures and executives. As World War I ended, Harold Laski argued forcefully that the legal theory of the sovereign state was not only unconvincing but, as we will see later, also undesirable.14 These pluralists did not necessarily ascribe any metaphysical or even legal standing to groups. On the contrary, most of them were overtly critical of organic concepts of the nation, community, and state. Their pluralism consisted in a growing recognition that organized interests often played an important role in modern democratic politics. Constitutional nostrums did not accurately reflect the complexities of modern government. Wallas, Bentley, and Laski thereby began to introduce a distinctive empirical tradition of pluralism. Empirical pluralism was not the only grounds that turn-of-theÂ�century thinkers had for attacking the state. The most vocal challenges to the state came instead from the communist and anarchist movements rising in parts of Europe. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously argued that “the power of the modern state is merely a device for administering the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class.”15 Less famously, they also wrote that, following the communist revolution, “the proletariat will use its political power … to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie. the proletariat organised as ruling class.”16 Marx clearly rejected Hegel’s organic harmonious concept of society and the state as remotely adequate descriptions of contemporary capitalism. However, he also seemed to leave open the possibility that communism might bring into being something like a harmonious society and perhaps even an administrative state. A third strand of pluralism arose when Marxists tried to develop forms of social action and organization largely independent of bourgeois politics and the state. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Fabian socialists were promoting parliamentary and state action as ways to solve socio-economic injustices.17 Yet, Marxist ideas continued to inspire other socialists who opposed Fabian politics. These latter 14 H. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917). 15 K. Marx and F. Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in K. Marx, Later Political Writings, ed. T. Carver (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.€3. 16 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” p. 19. 17 The clearest example is S. Webb, “The Historic Basis of Socialism,” in G. Shaw, ed., Fabian Essays, intro. A. Briggs (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962). For discussions see M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton University Press, 2011); C. Hill, Understanding the Fabian Essays in Socialism (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996); and W. Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

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socialists often argued that the solutions to socio-economic injustices had to come from the workers and their industrial organizations. G. D. H. Cole and at times Laski looked to groups of workers organizing and controlling their own activity.18 They argued that in a socialist society industries should be controlled and run by associations of the relevant workers. The workers in any given industry might form self-governing co-operatives, guilds, and other producer-based associations. Insofar as the state remained necessary, it would play a purely regulatory role, overseeing these other associations. Yet, Cole in particular sometimes implied that society, as opposed to the state, should somehow Â�co-ordinate and oversee the associations within it. He seemed to reject the possibility of any organized political unit acting as the legitimate expression of a common good. Cole and Laski thereby forged a distinctive socialist tradition of pluralism. Modern pluralism may seem to involve a balancing act. On the one hand, some pluralists want to ascribe to groups a particular legal, and at times even metaphysical, standing in order to forestall the onward rush of a modern, atomized, and individualized society devoid of Â�historic ties, bonds, and associations. Equally, on the other hand, some pluralists want to demystify and disaggregate the state so as to forestall the similarly rapid advance of the modern state as it intervenes and even controls more and more aspects of individual and social life. Nonetheless, even if pluralism is a balancing act, it is not necessarily incoherent or confused€– just complex. There are all kinds of ways in which pluralists might reconcile support for groups with demystifying the state. Most obviously, some pluralists might choose to ascribe a standing to all groups including the state, while others might choose to demystify not only the state but also all groups within civil Â�society. However, there are other, arguably more interesting, ways in which pluralists might seek to demystify and restrict the state and yet to promote and protect civil associations. They might reject the metaphysical ascription of identity to groups while arguing that various groups should be given legal standing. They might then argue that all kinds of civil associations€– not just the state€– should have the legal right to conduct their own affairs. For now, however, the important point is that 18 M. Newman, Harold Laski: A Political Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); and A. Wright, G. D. H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Also see R. Eisfield, “The Emergence and Meaning of Socialist Pluralism,” International Political Science Review 17 (1996), 267–79; P. Hirst, ed., “Introduction,” in The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis, and H. J. Laski (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, chapters 8 and 9.

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modern pluralism is not monolithic. It includes diverse liberal, socialist, and empirical strands, each containing varying perspectives on the nature of associations and how they might break up the metaphysical, political, and legal standing of unified sovereign states. The diversity of modern pluralism raises the question of whether the different strands have anything in common other than the use of the word “pluralism.” Not only do the main pluralist traditions differ from one another, each has always accommodated a range of views that have changed over time. It is a mistake, therefore, to postulate a core set of beliefs that always appear within pluralism. Aggregate concepts in the history of political thought do not possess that kind of stability; they are not natural kinds. Yet, the lack of an essential core to pluralism does not preclude it being a topic of historical study. Pluralism is best characterized, like so many concepts, in terms of family resemblances. As I have suggested, pluralists typically share an awareness and preference for diversity and a political suspicion of allegedly homogenous nations and sovereign states. Many have paid attention to the role of sub-national groups and their potential as sites of forms of self-government. More generally, however, the extent to which different strands of pluralism do or do not share anything in common will depend on the level of abstraction at which we treat them. The beliefs of any two pluralists will differ in their details and yet share more abstract themes.

Historicizing pluralism

The twentieth century opened with modern pluralists challenging the theory and practice of the state. The pluralist challenge to the state then inspired new policies and new worlds, including some features of contemporary multiculturalism and governance. Modern Pluralism traces the history of pluralist ideas and the worlds they helped create. Pluralists themselves might be especially wary of the danger that the history of pluralism gets told in homogenizing or even statist terms. Modern Pluralism draws here on a radical historicism that allows for the diversity and contingency of social and political theories and practices. Radical historicists are wary of describing particular historical developments in relation to a single overarching category, let alone in terms of an apparently natural social entity or teleological process. Modern Pluralism thus employs concepts such as “tradition” and “dilemma” to demarcate its aggregate units.19 Radical historicists 19 For a fuller analysis of these concepts and their roles see M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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conceive of beliefs as contingent in that people reach them against the background of a particular intellectual inheritance, rather than by means of pure reason or pure experience. We thus need a concept akin to tradition in order to demarcate the background that helps to explain how people reach the beliefs they do. Of course, all kinds of words might evoke such a concept, including, for example, “language” and “discourse” as well as “tradition.” While the particular word we use is of little importance, there is at times a substantive issue at stake. “Language” and “discourse” sometimes carry lingering echoes of the structuralist hostility to agency and the structuralist preference for synchronic explanations. In contrast, “tradition” captures the historical flow of people inheriting webs of belief that influence what they think and do without fixing it. People inherit traditions that they then develop or transform before passing them on to others. When we use abstract concepts such as tradition, discourse, or language, we raise the question of how we should analyze and explain change in them. Concepts such as “dilemma” and “problem” suggest that change occurs because agents seek to respond to novel circumstances and ideas by drawing on the resources of the traditions they have inherited. Here, a dilemma arises whenever a new idea stands in opposition to people’s existing beliefs, and so forces a reconsideration that results in somewhat new beliefs and typically inspires at least slightly different actions and practices. While dilemmas can derive from theoretical and moral reflection, it is useful to recall that they often arise from experiences of the world. Thus, although we cannot straightforwardly associate dilemmas with social, economic, or political pressures in the “real” world, we can link intellectual history to social, economic, and political history. Beliefs, traditions, and dilemmas are profoundly impacted upon by people’s competing experiences of the world about them. The chapters in Modern Pluralism discuss traditions and dilemmas across a range of levels of aggregation and with varying mixtures of descriptive and explanatory goals.20 These traditions and dilemmas differ in scope from broad characterizations of widespread patterns of thought€– such as liberalism, socialism, and empirical political science€– to narrower depictions of networks of scholars or even

20 Other works have described modern pluralism in terms of three traditions that bear at least a family resemblance to those that dominate the following essays. See, in particular, Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism, chapter 4; and D. Nicolls, Three Varieties of Pluralism (London: Macmillan, 1974). For a notably different€– and arguably less historicist€– typology, see Laborde, Pluralist Thought.

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Â� policy-makers€ – such as guild socialists, Cold War liberals, and difference theorists. Whatever the scope of the traditions and dilemmas invoked, radical historicists should be wary of attempts to equate them with a fixed core and a penumbra that varies over time. Particular traditions and dilemmas are pragmatic concepts, the content of which depends on what one wants to explain. They are not natural kinds with essential properties or necessary trajectories. It is best to think in terms of an undifferentiated social context of criss-crossing interactions, not a series of discrete and identifiable traditions and dilemmas. Historians and social scientists then choose to slice a particular tradition or dilemma out of this undifferentiated background in order to explain whatever set of beliefs, actions, or practices interests them. In this view, particular traditions and dilemmas are aggregate concepts that we ourselves craft to suit our particular purposes; they refer to things in the world, but their borders are defined by us and our purposes. Particular traditions and dilemmas should not be mistaken for given chunks of the past as if they and they alone were part of an adequate account of history. Nor should they be mistaken for structures of thought that fix the diversity and capacities for change of the individuals located under them. The criteria for evoking traditions and dilemmas thus vary with the purposes of the narrative being told. From this perspective, the chapters that follow do not prescribe a new master narrative so much as tell a series of interlinked stories. Once we shift attention from homogenizing and statist concepts to traditions and dilemmas that we craft for our own purposes, we then might proceed to reconsider the place of national and transnational themes in the history of pluralism. At times, earlier historiographies have characterized political thought as cosmopolitan and universal in character, as if it comprised a set of political ideas addressed to perennial philosophical problems or to scientific truths possessed of a universal validity. Radical historicism queries any such characterization by emphasizing that particular beliefs are necessarily embedded in wider webs of belief and traditions, which are themselves contingent and historical. Political thought thus appears as an activity by which people make their future out of their past. Political actors inherit a tradition that they then can modify and use for their own purposes, perhaps through abstract and conscious reflection or perhaps through Â�unreflective action. When they modify their inheritance so as to act in new ways, they thereby remake the world. The history of political ideas is at least in part the study of the activity by which people collectively make and remake their communities. Moreover, because the Â�nation-state is an important expression of community in the modern world, it is sometimes helpful to situate

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political thought in broad national contexts.21 Modern Pluralism generally focuses on the way in which particular traditions of political science have flourished and developed in two nations: Britain and the United States. However, if histories of political thought adopt a loosely national orientation, they may encourage both an exaggerated sense of national exceptionalism and a false sense of the homogeneity of political thinking in a given state. Certainly, widespread assumptions about American and British exceptionalism have obscured, for historians of each, the importance of transatlantic exchanges.22 Here, radical historicism queries such national histories insofar as it prompts us to look skeptically upon any straightforward equation of traditions with territorial or institutional boundaries. While political thought is an activity by which people make the future out of their past, the relevant actors need not know any particular institutional or national boundary. On the contrary, political discussions take place in various overlapping networks, many of which are transnational. Historians have no reason to assume that national influences are the most important ones on the character of political thought. When historians pursue transnational flows, they query what otherwise might appear to be purely national debates and institutions. Modern Pluralism emphasizes the exchanges back and forth between American and British pluralists.

Traditions of pluralism

Modern Pluralism focuses on, first, the diverse traditions of pluralist thought and their relationship to one another, and second, the dilemmas in response to which these traditions have been changed, modified, and transformed. It is organized in three chronological sections. 21 D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Examples of insightful national approaches to pluralism include Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity; and Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State. 22 For an early and important reconsideration of transatlanticism, see J. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 601–28. For later studies of the transatlantic flow of political ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Adcock et al., Modern Political Science; M. Bevir and F. Trentmann, eds., Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges 1800 to the Present Day (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); J. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 – 1920 (Oxford University Press, 1986); and D. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Examples of insightful transnational approaches to pluralism include Laborde, Pluralist Thought; and Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State.

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Each section consists of three chapters€– one each on the three main traditions of modern pluralism, namely, the liberal constitutional tradition, the radical socialist tradition, and the empirical tradition. Most of the chapters consider transnational exchanges between political theorists in Britain and the United States. The general focus on traditions, dilemmas, and transnational exchanges guided decisions about which topics and theorists to consider within each chapter.

1880–1930: the rise of modern pluralisms

The first section concentrates on the years 1880 to 1930. The origins of modern pluralism are found in late nineteenth- and early twentiethÂ�century dissatisfaction with concepts of the state as defined by principles. The nineteenth century was dominated by a developmental historicism according to which principles€– such as those of nationality and liberty€– defined the historical trajectory of states that were characterized by common interests.23 From 1880 to 1930, this developmental historicism confronted dilemmas such as that which World War I posed for any belief in rational progress. One result was the rise of modern pluralism. Empirical political scientists turned from historical narratives of the evolving state to detailed studies of factions and networks. Liberals invented and rediscovered various forms of group rights and constitutional pluralism. Socialists advocated guild and syndicalist modes of organization. In Chapter 2, Jacob Levy explores the roots of the liberal tradition of pluralism. British pluralist thought of the late nineteenth century is often presented as standing apart from, or even in opposition to, the liberal tradition. In this view, pluralism appears as an importation of German romantic holism, by way of the undoubted influence of Gierke. Levy challenges this view, showing how British pluralism was an episode within the history of liberalism, and arguing that contemporary liberals would do well to recover some of the insights of the liberal pluralists. Figgis and Maitland were liberal holists who wanted to protect freedom of association and religious freedom from the encroachments of the state. Levy reconstructs the connections between their liberal constitutionalism and their ideas about associational life. He suggests that they were the intellectual heirs, not only of Gierke, but also of an Adcock et al., Modern Political Science. On evolutionary and historical narratives more generally see J. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1966); and J. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 1988). 23

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intellectual influence they freely acknowledged but who is now often forgotten: Lord Acton. British guild socialism occupies a prestigious but ambiguous position in the history of pluralist thought. The prestige appears in the fact that almost every serious study of pluralism refers, usually positively, to Cole and the other guild socialists. The ambiguity results from the fact that, despite this apparent enthusiasm, the concepts and arguments of the guild socialists have rarely received sustained attention. In Chapter€3, Marc Stears provides an overview of the rise of the socialist tradition of pluralism. He draws on extensive research to argue that there were, in fact, three distinct guild socialist traditions in early twentieth-century Britain, each of which had a distinctive vision of the kind of pluralism needed to counter the expansion of the central state. Stears thereby opens up the possibility of tracing differences among later pluralisms, both British and American, back to disputes among the guild socialists. Finally, in Chapter 4, Avigail Eisenberg reconsiders the roots of the empirical tradition of pluralism from the perspective of discussions of identity. She places the empirical pluralists at the center of a methodological revolution. In the early twentieth century, the pluralists swept away organic and evolutionary approaches to the human sciences, replacing them with more modernist and empirical studies, at the center of which were questions about the nature and status of groups. Eisenberg argues that this empirical pluralism was also informed by political debates about racism, immigration, and assimilation in the United States, the legal status of trade unions in Britain, and the growing threat of the totalitarian state. The pluralists responded to these methodological and political debates with a distinctive theory of the relation between individual identity and associations. They argued that individuals are found in groups: groups provide the fluid and continuously changing context that serves as a source of individual identity and power, and as a source of social constraint and potential oppression.

1930–1970: pluralisms in flux

The second section of this book examines the middle of the twentieth century from 1930 to 1970. At this time, totalitarianism posed dilemmas for various political theorists.24 On the one hand, political thinkers 24 M. Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and S. Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism (Manchester University Press, 1995). On the relationship of totalitarianism to the rise of neoliberalism and the transformation of political practice also

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tried to define an ethical position that could hold a firm line against totalizing systems. On the other, political thinkers and policy-makers wanted to develop political institutions that could help to address the social problems that were often thought to have given rise to totalitarian regimes. Liberals shifted their focus somewhat from constitutional matters to defenses of value pluralism. Socialists turned away from “utopian” ideals of non-governmental fellowship toward corporatist institutions. Empirical political scientists, especially in the United States, devised accounts of democracy that defined it as inherently pluralist in contrast to totalitarian regimes. Jan-Werner Müller, in Chapter 5, continues the history of the liberal tradition of pluralism, exploring the rise of value pluralism as an alternative to the holism of Figgis and Maitland. Müller argues here that value pluralism only really emerges in Isaiah Berlin’s lectures and essays during the 1950s. Berlin’s attempt to comprehend and to combat Soviet communism sparked the idea that totalitarianism might be understood as a form of monism and so countered by forms of pluralism. Related ideas appear to have inspired Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek insofar as their rejections of socialism also depended on assuming an inherent plurality of human ends. Value pluralism was, in other words,€t he apparently “anti-utopian” basis for Cold War liberalism. It is ironic, therefore, that, as Müller neatly suggests, several German émigrés in the United States attacked value pluralism on the grounds that it was undermining the West in its struggle with communism. Indeed, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin identified value pluralism with the work of Max Weber, arguing that it amounted to relativism and that it had contributed to the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism. The scene was thus set in the 1950s and 1960s for an emerging discussion on value pluralism and its political implications. In Chapter 6, Ben Jackson takes up the story of socialist pluralism in the mid twentieth century. Today, the dominant narrative suggests that socialists utterly rejected pluralism and even learnt to love the state; socialists allegedly became wedded to statist reform projects organized around the welfare state, nationalization, and planning. This narrative then enables historians to describe neoliberalism as an individualist reaction to socialist statism. Jackson convincingly shows that this narrative is seriously misleading. For a start, while socialists and progressives did retreat from the commitments of the guild socialists, they nonetheless explicitly theorized the mid-century social settlement see D. Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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as a pluralist one. In addition, the neoliberal critique of socialism was articulated as an attack on the existence of certain associations in civil society that were held to threaten both individual liberty and the state. Jackson thereby develops an alternative narrative that foregrounds debates on the politics of trade unions and thus, indirectly, the working class. The socialists tried to provide pluralistic spaces for trade unions. Neoliberals tried to close down those spaces. John G. Gunnell uses Chapter 7 to explore the relationship of empirical pluralism to democratic theory in the mid twentieth century. He begins with Eisenberg’s account of the pluralist challenge to nineteenth-century notions of organic national communities as constitutive of states. Empirical studies showed that the United States was, politically and culturally, an irreducibly pluralist society. Gunnell then suggests that, during the 1930s, this empirical recognition of pluralism got transformed into a more normative theory of democracy. Transatlantic exchanges gave rise to a new theory of democracy as a type of pluralism. An empirical pluralism thus tacitly informed the American image of democracy until at least the end of World War II. Pluralism thereby became the self-understanding of American democracy. Indeed, Gunnell concludes by suggesting that, while the pluralist theory of democracy encountered severe criticisms, it was also revised and vigorously reasserted through to the end of the twentieth century.

1970–2010: contemporary pluralisms

The third section covers the contemporary age, from 1970 to 2010. As the Cold War slowly ended, so some themes that dominated the middle of the twentieth century lost their resonance. Britain and the United States faced new dilemmas, such as those associated with multicultural societies and the shift from government to governance. Liberals may not have lost all interest in value pluralism, but they appear far more concerned to devise new ethical and constitutional blueprints that respect a plurality of minority cultures. Socialists may have been liberated from some of the dogmas of the Cold War years, but they have to contend with the decline of class and the hollowing out of the state. Empirical political scientists have drawn on a range of theories to define governance€– often in pluralist terms and so in contrast to those institutional theories that have tried to bring the state back in.25 25 P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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In Chapter 8, Ruth Abbey surveys recent discussions of pluralism among liberals. Like much present-day liberalism, these debates owe a huge debt to John Rawls. Rawls’s theory of justice met with a string of communitarian criticisms. He responded to these criticisms partly by emphasizing the pluralist aspects of his theory. Although it would be a stretch to describe even Rawls’s later writings as pluralist, some liberals adopted a more substantial pluralism in response to the growing demands of multiculturalism in Western societies. Abbey here looks at Charles Taylor’s discussion of liberalism and a politics of recognition, followed by the different treatments of multiculturalism by liberals such as Will Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas. Yet, liberals have not always embraced the claims of multiculturalism. Rather, the compatibility of multicultural pluralism with liberalism remains hotly debated. Abbey here considers first Susan Moller Okin’s views on the tensions between multiculturalism and feminism, and then Brian Barry’s strident reaffirmation of an Enlightenment liberalism. In Chapter 9, Toby Reiner and I pursue the recent history of the socialist tradition of pluralism. Today, radical pluralists generally fall into two main camps, depending on whether they emphasize associationism or difference. The associationists include Paul Hirst, Joshua Cohen, and Joel Rogers. They have inherited the syndicalist and guild socialist concern with organized groups in civil society, and especially trade unions. Generally, they seek to promote these groups as bulwarks against state power and even as utopian alternatives to the centralized state. Associationism is a radical vision of participatory governance distributed across a plurality of power centers. The difference theorists include Chantal Mouffe and Iris Marion Young. Their work reflects developments in socialist thought in response to the rise of new social movements and a growing engagement with issues of gender and race. Generally, they emphasize a democratic ethos of equality, and they focus on the inclusion of minority groups and the development of modes of discourse that accommodate difference. We also provide an account of the political thought of Michael Walzer, whom we take as drawing on both strands of pluralist thought in equal measure. Reiner and I argue that both of these types of radical pluralism emerged out of a series of dilemmas that radicals faced because of the electoral success of neoliberalism, rising awareness of the multiculturalism of contemporary societies, and the demise of the Soviet Union. Finally, Robert Adcock and Mark Vail discuss the recent history of empirical pluralism. Their chapter begins where Gunnell’s leaves off, with the fusion of pluralism and democratic theory in descriptions of American government as a paradigm for a liberal theory of how to

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reconcile competing interests in a modern society. Adcock and Vail show how this tradition of empirical pluralism was challenged through the 1970s and 1980s by more corporatist theories. The literature on corporatism rejected the more specific forms of interest group intermediation, while clinging to the broader pluralist idea that interest intermediation is pivotal to democratic governance. In addition, the rise of neoliberalism then pushed corporatist research to stress cross-national diversity in capitalist democracies. Adcock and Vail suggest here that some political scientists responded to neoliberalism by distinguishing varied approaches to democracy, civil society and social capital, and globalization and economic reform. Political scientists distinguished among different types of capitalism, including not only neoliberalism but also more embedded economies. Policy actors too tried to forge different strategies of governance, including not only the neoliberal focus on marketization, but also New Labour’s Third Way. Much of the new governance recycles the pluralist valorization of collective actors, but with the relevant actors now being not interest groups, but networks of public, private, and voluntary associations.

Conclusion

The chapters in this volume show how the traditions of modern �pluralism that arose in the late nineteenth century continued to echo throughout the twentieth century and on into contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and governance. The overall story is one of a shift from constitutional and institutional arrangements to recognition of cultural differences. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberal, socialist, and empirical pluralists concentrated on �dispersing state power. British pluralists usually emphasized the idea of giving powers to functionally-defined groups, including churches, consumer organizations, and trade unions. American pluralists typically emphasized opening state institutions and policy-making to the influence of these and other groups. In both cases, pluralists concentrated on political institutions, their legal authority, and their role in decision-making. From the late twentieth century to the present day, the main strands of pluralism increasingly focused less on constitutional and institutional arrangements than on the plurality of cultural groups and policy actors. Liberal, socialist, and empirical pluralists discuss the extent and ethical consequences of multiculturalism and networked governance. Given the shift from authority and institutions to cultures and actors, there is a sense in which we are all pluralists now. Few people today believe in the reality of the homogenous societies and unified states

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depicted in nineteenth-century national histories. Perhaps more people still believe in the desirability of a common national culture and a strong central state; but pluralism is a widespread ideal, and multiculturalism and network-governance regularly appear on official lists of the goals that modern governments should promote. The rise of pluralist alternatives to monistic visions of society and the state has transformed both our thinking and our world. For a start, pluralist ideas have revealed what were hidden features of the world. It seems clear, for example, that nineteenth-century societies were nothing like as homogenous as they appeared in the classic national �histories.26 The various traditions of pluralism have led people to see the world differently, so that many of us now recognize diversity where our ancestors generally did not. In addition, pluralist ideas have contributed significantly to a remaking of society and politics during the twentieth �century. Social scientists are often peculiarly blind to the impact of their ideas on the world. They concentrate on the ways in which social science describes and explains the world, rather than the ways in which it produces the world. However, while it may be controversial to argue that social science makes the world as well as analyzing it, the argument is an obvious one: when policy actors form policies using formal or folk theories from social science, then social science is partly constitutive of the policies. The various pluralist traditions helped to remake society and government in just this manner. Liberal pluralism surely helped to reinforce and promote greater separation of political and religious spheres. Socialist pluralism promoted the political role of trade unions in a way that surely helped to advance their role in various postwar corporatist arrangements. Empirical pluralism did not just describe the role of interest groups in democratic governments; it also legitimated this role in a way that surely contributed to their further rise. Even today pluralists continue both to reflect and generate changes in society and government. As Abbey and Reiner and I show, theoretical and practical agendas of multiculturalism and difference have risen out of both liberal pluralism and the strand of socialist pluralism that focuses on difference. Also, as Adcock and Vail and Reiner and I show, 26 For various critical studies of the British case see R. Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1: History and Politics, vol. 2: Minorities and Outsiders, and vol. 3: National Fictions (London: Routledge, 1989). Other studies of the mythical nature of national histories in various settings and genres include J. Garrity, Step-Daughers of England: British Women Novelists and the National Imaginary (Manchester University Press, 2003); R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987); E.€ Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 1998); and J. Richards, Films and British National Identity (Manchester University Press, 1997).

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many governance agendas draw on both empirical pluralism and radical appeals to associationism. Multiculturalism raises issues about the existence and value of diverse groups in society. Most of us recognize such diversity exists. Yet, we are unsure what standing to give to cultural groups. Some people believe in a thick concept of culture that appears to make cultures defining for individuals; people are constituted by their membership of a culture. Other people are hostile to reifying cultures, emphasizing that Â�individuals have capacities for reasoning and choosing, and so that individuals can come to transform or reject the cultures into which they were born. The issue of the standing of cultural groups becomes even more complex when political theorists debate how we ought to treat them. Political theorists might argue, for example, that cultural groups are reifications, but that there are good moral or legal reasons for treating them as if they were persons. The trick then would be to balance concerns over group rights with concerns for individual choice. Governance raises issues about the presence and role of networks of private and voluntary actors in formulating public policies and delivering public services. The word “governance” suggests a more disaggregated view of the state than does “government.” Many states have deliberately promoted contracting-out and public–private partnerships in a way that increasingly involves non-state actors. Some people believe that the state has been hollowed out. Others argue that the state has merely shifted the way it operates from direct control to the metagovernance of the other organizations that now undertake the tasks of governing. Here too, moreover, there are issues not only about the nature of groups, but also about their ethical desirability. Some people believe that one or both of marketization and partnerships increases the efficiency of public services. Other people fear that they erode public service ethics and blur lines of accountability. Once again, therefore, political theorists might argue that groups and networks are reifications, but that there are good moral or legal reasons for treating them as if they were persons. The trick then would be to balance appreciation of the limits to state control and authority with recognition of the moral and legal benefits of establishing clear lines of responsibility. Debates about multiculturalism and governance illustrate the continuing vibrancy of pluralist debates.27 Modern pluralisms may have 27 Pluralist debates remain equally alive in philosophy, religion, ethics, and science. See, for examples, D. Archard, ed., Philosophy and Pluralism (Cambridge University Press, 1996); M. Baghramian and A. Ingram, eds., Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity (London: Routledge, 2000); and S. Kellert, H. Longino, and C. Waters, eds., Scientific Pluralism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. XIX (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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transformed our theories and worlds, but if we are all pluralists now, we are so mainly in that we all reject monistic concepts of society and the state. It seems far less plausible to suggest that we are also pluralists in that we all actively embrace the often distinctive ideals of the different traditions of pluralism. On the contrary, even if pluralism has indeed triumphed over more unified concepts of state and society, there remains much debate about where, and to what extent, pluralism does and should exist. Typically, pluralism now refers not just to a belief in and sensitivity to diversity in society and government but more narrowly to overt arguments in favor of encouraging such diversity. While pluralists may have won their battles against reified accounts of the state as homogenous and unified, they still have to argue for the benefits of further accommodating the values of cultural minorities and further dispersing power among local, social, and economic groups.

2

From liberal constitutionalism to pluralism Jacob T. Levy



The British pluralists

As between the two philosophically polar approaches to association and state in the history of English political thought – the radical skepticism of associational life on the part of Thomas Hobbes, and the radical skepticism of the state associated with the early twentieth-century British pluralists – there is no real contest in terms of influence. Hobbes is, and remains recognized as, one of the handful of most important political philosophers since ancient times; the most important ever to write in English. The pluralists, often aggregated rather than named when mentioned at all, are remembered chiefly in a few idiosyncratic intellectual corners: those with an interest in British historiography or in guild socialism, for example. The pluralists threw their intellectual efforts not only against Hobbes, but also against Austin and his conception of law, the state, and sovereignty. Austin still stands as a dominant figure, someone whose work is productive of still more work by the likes of H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz. The pluralist critique of sovereignty is widely thought to be a non-starter, and there are no analogues of Hart and Raz working to elevate that critique to new heights of philosophical sophistication. When Harold Laski expressed his view that the pluralist “movement … to the next generation will appear not less influential than the work done a century ago by the utilitarians,”1 he was about as far in time from Bentham’s circle as he is from us, now; neither in the following generation nor in ours has the prediction been borne out. As individual names, Bentham, Austin, and the Mills still loom larger than J.N. Figgis, F.W. Maitland, or G.D.H. Cole. As an intellectual movement, I thank Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli and Mara Marin for suggestive ideas, Mark Bevir and James Vernon for comments, and Ju-Hea Jang and Stephanie Ovens for research assistance. 1 Harold Laski, Preface, The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), p. x.

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utilitarianism reshaped Victorian politics, became the dominant position in anglophone moral philosophy for a century, and (transformed into welfare economics) became the default language of policymaking. The pluralist critique of centralized state sovereignty came a generation before tremendous centralization even in the remaining democratic states, and in nondemocratic and formerly democratic ones, centralized tyranny the likes of which the world had never seen. For a generation after that, political pluralism came to mean only a particular kind of intellectual disaggregation of the study of the state into the study of the interest groups warring for control over its apparatus, and the normative critique of state sovereignty more or less faded from view. And yet the pluralists attract a steady (though small) stream of attention and enthusiasm, and there are those of us who remain convinced that the pluralists made real intellectual progress, and have something to teach us still as we struggle with questions about freedom of association, the limits of the state model of absolute sovereignty, and the relations among individuals, intermediate groups, and the state. In this chapter, I aim to draw attention to British pluralism as an episode in the history of liberal political thought, a manner in which it is oddly infrequently treated, and to give some indications of how contemporary post-Rawlsian liberalism might be enriched by treating the pluralists as a resource.

Pluralism as an episode in the history of liberal thought

British pluralism as an intellectual school is conventionally marked as beginning with the legal historian F.W. Maitland’s translation of a portion of Otto von Gierke’s work under the English title Political Theories of the Middle Ages, and his substantial introduction to that translation. The figures identified with it are Maitland himself, the historian of political thought John Neville Figgis, G.D.H. Cole, and Harold Laski, with Ernest Barker and John Dewey sometimes being identified as fellow travelers and sometimes being thought of as the critics who helped to kill the school off (or maybe both in turn). Its intellectual high-water mark was, to my mind, attained with Figgis’ Churches in the Modern State, a minor masterpiece on freedom of religion and association, though a case could certainly be made that Laski’s trio of works, Authority in the Modern State, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, and The Foundations of Sovereignty, are cumulatively more important. The school is generally thought of as coming to an end roughly in the 1930s, with Laski’s turn to more orthodox socialism, under criticism from Dewey and others,

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under the weight of its inability to articulate what a theory of competing sovereignties means, and under assault from a world turning to centralization at best and totalitarianism at worst. Pluralism has largely been omitted from our sense of the history of liberal thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and there are several reasons for this.

Liberalism and its rivals

Cole and Laski, probably the most famous members of the school, in their pluralist moments were, and understood themselves to be, something like guild socialists and corporatists, and their interest in pluralist ideas was tied up with an interest in critiquing liberal economics. By the time that pluralism was fully engaged in controversy that captured the intellectual imagination (to the degree that that happened) it was a controversy regarding the best character of socialism, economic organization, and the Labour political movement that was displacing both the Liberal Party and the dominance of a sort of liberal ideology. The associations that interested Cole and Laski were, above all, trade unions, and secondarily, organizations representing economic interests. Their importance to the development of a decentralist socialist tradition has, I think, overshadowed the other pluralists’ contributions to liberalism. Similarly, the recovery of the pluralists in the 1980s and 1990s was led by others who were primarily interested in syndicalism, guild socialism, and neocorporatism, Paul Hirst being the most prominent. Hirst, like (sometimes) Cole and Laski but quite unlike Figgis or Maitland, was fundamentally interested in economic associations – trade unions above all. Avigail Eisenberg’s Reconstructing Political Pluralism, which came many years into the pluralist revival, was among the only works in that revival to take the pluralists seriously as a source for thought about religious and cultural groups rather than primarily about labor unions or corporate economic interests – and the connection she established there (on which I mean to build) still has not been much taken up in the literature. The pluralists wrote at an odd time for the word liberal, and only partly because of the collapse of the Liberal Party and the so-called “strange death” of Liberal England.2 British liberalism as an intellectual movement was coming to mean the “new liberalism,” distinguishing itself from its “old” predecessor with a newfound enthusiasm for George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: Smith and Haas, 1935). 2

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state power in the service of material welfare and limiting the power of industrial corporations. This in turn meant that the “old” liberals came to appear, and perhaps even to think of themselves as, concerned primarily with limiting state power in economic questions. The pluralists were emphatically not on either of these sides; Laski was not a New Liberal,3 and Figgis barely commented on economic questions at all.4 To a substantial degree Maitland and Figgis (who will occupy most of my interest in this chapter) were concerned with different questions altogether. Even Maitland’s youthful A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality, a conventional piece of liberal intellectual historiography that runs from Locke and Sidney through Smith and Kant to the Mills and Spencer to show the development of modern understandings of its titular ideals, eschews the word “liberal” altogether except in quotations from others.5 And so views that might have been understood as liberal, simpliciter, decades before or decades later, fell between the early twentieth-century cracks, because they were neither New Liberal nor Old Liberal.6

Liberalism and Hobbes

Also at fault is what I regard as a grave error in understanding liberalism and its history, an error that will take some time to explain but that can be summarized in one word: Hobbes. For a variety of reasons, liberalism came to be identified not with individualism as a normative conclusion, but individualism as a methodological premise. It came to be identified not with constitutionalism as a political practice, but with contractarianism as a foundational commitment.7 And it came to be identified not with religious freedom as a normative sine qua non, but with the subordination of the church to the state as a desirable aspect of the legal consolidation of modern states. This is a liberalism of which See his criticism of the old liberals for their neglect of the “social question” and of the new liberals and their institutions for paternalism, in “The Problem of Administrative Areas,” in The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays. 4 He makes a few remarks about industrial capitalism in Churches in the Modern State, but these are primarily examples of things that he thinks churches ought not to take corporate public stands on. 5 Frederic William Maitland, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality: As Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000 [1875]). 6 On this point, see my “Liberalism’s Divide After Socialism – and Before,” Social Philosophy and Policy 20(1) (2003), 278–297. 7 On the distinction between these, see my “Not so Novus an Ordo: Constitutions Without Social Contracts,” Political Theory 37(2) (2009), 191–217; my discussion in this section is closely connected with that article. 3

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Hobbes can be seen as the founder, one of the most perverse ideas ever to take hold in the history of political doctrines.8 Liberalism’s critics from the right (Strauss), from the left (McPherson), and from elsewhere (Pettit) have all attached Hobbes to liberalism in this way. For some, this is just sloppy slippage that omits a category like “modernity”; liberalism is the political theory of modernity, Hobbes is the political philosopher who marks modernity, therefore … Hobbes and liberals must both be capitalists, or atheists, or whatever. Sometimes it is more sophisticated than that. And sometimes, the identification of Hobbes with liberalism comes from those who think of themselves as liberalism’s friends. For recent examples of the misunderstanding of liberalism at stake here, one might think of Stephen Holmes’ book Passions and Constraints, with its explicit canonization of Hobbes and Bodin as the founders of what Holmes takes to be the liberal tradition, in part because they emphasized the sovereignty of the state over the inherited privileges of feudal actors.9 Or one might think of Samuel Freeman’s widely-discussed article arguing that libertarianism is a species of feudalism rather than a species of liberalism because it allowed for a medieval displacement of public authority by private – “medievalism” here comes to stand for something that is constitutively nonliberal, because of the authority wielded by non-state institutions.10 British pluralism, in contrast, was born in a medievalist mood, trying to recapture the legitimacy of the jurisgenerative multiplicity that preceded the rise of the unitary state. Holmes understands the authority of the unitary state over the private power of intermediate bodies to be constitutive of liberalism’s growth, and Freeman understands it to be definitional of liberalism (or at least of what he refers to as “high liberalism” while insisting that nothing tendentious is meant thereby). I do not mean to suggest that liberalism is anything but a modern doctrine, or that any medieval (or indeed any very-early-modern) views should be thought of as liberal per se. Indeed, I do think that liberalism is a doctrine both arising in and centrally about the modern state. But it grows in part out of earlier-modern skepticism of that state. The 8 I exempt from that charge of perversity Richard Flathman’s version of the claim, which relies not on these misreadings of liberalism but on a unique reading of Hobbes. I can’t bring myself to agree with that reading, but I can see how Flathman draws the lessons he does from Hobbes. 9 Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraints: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995). 10 “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism is not a Liberal View,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30(2) (Spring 2002), 105–151.

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Â� pre-liberal tradition of ancient (or “Gothic,” i.e. medieval) constitutionalism, found in England’s common lawyers and French parlementaires as well as other, more radical groups, such as the monarchomachs, made a real, though ambiguous, contribution to Locke’s thought, and a long-term contribution to the liberal understanding of constitutionalism and the rule of law, through the development of early forms of judicial review of the conflict between state action and fundamental law. Those ancient constitutionalist ideas, and the medievalism on which they relied to critique the modern absolutist state, were brought into an eighteenth-century intellectual world generally contemptuous of the medieval world and transformed into a foundation of liberalism by Montesquieu. The line of liberal constitutionalist thought that more or less follows from Montesquieu – including Madison, Burke, Constant, Tocqueville, and Acton – owes nothing to Hobbes, and is concerned to build up checks on absolute power, partly on the basis of social pluralism.11 In any case, the strange blurring of the line between Hobbes and liberalism was well under way in the pluralists’ own time. Constitutionalist, Whig, and common law skepticism about Hobbesian sovereignty was hard to come by, displaced by Blackstone’s theory of parliamentary absolutism, Bentham and Austin’s theory of sovereignty and legal positivism, and Dicey’s synthesis of the two: a parliamentary Hobbesian sovereign. In any liberalism of which Hobbes is the source, the pluralists have no place; and it’s no great surprise for the pluralists to be seen, and to have seen themselves, as alien to the liberal tradition.

Liberalism and groups

Finally comes a reason why even good Montesquieuian liberals might hesitate before bringing the pluralists into the liberal fold. This is the embrace of the kind of thing Anglo-Americans often dismiss as Germanic mysticism and obscurantism: the doctrine of the real personality of groups, a doctrine that ran through Gierke’s work12 and was the major theme of Maitland’s seminal introduction to Gierke. However 11 Here I draw on my “Montesquieu’s Constituional Legacies,” in Modernity in Question: Montesquieu and His Legacy, edited by Rebecca Kingston (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 12 Throughout, references to Gierke and his work mean only the four volumes of Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, the last published in 1881. This is the work that influenced the British pluralists. Antony Black notes that his later work became much less liberal and pluralist, more statist and nationalist. Black, ed., “Introduction,” in Otto von Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, trans. Mar Fischer (Cambridge University Press, 1990 [1868]).

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much we argue that liberalism is constituted by moral rather than methodological individualism, the doctrine of groups as real persons will be a hard pill for liberals to swallow. That the theory of real group personality gets tied up with an old-fashioned story about the necessary despotism of Roman law, and the necessary connection between Germanic customary law and freedom only makes things worse. For obvious reasons, by the mid to late 1930s, Anglo-Americans ceased to be enamored of just-so stories that placed the roots of liberal freedom in the ineliminable character of the German volk and its offshoots such as the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons. But that historiographic point is secondary; real group personality is the crux. I will return to this below, and argue that real group personality is not only reconcilable with liberalism but, understood in the right way, necessary for it.

The pluralists and Lord Acton

And yet, despite all these reasons for a distance between pluralism and liberalism, there is something odd in our sense of the relationship of the two. To see this consider Figgis’ and Maitland’s relationships to Lord Acton, among the most quintessentially and even dogmatically liberal (as well as Liberal) political thinkers of nineteenth-century Britain. Acton was a historian first, a theorist second – similar in that way to both Gierke and Maitland, and to an extent Laski.13 He was Regius Professor at Cambridge and a major force behind the Cambridge Modern History. But he was a theorist of undoubted normative commitments: close to Gladstone’s Liberal government; deeply involved in intra-Catholic struggles about papal centralization, ultramontanism, and the First Vatican Council, on the side of the decentralists; and a committed federalist. He was elevated to the peerage by Gladstone, wrote profound essays on the theme that he termed “the history of liberty,” and never completed his projected complete unified treatment of the subject. His “On Nationality” has acquired a minor place in the canon as a rejoinder to John Stuart Mill’s myopic treatment of the subject in Considerations on Representative Government, and as a defense of multinationalism that looks farsighted after the twentieth century. And he was, throughout his writings on constitutional questions, a 13 Laski was only occasionally appointed to history departments, but held that “no attempt at reconstruction of our present institutions is likely to be successful save insofar as it is deeply rooted in historical knowledge.” Foundations of Sovereignty, p.€ix.

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committed liberal federalist – indeed, I think there is no other canonical or even semi-canonical thinker for whom federalism was such a central theme.14 He considered it the great modern constitutional discovery, that which might make the democratic republicanism that was inevitable in modernity safe for individual liberty.15 Of all checks on democracy, federalism has been the most efficacious and the most congenial … The federal system limits and restrains the sovereign power by dividing it, and by assigning to Government only certain defined rights. It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people, and it affords the strongest basis for a second chamber, which has been found the essential security for freedom in every genuine democracy.16

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded. It is the one immortal tribute of the United States to political science, for state rights are at the same time the consummation and the guard of democracy.17 Figgis and Maitland were Acton’s junior colleagues, not his students, but described themselves as deeply under his influence. Figgis’ Churches in the Modern State includes an appreciation of Acton as an appendix; and it was Figgis who first edited and published posthumous collections of Acton’s essays, with a co-authored intellectual biography-cumpersonal appreciation as the introduction to the collection Essays on the History of Freedom. Maitland likewise wrote a moving celebration and obituary upon Acton’s death.18 Nor was this a mere matter of personal loyalty to a colleague. Figgis’ book Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius is shot through with references to Acton, especially approving of Acton’s liberal moralized approach to history and intellectual history, and Acton’s embrace of 14 I have, I suppose, idiosyncratic views on why neither Publius nor Calhoun comes out ahead on this score, explained at some length in “Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties,” American Political Science Review 101(3) (2007), 459–477. 15 And in this way he was more committed than was Tocqueville to the potential importance of formal political institutions; Tocqueville was more pessimistic about institutions’ ability to check the historical tide. See his “Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe I,” in which he says approvingly of May that “his judgment is untinged by Tocqueville’s despondency” (Acton, “Review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe,” in Essays in the History of Liberty, edited by J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985 [1877]), p. 84) and his review of James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, in which he endorses the view that “Tocqueville never understood the [American] federal constitution” (Acton, “Review of James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth,” in Essays in the History of Liberty, p. 396). 16 Acton, “Review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe,” p. 84. 17 Acton, “The Influence of America,” in History of Liberty, p. 211. 18 The Cambridge Review, October 16, 1902.

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conciliarism. And Acton’s fervent advocacy of conciliarism and religious freedom, his opposition to the papal centralization that culminated in the First Vatican Council, and his devotion to federalism and decentralization in politics – these all complement and reinforce themes in Gierke, whose rediscovery of Althussius was all about building a German pedigree for federalism, and whose reconstruction of the intellectual shape of the Middle Ages moved freely back and forth between conciliarism in theology and constitutionalism in politics. For Gierke as for Acton, the intellectual and institutional history of freedom was deeply tied up with the intellectual and institutional history of decentralization, competing institutions, and multiple authorities checking one another. Maitland and Figgis learned these lessons from the Gladstonian liberal as well as from the German holistic medievalist; and they did not perceive there to be an essential conflict between the two. Laski, who might be expected to have less sympathy than Figgis or Maitland with a Victorian antistatist liberal, devotes a chapter of his Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty to the contest between papal supremacy and its critics in the nineteenth century, a chapter centrally about Acton and filled with admiring evaluations like this: “To the study of a man who so strenuously devoted his life to the study of liberty it is difficult to approach without emotion. Acton’s life was spent in repelling at once the claims of either Church or State to a unique sovereignty over the minds of Men.”19 In short, I think we err when, to the degree that we pay attention to British pluralism at all, we treat it as an isolated and brief-lived episode in the history of political thought, treating it simply as the reception of Gierke’s Germanism in a British context. The most influential recent book on the pluralists, David Runciman’s Pluralism and the Personality of the State, proceeds in this fashion, mentioning Acton not at all. Indeed, almost none of the works studying the pluralists discuss their connection with Acton in any substantial way, save for David Nicholls’ The Pluralist State.20 But pluralism was Actonian liberalism and Germanist 19 Harold Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), p. 86. He elsewhere treats “the learning of Lord Acton” as an improbably high standard to meet, one that would need to be met in order to “do on the grand scale what Mr. Edward Jenks so brilliantly attempted in his ‘Short History of Politics.’” Harold Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 20. 20 David Nicholls, The Pluralist State: The Political Ideas of J.N. Figgis and His Contemporaries (Oxford: St. Martins Press, 1975). In a way my complaint in this section amounts to the wish that Nicholls’ book rather than Hirst’s later work had launched the neo-pluralist revival, such as it has been.

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medievalism at the same time, with the two different idioms completely intertwined in their understandings of the priority of religious liberty, the centrality of conciliarism, and the evils of centralization in church or state. Contra Freedman, medievalism is not alien to liberalism, particularly liberalism of a pluralist and constitutionalist sort, though it may be alien to the “high” liberalism of the philosophes and their heirs. And, by the same token, we err when we somehow reserve the pluralists for the intellectual ancestry of contemporary variants of socialism while reserving Acton for the intellectual history of market liberalism or some variant of conservatism (e.g. Hayek and Himmelfarb). The particular intellectual habits of our own day encourage only socialists to see forbears in the pluralists, only conservatives to see ancestry in Acton, and, it sometimes seems, liberals to see no ancestors at all between Mill and Rawls. Acton’s federalism and Gierke’s medievalism were perhaps compatible and combinable, but Acton himself was no medievalist.21 Indeed, he was a forceful advocate of the historical narrative that has been dominant throughout modernity: that the ancients had discovered moral truth (in Acton’s case, natural law), which was lost in superstitious servility of the Middle Ages, and then gradually rebuilt from Aquinas onward. While he was, literally, a Whig historian, he had little use for the Whig-historian narrative of ancient Germanic liberty confirmed in Magna Carta and defining the true English law until it was subverted by the modern state of the Tudors and Stuarts. (It is, I suppose, difficult for a Catholic to feel wholly comfortable with that narrative.) For Acton, the Hobbesian sovereign state is an evil, but it is not a modern fall from medieval grace. What Maitland called “the federalistic structure of medieval society” does not appear in Acton’s own histories of freedom or federalism.22 Freedom of conscience is so central for Acton that he could not be anything but a post-Reformation modern. And, while always opposed to the modern centralizing state, he was also so deeply concerned with centralizing and corrupting papal power that he could not look to the Middle Ages and be happy just because there were no states to be found. 21 I do not know how aware Acton was of the substance of Gierke’s work. As far as I can tell, Acton mentioned Gierke once in his writings, in an essay on “German Schools of History,” but it was in passing. It is clear that Acton knew of the Germanist–Romanist disputes in historiography that provided the background to Gierke’s scholarship. Those disputes, however, were not his. 22 F.W. Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” in State, Trust and Corporation, edited by David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 66.

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When Acton looked to the Middle Ages, he primarily saw the grand ideas that seem to us conspicuously political: natural law, religious persecution, the contest between would-be absolute kings and a would-be absolute church, and the idea of tyrannicide.23 Certainly, he endorsed the traditional view that the conflict between church and€empire allowed some freedom to grow in the institutional cracks; and he gave cursory due to the medieval origins of cities, parliaments, and the Â�principle of representation for taxation.24 But he seems to have seen these as accidents, not ideas. The recurring urge to “trace the free institutions of Europe and America, and Australia, to the life that was led in the forests of Germany,” a trope of Whig medievalism for centuries, he dismissed as “desperate.”25 Acton was a historian of ideas, Maitland a historian of law. The selections of Gierke chosen by Maitland for Political Theories of the Middle Ages were, despite the title, heavily jurisprudential. The modern student of political theory who looks to Maitland’s famous introduction to that work for a statement of pluralist theory will likely be baffled by the dense discussions of doctrines of trust, corporate delicts, corporations sole, partnerships, and Roman and common law, to say nothing of the medieval ideas of universitas and societas. He commends Gierke to his compatriots’ attention in this remarkable passage: Englishmen should be especially grateful to a guide who is perhaps at his strongest just where they must needs be weak: that is, among the books of the legists and canonists. An educated Englishman may read and enjoy what Dante or Marsiglio has written. An English scholar may face Aquinas or Ockham or even the repellent Wyclif. But Baldus and Bartolus, Innocentius and Johannes Andreae, them he has never been taught to tackle, and they are not to be tackled by the untaught. And yet they are important people, for political philosophy in its youth is apt to look like a sublimated jurisprudence, and, even when it has grown in vigour and stature, is often compelled or content to work with tools – a social contract for example – which have been sharpened, if not forged, in the legal smithy. In that smithy Dr. Gierke is at home.26

Maitland saw, both in England and on the continent, a rich and complex associational life that was always shaping legal ideas and doctrines. Since cities, guilds, monastic orders, parishes, and so on were real 23 “The History of Freedom in Christianity,” in History of Liberty, pp. 32–37. 24 “The middle ages had forged a complete arsenal of constitutional maxims: trial by jury, taxation by representation, local self-government, ecclesiastical independence, responsible authority. But they were not secured by institutions.” “Review of May,” p. 70. 25 Ibid., p. 69. 26 Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996 [1900]), p. viii.

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social actors with a real need to act corporately, common law and civil law alike were pushed to accommodate. In other words, where Acton noticed only political ideas and public law, with liberty arising accidentally, Maitland perceived legal ideas and private law, with the freedom of group life always being pressed from below. The union of Actonian liberalism and Gierkean medievalism was thus not Acton’s own project. It was, especially, Maitland’s and Figgis’. It is that union that makes the British pluralists distinctive within anglophone liberalism. Figgis, in his admiration for Acton, attributed to the latter a kind of medievalism, and treated him as a forerunner of Gierke-inflected medievalist pluralism. There are, it is true, not wanting signs that his view of the true relations of States and Churches may become one day more dominant, for it appears as though once more the earlier Middle Ages will be justified, and religious bodies become the guardians of freedom, even in the political sphere … His ideal of freedom as of the Church was in some respects that of the earlier Middle Ages.27

But notice: Figgis and Laurence here express their own view of medieval understandings of religion and freedom, and say that those understandings resemble Acton’s views on religion and freedom. They do not attribute to him that view of the Middle Ages. They further note that any temptation to medievalism on Acton’s part was checked by his moralism; he could not but judge older eras against his standard of justice, and this meant that the persecuting centuries could not attract him. The second tendency against which Acton’s moral sense revolted, had arisen out of the laudable determination of historians to be sympathetic towards men of distant ages and of alien modes of thought. With the romantic movement the early nineteenth century placed a check upon the habit of despising mediæval ideals, which had been increasing from the days of the Renaissance and had culminated in Voltaire. Instead of this, there arose a sentiment of admiration for the past, while the general growth of historical methods of thinking supplied a sense of the relativity of moral principles, and led to a desire to condone if not to commend the crimes of other ages. It became almost a trick of style to talk of judging men by the standard of their day and to allege the spirit of the age in excuse for the Albigensian Crusade or the burning of Hus. Acton felt that this was to destroy the very bases of moral judgment and to open the way to a boundless scepticism. Anxious as he was to uphold the doctrine of growth in theology, he allowed nothing for it in the realm of morals, at any rate in the Christian era, since the thirteenth century.28 27 Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. xvii. 28 Figgis and Laurence, 1907 Introduction to Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays.

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Maitland, like Acton, saw much of the danger in modern democratic life as originating in French Revolutionary doctrines: “It is always best to begin with France, and there, I take it, we may see the pulverizing, macadamising tendency in all its glory, working from century to century, reducing to impotence, and then to nullity, all that intervenes between Man and State.”29

Group personality

The problem of “real group personality” remains. How can that sort of metaphysical collectivism be brought into even a loose understanding of liberal thought? Part of what made Hobbes seem like a plausible liberal in the first place was the intuition that egalitarian individualism is a central feature of liberalism, combined with Hobbes’ Â�corrosive skepticism about groups standing on their privileges.30 Pluralism, by contrast, as an anglophone intellectual movement was sparked by Maitland’s introduction to his Gierke translation; the idea that groups have real existence that the state recognizes but does not create was its founding intellectual commitment. I think that the most persuasive account of the theory of real group personality was given by Maitland, not in his renowned introduction to the Gierke translation, but in his later essay on Moral Personality and Legal Personality (1904).31 If the law allows men to form permanently organized groups, those groups will be for common opinion right-and-duty-bearing units; and if the law-giver will not openly treat them as such he will misrepresent, or, as the French say, he will “denature” the facts: in other words he will make a mess and call it law. Group-personality is no purely legal phenomenon. The law-giver may say that it does not exist, where, as a matter of moral sentiment, it does exist. When that happens, he incurs the penalty ordained for those who ignorantly or willfully say the thing that is not. If he wishes to smash a group, let him smash it, send the policeman, raid the rooms, impound the minute-book, fine, and imprison; but if he is going to tolerate the group, he must recognize its personality, for 29 “Moral and Legal Personality,” p. 66. 30 One account of Hobbes in this regard that I do admire, though I still dissent from its treatment of Hobbes as meaningfully liberal, is Richard Boyd, Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2004). 31 Laski’s “On the Personality of Associations” seems to me torn between the view I attribute to Maitland here and the one I attribute to Figgis below. Some might see that as a strength of the essay, thinking that it unites the two strands, though I think it fails to reconcile them; in any case it is a useful piece in its clear articulation of both. Harold Laski, “On the Personality of Associations,” in The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921).

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otherwise he will be dealing wild blows which may fall on those who stand outside the group as well as those who stand within it. For the morality of common sense the group is person, is right-and-duty-bearing unit. Let the moral philosopher explain this, let him explain it as illusion, let him explain it away; but he ought not to leave it unexplained, nor, I think, will he be able to say that it is an illusion which is losing power, for, on the contrary, it seems to me to be persistently and progressively triumphing over certain philosophical and theological prejudices.32

This account seems to me plausible and compelling, and broadly compatible with the current social scientific thought about institutions and organizations.33 It might credibly be thought question-begging, as are many arguments about law that rest on some idea of settled social expectations. If we had a different rule, expectations would adjust accordingly. If everyone knew that associations lacked legal personality, i.e. could not enter into contracts or own property, then no one would treat them as right-and-duty bearing units. As I said, I think this positivist view is credible; but I also think that it is wrong, and its wrongness is a central pluralist insight. When persons join together to pursue projects in common, whether religious, cultural, educational, or recreational, and when they do so in ways that they mean to be more than ephemeral, several things more or less necessarily follow. One is that they adopt decisionmaking procedures, some ability for the group to act as such. This is perhaps the key step that differentiates a group from an association or organization. If we all happen to worship in the same way at the same place and the same time, our groupness suffices. But if we wish our union to outlast the first disagreement about time or place or manner or theological content, then we cannot rely on that happenstance; we will need a way to come to decisions, whether a simple majority voice vote or a complex system creating a self-perpetuating episcopacy with authoritative decisionmaking power or anything in between. The simplest models are still compatible with groupness: at the end of a happenstance game of pickup basketball (or so I imagine), one of the players might say “same time tomorrow?” and then a majority of others say “an hour later is better”; the first one goes along. That might be repeated over and over again, so long as each day the members of the group wish for it to carry on and value that more highly than they value the slight disruptions to their schedules necessary to accommodate the others. (Ephemera may be long-term.) But come the day of 32 “Moral Personality and Legal Personality.” 33 See the overview in Robert E. Goodin, Introduction, in Goodin, ed., Theories of Institutional Design (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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a more serious disagreement – shall we admit this new player to our group? – or a need to deal with outsiders – I negotiate with you on behalf of my team about where and when we’ll compete against yours – the group may well find that it needs more than case-by-case agreement. It needs members to have committed to one another to be bound by collective decisions, or else to leave. At that point, the transition to association happens; the group becomes something else that can survive the departures of all of its founders, with a suitable provision for admitting newcomers, and something that can credibly engage with the outside world. Something else that more or less necessarily happens in any collective enterprise beyond the simplest is that we will pool some resources and devote them to the cause. This demands the decisionmaking procedures just discussed: we all think that the project is worth sacrificing some of our separate funds, but we need some way to decide on how the funds will be used and dispersed among the many conceivable ways of supporting the project. It also, I think, requires the creation of offices and role differentiation: there must be a treasurer, and the treasurer must understand the difference between the treasury with which he’s been entrusted and his personal wealth. So long as the treasurer is more committed to our project, and his reputation, than he is interested in the possible ill-gotten gains, we need nothing more than that understanding on his part. But suppose that we want more than that – as we will if our association grows too large for everyone to know the treasurer personally, or if the treasury becomes so large as to provide a temptation to even decent and honorable treasurers. We could each enter into a trust-like relationship with the treasurer, individually, and indeed in general trusts are an important legal instrument for the development of secondary institutions, much studied in that light by Maitland. But this is grossly inefficient for large groups, and moreover may be incompatible with our desire to pool resources (I€don’t just want the treasurer to hold onto my money for me; I want it to cease to be mine, without thereby becoming his, personally). The natural solution is to allow the association as such to own the funds, to be administered by whoever currently holds the office of treasurer, whose right to spend it is both limited to associational business and ends when the tenure in office does. If the treasurer feels tempted, he knows that the association as such will have the legal authority to pursue him for misappropriation or theft. That last step required a) that the association as such be understood to own the funds, by its members and by the treasurer; and b) that that understanding be legally recognized, so that the law outside the group

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can make sense of the claim of misappropriation, and act accordingly. This is, I think, a basic set of social facts, and Maitland was right to see them as facts in need of recognition rather than simply responses to a preexisting positive rule. When medieval Roman lawyers struggled with the question of whether guilds organized only by their members’ consent were legal associations, what turned on the question was not whether the guilds would be “smashed,” but whether they had personality.34 When the members entered into a common enterprise and pooled some resources, what was the status of that pool? Who owned a guild-house? Who owned the guild treasury? These are problems for insiders and outsiders alike, not coherently resolvable without recognizing the associations as legal entities – in our sense, without recognizing their personality. And the history of the civilians’ reconciliation to the guilds is one of recognizing a social reality. The Roman rule that no association was lawful unless it was created by the Emperor denatured the facts, and misdescribed the web of social relations that had been created in guild-heavy medieval cities. It was not the case that the Roman rule simply created social expectations around it; given the social fact of guilds, certain expectations spontaneously arose, and the lawyers’ options were indeed to accommodate those expectations or else to “make a mess and call it law.”35 Maitland’s account here is as noteworthy for what it does not say as for what it does. In it, “personality” means only personhood in the legal sense or a direct moral analogy to that sense; it carefully has none of the romantic, emotional, or psychological associations of our current word personality. More importantly, this account doesn’t rely on any question-begging anthropomorphication. The attribution of personality does not make of groups natural persons, with all the latter’s attributes. It does not make groups ontologically prior to or superior to natural persons. It simply makes full sense of natural persons’ freedom to engage in common projects, and the mechanisms they adopt for this. Both the “real” and the “personality” in “real group personality” risk being misleading to the contemporary reader. Maitland had no interest 34 Here I draw on Antony Black’s important and still under-known Guilds and Civil Society, as well as on Maitland’s introduction to Gierke’s Political Theories of the Middle Ages. Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 35 This emphasis on the priority of social reality over either philosophical purity or simplified legal doctrine was a central and recurring feature of pluralist thought. Compare Laski’s defense of pluralism as being empirically borne out, and critique of sovereignty as a fiction and of the “facile brilliance” of Rousseau, in his The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (1921), p. vi.

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in metaphysics or spiritual essences; he was interested in the relationship between legal ideas and real social facts. Contrast that with Churches in the Modern State. Figgis’ book takes as its point of departure the then-recent Free Kirk of Scotland case, in which the House of Lords had ruled that a small conservative minority of that church who refused to sanction its merger with what they took to be a heretical group were, in case of schism, legally entitled to succeed to the previously-unified church in the sense of owning its property. What we find in this case [the Free Kirk case] is that the lawyers refused to consider the body as a Church, i.e. as a society with a principle of inherent life … They construed it as a mechanism, not as an organic life.36

Figgis says this kind of thing over and over again. But there is tremendous distance between saying that groups will be spontaneously socially viewed as persons in the sense of being right-and-duty bearers, and that the law ought to reflect this, and saying that groups are persons in the sense of having inherent life, much less organic life. The latter sort of anthropomorphism is actually important to Figgis’ argument in the Free Kirk case. Among the attributes of natural persons is that they grow, they develop. They change over time in ways that are at least partly self-directed. They are capable, to use a word Figgis does not but might have, of Bildung. And it is these attributes of personhood that Figgis maintains the Free Kirk exercised. Its doctrine grew and developed, such that those who held fast to the original doctrine end by appearing schismatic. He cannot get to his desired condemnation of the outcome in the Free Kirk case just by relying on the thought that groups are, and of right ought to be, right-and-duty bearers. He must insist that among the rights they bear is the right to Bildung. Otherwise, there seems to be no reason why sociologically real groups, groups that insiders and outsiders interact with as if they had corporate life, could not be doctrinally committed to what they took to be unchanging truths. A contemporary majority of the members of the Free Kirk differed in their theological views from the church’s founders. Why must that mean that “the church” as a corporate entity had matured and changed “its” mind? Why could it not mean that they had left a church which remained committed to “its” views? Either outcome could be compatible with the thought that the church had an ongoing independent existence over time, which was no mere concession from the state. I suppose that in a properly pluralistic society, 36 John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), p. 33.

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at least some associations and churches would fall on each side of the line. Some would be in a sense about the current commitments of their members, and some would be in a some sense about a founding set of beliefs. Some religious groups understand religious truth to be given at a single time and clear and unchanging, others understand it to be difficult and added to over time by the exercise of (e.g. Talmudic or casuistic) reason. Some understand a hierarchical authority structure to be religiously mandated, others hold with some version of congregationalism, and others view decision-making structures to be matters of moral or theological indifference. The Bildung model in effect insists that all churches, all associations, are really committed to evolution in religious doctrine and congregationalism or majoritarianism in decisionmaking authority. This amounts to a failure of pluralism – a failure brought on by a too-literal embrace of the “personality” concept, a reliance on what Runciman calls Maitland’s “German” as opposed to his “English” Â�theory of what group personality as a concept meant.

Mill

I have emphasized the pluralists’ debts to, and enthusiasm for, Lord Acton. By contrast, their treatment of Acton’s fellow liberal but sometime intellectual opponent John Stuart Mill was far from effusive. Maitland credited Mill with reconciling the idea of freedom with that of variety or diversity, in a way that his Whig and contractarian predecessors had emphatically not done, and respected his contributions to political economy, but has little more to say about him. Figgis is openly dismissive of On Liberty in Churches in the Modern State. He notes that Mill’s principles could seem to completely justify the religious liberty that is his main concern, but he maintains that Mill’s arguments simply fail. Those who commit religious persecution always say that it is in part because religious error is other-regarding: your propagation of your false beliefs leads to my temptation and the jeopardy of my soul. The distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding behavior is not only untenable, according to Figgis; it is positively dangerous to freedom of speech. He offers the Bible and the writings of Rousseau as examples of books the writing and propagation of which profoundly affected others, reshaping the world in “explosive” ways. If we make intellectual and religious freedom rest on the foundation that their exercise affects no one else, then they will be unsustainable. Figgis’ own argument emphasizes the collective and corporate character of religious liberty: my freedom of conscience is not an individual and

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self-regarding freedom, but is inextricably tied up with our freedom to worship and inquire, together, in an ongoing structure. Mill himself denied much that the pluralists held dear, which should not be a surprise. He was prone to see group life as a manifestation of the regrettable human tendency to “like in crowds.” In his essays on religious and educational associations, he denies that their ability to hold funds intergenerationally can be anything more than a convenience at best.37 Early in his career he thought it actively inconvenient, and called for the nationalization of charitable endowments. Later, he expressed doubts about whether the funds would be wisely spent by the state, but still emphatically maintained that associations’ corporate lives were a mere legal fiction, always subject to revision by the state as needed. This is precisely the view that Maitland’s historical work on trusts, and Figgis’ theoretical work on churches, was meant to combat. If we are to return to the pluralists as sources for insight and argument about the liberal theory of religious and associational freedom – as I think we should – it should be with an understanding of pluralism as always having been liberal and holistic both.38 A reading of the pluralists as followers of Acton as well as of Gierke, as working with (and sometimes equivocating between) a sociological and a metaphysical understanding of the reality of group life, and as concerned with the freedom of groups because concerned with the freedom of individuals, helps us to understand their ideas more precisely and to better appreciate their place in intellectual history. It also, I think, helps us understand liberalism. Mill’s defense of individual eccentricity against group conformity, and his embrace of the legal-fiction theory of associational life, find their contemporary descendants in those liberal theories that emphasize the opposition between individual freedom and cultural norms, or religious rules, or associational structures. The pluralists offer alternative resources to the contemporary liberal: sociologically more realistic about group life, and conceptually clearer in their understanding that such norms, rules, and structures arise out of individual freedom itself. 37 “Endowments” (1869); “The Right and Wrong of State Interference with Corporation and Church Property” (1833), both in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Economics and Society 1850–1879, edited by J.M. Robson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006). 38 Here there is an affinity with some ideas from the denouement of the liberalÂ�communitarian debate. See Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The LiberalCommunitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Allen Buchanan, “Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Ethics 99 (1989), 852–882.

3

Guild socialism Marc Stears



Introduction

British guild socialism occupies a prestigious but ambiguous position in the history of pluralism. The prestige is reflected in almost every serious study of the socialist tradition of pluralism, each of which makes reference to the guild socialist movement led by G. D. H. Cole, S.€G.€Hobson, R. de Maeztu, M. Reckitt and others from around 1913 to 1923. It is also often suggested that guild socialism provided crucial insight and inspiration not only to the socialist tradition but to the whole range of pluralist traditions, including both the liberal and the empirical variants.1 The ambiguity, though, results from the fact that despite this apparent enthusiasm, the central concepts and philosophical arguments of the guild socialist movement have remained remarkably unexamined. Even the recent resurgence of interest in British pluralism has not produced a new book-length treatment of guild socialism per se. This paucity of detailed research entails that despite the guild socialist movement’s centrality to the evolution of pluralist traditions, scholars seem entirely unclear as to the nature of the movement’s fundamental conceptual and practical political claims. In so far as they are discussed at all, there is unfocused disagreement as to the guild socialists’ approach to the central political concepts of liberty, democracy, community and the state. Accounts of the movement’s more For some examples, see P. Beilharz, Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (London: Routledge, 1992); A. Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (London: Macmillan, 1985); P. Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Social and Economic Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); D. Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London: Macmillan, 1994); D. Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge University Press, 1997); A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (London: Palgrave, 1997); A.€Vincent, Theories of the State (Oxford University Press, 1993); A. Wright, G. D. H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1979). 1

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concretely practical political suggestions remain similarly unclear, with some associating guild socialism almost with anarchism while others suggest that the state always remained an integral element of their political programmes. In this chapter, I draw on my own research of the last decade or so in an attempt to rectify the absence of any clear understanding of guild socialist political philosophy.2 It is an attempt that also reinforces this volume’s study of the evolution of pluralist and anti-statist political thinking for the remainder of the twentieth century. Here, I aim in particular to introduce three very different sorts of guild socialist arguments, all of which were found intermingled in the institutions and organisations of practical guild socialism in Britain in the years between 1912 and 1922. These three positions, I shall argue, shared remarkably little in common with each other above and beyond a general reaction against the dominance of state-centrism in the political thought of the early twentieth-century British Left. Disentangling the three provides us with a richer and more subtle understanding of the guild socialist phenomenon. It will also allow us to see the contrasting potentials of pluralist political thought, enabling us better to understand how many of the diverse movements that made up the various pluralist traditions later in the twentieth century, both inside and beyond Britain, all managed to find their roots in guild socialism. Before any of that can begin, though, we need to open with the sources of state-centrism in British leftist political thought to which all of the guild socialists would ferociously respond. It was, after all, the prevalence, and the radicalism, of that state-centric position that brought guild socialism into being.

State-centric socialism in the early twentieth century

Socialist thought in early twentieth-century Britain was dominated by a state-centric tradition now generally known as ‘Fabianism’, although the sources and propagators of that tradition stretched far beyond the confines of the actual Fabian Society to include the intellectual elements 2 I discuss guild socialism and its influence in the United States in both Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton University Press, 2010). This chapter also draws on my earlier paper, ‘Guild Socialism and Ideological Diversity on the British Left, 1914–1926’, Journal of Political Ideologies 3 (1998), 289–306.

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of the Independent Labour Party, including J. Ramsay MacDonald, and the more radically-inclined members of the Liberal Party such as J.€A.€Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse. At the tradition’s heart was an organic conception of community life, derived from a idiosyncratic combination of Hegelian idealism and Darwinian-inspired sociology, which insisted that societies flourished best when they were ordered and effectively integrated, and that they floundered when they were driven apart by competition, inequality, mismanagement or any of the other perils that blighted the industrial age.3 Integral to Fabian socialism was a call to realise a greater ‘state of affairs ahead of us, less marked by failure, less chaotic, better organised’.4 As Fabian founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb evocatively summarised, ‘where our forefathers saw a jostling crowd of individuals each fighting for his own hand’, Fabian socialists dreamt of playing their part in securing a new social order, one that will resemble a ‘highly organised, far reaching, patiently pursued communal enterprise’.5 This organic conception of the ideal society infused all aspects of the tradition’s political thought. It inflected even, and perhaps most spectacularly, their conception of individual freedom. In 1897, Sidney and Beatrice Webb declared on behalf of Fabian thinkers that ‘we ourselves understand by the words liberty or freedom the utmost development of faculty in the individual human being’.6 What this meant was that all individuals would have to learn to control themselves, to overcome their internal weaknesses, to temper their own demands, all in an effort to privilege the common good above their own short-term desires. In order to ensure progress towards a more fully-integrated organic society, the ‘community’ would have to ‘enter at every point into the life of the individual’, and in order for that to be possible it would be vital to teach individuals how to ‘broaden their sympathies … into the wide sympathy of community’.7 To be genuinely free, Sidney Webb thus wrote, each individual would have to ‘abandon self-conceit … and bend his jealous mind … to subjection to the higher end’.8 As all worthwhile progress 3 J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Society (London: Independent Labour Party, 1907), 9. 4 MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 9. 5 S. Webb and B. Webb, ‘The Principles of the Labour Party’ (London: The Labour Party, 1918), 4. 6 S. Webb and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901), 847. See too J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Government (London: Independent Labour Party, 1909), 154. 7 J. R. MacDonald, Democracy and Character (London: Independent Labour Party, 1905). 8 S. Webb, ‘Historic’, in G. B. Shaw, ed., Fabian Essays (London: Fabian Society, 1884), 54.

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depended on the development of an ever closer communal union, then the only way to true liberty was to be found by ensuring that each and every individual rendered ‘faithful service’ to the community.9 As any effort better to integrate the disparate parts of the social organism would have to be overseen and directed by a well-informed, powerful central political agency, so too would individual ‘liberty’ in its truly communal sense. Liberty could thus no longer be understood as the ‘negative demand to be let alone’. Instead, it had to be accepted that there was no longer any antithesis between ‘liberty and coercion’.10 Well-advised external agencies, those that knew how society could be managed and improved, could assist individuals in the development of their social perfection rather than hinder them, even if those individuals may not initially recognise it themselves. This faith in the centrality of a fully ordered and integrated communal life to the fulfilment of all individuals’ lives led directly to an astonishingly state-centred political programme. In expanding on this general argument, Fabians insisted that any institution that was to be charged with directing the whole course of societal evolution would have to satisfy at least three criteria. First, and most straightforwardly, such an agency would have to be powerful enough to successfully direct, when necessary, every one of society’s functioning organs. It must have a ‘force strong enough to be thrown against’ any obstructive individual or sectional interest, to be able to override any temporary, short-sighted opposition. Second, the agency would have to be aware of the overall ‘science of society’, the needs and demands of all the constituent parts, and possess solutions to the many important technical questions that would arise. Third, it would have to be impartial. The agents involved would need to possess a high level of moral integrity, which would make them capable of ensuring that each part of the societal body was maintained in health.11 The Fabians and their allies were convinced that only one institution met these demanding conditions: the central government of the modern nation state. As Ramsay MacDonald spelt the conditions out, the search for evolutionary progress demanded that ‘[s]ome organ must enable other organs and the mass of society to communicate its impressions to a receiving centre, must carry from that centre impulses leading to action, must originate on its own initiative organic movements calculated to bring some benefit or pleasure to the organism’.12 This series 9 MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 195. 10 Ibid., 134–5. 11 S. Webb, Towards Social Democracy (London: Fabian Society, 1914), 38–9. 12 MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 14–15.

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of conditions, he continued, happily coincided with ‘the Socialist view of the political organ on its legislative and administrative sides’. It was central government, MacDonald concluded, that ‘carries up experience, carries it to a centre which decides corresponding movements, and then carries back to the parts affected the impulse of action’.13 The state in this sense, at least when properly reformed and staffed, was the only agency capable of guaranteeing that the inevitable socialising evolution was conducted effectively and fairly. It was the agency that should be charged ‘systematically to think out the function that each person has to perform and the relation in which each must stand to others and to the whole’, and in so doing it would guarantee both social progress and individual development: the combination of which made for the expansion of real freedom.14 Fabians were not shy of explaining the consequences of these arguments. ‘When critics suggest that individual liberty and a thick statute book are inconsistent, we confess we do not follow the argument’, Ramsay MacDonald insisted. For ‘[t]here is no opposition between these things’ as long as one accepts ‘that the law of individual well being is a law of social personality’.15 With all this in place, Sidney Webb could contend that a policy of ‘growing collectivism’, where individuals’ lives are positively directed by a central authority operated ‘more and more [by] … persons elaborately trained and set apart for the task’, would be ‘the mother of freedom’.16

The guild socialist moment

‘Today, the state enjoys its beatification’, the political philosopher Harold Laski insisted in 1917. ‘We turn to it almost blindly in sure faith that its way spells salvation.’17 It was, as so often with Laski, an exaggeration, but the general sentiment was accurate enough. For in the early twentieth century, Fabianism was not only an influential academic theory, it also often appeared to be part of a broader trend. That trend was in part captured by significant expansions in the power of central government in Britain in the first decade of the 13 MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 14–15. 14 S. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), 202. 15 MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 134–5. 16 S. Webb, ‘The Difficulties of Individualism’, in S. Webb, ed., Socialism and Individualism (London: Fifield, 1909), 27 and S. Webb, ‘The Necessary Basis of Society’, Fabian Tract 165 (London, 1906), 6. 17 H. Laski, ‘Can the State Survive?’, New Republic, 21 April (1917), 14.

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twentieth century. The reforming Liberal government elected in 1906 brought sharply increased taxation, the introduction of old-age Â�pensions, a limited national health and unemployment insurance programme, and commissions into the possibility of minimum wages. The interventions of the wartime administration went further still, with the infamous Munitions and Defence of the Realm Acts enabling governmental agencies to regulate both industrial and social life to a level not previously experienced in Britain. A range of key judicial decisions also enhanced the role of centralised governmental authorities in fixing the limits of the activity of non-state social groups. In 1903, the House of Lords declared that the Free Church of Scotland had no right to merge with the United Presbyterians, despite support amongst the members of both churches. Even more strikingly, in 1908, W. V. Osborne sued the Railway Servants Union in response to its demand that he pay a contribution to the Labour Party as part of his dues. Osborne’s lawyers charged that the Trade Union Act of 1871 limited trade unions to involvement in specifically industrial activity. The House of Lords agreed.18 These developments prompted fierce resistance from across the political spectrum, resistance which soon provided the catalyst for a thoroughgoing rejection of state-centred political reform and for an increasing demand that groups and associations should be left to run their own affairs. Political commentators began to argue that ‘everywhere’ in the country ‘faced the uprising of the group’.19 ‘Guild socialism’ first entered into British political vocabulary at this very time, initially as a general label for those who wished to resist this growth of the power of the central state without abandoning some hope for reform of the prevailing social order. Amongst the intellectuals associated with the term at this time were a young Oxford academic G. D. H. Cole, a renowned theologian John Neville Figgis, a disillusioned Independent Labour Party activist S. G. Hobson, an ex patriate Spanish philosopher Ramiro de Maeztu, and a Christian socialist Maurice Reckitt. The group was complete with its own weekly newspaper in A. R. Orage’s widely-distributed New Age, and, following the composition of a constitution known as the ‘Storrington Document’ in 1915, it received a temporary institutional identity in the ‘National Guilds League’ (NGL).

18 See H. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 128–31. 19 G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (London: 1913, 2nd edn 1917), 19.

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These mechanisms allowed the guild socialists to set to work in preparing a new set of arguments intended to reject the centralisation and bureaucratisation associated with the recommendations of Fabian socialism. Those associated with guild socialism thus began to demand that the British Left reject its traditional over-reliance on the reforming prowess of the centralised state and look instead to the work of smaller, localised and democratised associations for meaningful and long lasting political, social and economic reform. They crafted visions of a wholly new society, one where central government was relegated to a position well below that enjoyed by private associations and local federations, and penned imaginary constitutions, philosophical treatises, even poems and operas to make their case. There was no doubting the widespread appeal of this effort, an appeal that deepened as the war progressed and the interferences of central government in the lives of individuals and groups became increasingly troublesome. In fact, the excessive state intervention of wartime presented an unrivalled opportunity for pluralist argumentation. Dismayed by a host of government programmes, a wide array of political organisations provided a welcoming audience.20 Guild socialist arguments were taken up in a myriad of discussion circles and lecture groups, co-operatives and trade unions in the immediate aftermath of the war. Leading figures in the broader labour movement, such as Frank Hodges and Robert Smilie of the Miners’ Federation began to lend their attention to the growing movements of discontent.21 For many commentators, guild socialist ideas became the predominant ‘living political issue’ of the age.22 There was even a bookshop in New York, The Sunwise Turn, that was briefly dedicated to guild socialist literature.23 Yet despite all the enthusiasm and the plethora of texts produced, it is vital to recognise that there was not one philosophically unified and politically coherent guild socialist movement in Britain at this time. Rather, there were three distinct groups, each of which struggled for control of guild socialist institutions and which offered very different accounts of both the problems of the present and the nature of the ideal. The first of these groups was led by the exuberant future-Fascist 20 R. Ensor, ‘Guild Socialism’, Manchester Guardian, 18 November (1920). 21 For a first-hand description of this popularity see F. Hodges, Nationalisation of the Mines (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920) and F. Hodges, My Adventures as a Labour Leader (London: Leonard Parsons, 1925). For a general introduction see C. Wrigley, ‘Trade Unions and Politics in the First World War’, in B. Pimlott and C. Cook, eds., Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years (London: Macmillan, 1991), 69–87. 22 H. Phillips, ‘Workshop Organisation’, Economic Journal 33 (1923), 396. 23 See Stears, Demanding Democracy, chapter 3.

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Ramiro de Maeztu, and included the popular British authors Maurice Reckitt, S. G. Hobson and A. E. Randall; the second was associated most closely with the theological writings of John Neville Figgis and the third, and probably most widely remembered, was shaped by G. D. H. Cole and his Oxford colleagues Ivor Brown, R. H. Tawney, as well as by the plentiful New Age writings of an unidentified young philosopher who went under the pen-name of Oliver Latham. These three groups shared a general disdain for Fabianism and especially for the extension of the powers of the central state, but they agreed on little else. The next three sections of this chapter introduce each in turn.

Guild socialism and organicism: Maeztu, Hobson and Reckitt

At the core of the first group of guild socialists’ ideological programme was an interpretation of communityas a quasi-organic entity shaped by the inter-relation and interdependence of individuals that initially appeared to differ very little from that advanced by Fabian socialists and their colleagues. This view, in turn, allowed for an insistence that society should pursue a single shared good that could be objectively identified.24 Such organicism also inspired a related notion of communal ‘function’. On such an account, if society is to grow and prosper, each individual within it has a clearly defined duty to fulfil. A ‘function’, in other words, was a role, and usually an industrial role, that had to be performed if the social order was to flourish. Unfortunately, as these theorists understood it, in capitalist societies not everyone performs their duties as they should and their functions thus go unfulfilled. A range of jobs were performed badly, industries inefficiently directed, and workers underperforming. The result of such functional failure was said to be a social breakdown which, in turn, leads to a wide range of difficulties including industrial unrest and economic downturn. Improved functionality was thus to provide the solution to a wide set of contemporary concerns. These guildsmen could assure the poor man, for example, that if he was looking for an answer to his poverty, he has simply to be aware that a ‘far finer career of material achievement awaits him when the community is reorganised into its true’, that is to say functional, ‘formation’.25 24 See R. de Maeztu, Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of War (London: Macmillan, 1916), esp. 216. 25 S. G. Hobson, National Guilds (London: Macmillan, 1914), 115–16. See too R. de Maeztu, ‘On Luxury and Waste’, New Age, 13 May (1915), 35.

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The central difference between this first group of guildsmen and their Fabian contemporaries emerged with regard to the cause of functional failure and thus the nature of the proposed remedies. Whereas Fabians often blamed a lack of centralised regulation for the functional failing of modern societies, this group of guildsmen looked in exactly the opposite direction. It was the overwhelming power of the central state rather than the state’s absence that was to blame. ‘History’, Maeztu argued, had falsified the Fabian ‘supposition that the unification of all powers€… was necessary for the ordering of social life’.26 Quite to the contrary of Fabian suggestions, these theorists argued that the state necessarily hinders progress towards functional organisation. And the reason was simple. States become easily overrun by single groups of self-interested individuals who then exercise power not for the overall good of the community but to further their own vested interests. As Maeztu phrased it, as soon as any single authority ‘acquires absolute superiority over the others, it loses all stimulus to produce objective values. It only cares about maintaining its power or spending it in a life of pleasure’.27 The obvious and available alternative to state-centrism€– that of free market organisation and a more thoroughgoing adherence to laissezfaire€ – was also, however, said to be doomed to failure. The unregulated, unstructured competition of the marketplace was no more likely to ensure functional fulfilment than state organisation. To ensure that functions were properly fulfilled, these theorists thus concluded, social, economic and political governance had to be radically but rationally divided and decentralised. Organisations, and this is where the term ‘guilds’ came in, should be drawn up to cover each of the essential functions of communal life and these organisations should then be released from the directional control of the central state. They would then operate effectively in their own arena, motivated to fulfil their duties effectively by the need to maintain good relations with the other guilds maintaining the other functions.28 This was to be ‘a social order without the need for a sole power’.29 If there was a role left for the state then it was to be one of setting the relevant background conditions. Some of these guildsmen believed that the guilds would emerge bottom-up through the work of dedicated converts without the need for any state assistance.30 Others believed 26 R. de Maeztu, ‘The German Heresy’, New Age, 3 February (1916), 321. 27 R. de Maeztu, ‘More Disconnected Connections’, New Age, 13 April (1916), 562. 28 See C. Bechhofer and M. Reckitt, The Meaning of National Guilds (London: Cecil Palmer and Heywood, 1918), 4. 29 Maeztu, ‘German Heresy’, 322.â•… 30╇ Ibid., 418.

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that they could be introduced from the top if the state could briefly be secured for the good cause. Still others argued for some form of compromise between the two. In that latter mould, Reckitt urged that ‘the function of the state’ was ‘not to destroy the vital associations of which society is, or should be, composed, but to harmonise them’ and then to move away.31 This approach to community and function also delineated, and was further reinforced by, this group’s approach to other concepts. As with the Fabians, the most important concept to be reworked concerned the liberties of individuals in relation to their duties. These theorists were in no doubt both that the two concepts were often in conflict and that superiority lay in the commitment to function. To these guildsmen, therefore, the ‘principle of individual liberty is radically and irremediably opposed to all organisation’.32 ‘Freedom’, as Maeztu’s closest colleague A. E. Randall insisted, ‘reduces a nation to a heap of dust’.33 The inescapable result of this conceptual speculation was the idea that the ‘common object’ was to be ‘considered superior to the individual aims’ of citizens or associational members.34 Most importantly, the rights of the individual were to be closely tied to the performance of functional duties. Maeztu would even go so far as to insist that ‘we should not discuss any longer the rights of the individual … for in this society nobody would have any other right than that of doing his duty’.35 If an act could not be defended in terms of its functionality for the whole, then the individual had no right to perform it. On this guild scheme there was also to be no real role for individual choice in the allocation of individuals to functions. ‘Every man’ was to be compelled ‘to exercise the function for which he shows the greatest aptitude’, whether or not that coincided with their own subjective assessment. Refusal too was to be met with a strict response. ‘If the individual refuses to help society’, Maeztu urged, ‘society will in turn refuse to help the individual, who will consequently die of hunger!’.36 When critics complained that this was going too far, these guild socialists went to go even further. Rejecting a critical work of Bertrand Russell, for example, S. G. Hobson urged that guildsmen should be prepared to 31 Bechhofer and Reckitt, Meaning of National Guilds, 22. 32 R. de Maeztu, ‘Beyond the Barriers of Liberty and Authority’, New Age, 2 September (1915), 424. 33 A. E. Randall, ‘On Aristocracy’, New Age, 11 March (1915), 513. 34 Maeztu, ‘Beyond the Barriers’, 424. 35 Ibid., 425. 36 R. de Maeztu, ‘On Compulsion’, New Age, 24 June (1915), 181. See too S. G. Hobson, National Guilds, 164.

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let doubters ‘shriek about individual liberty’.37 The principle of function was too important to overlook. ‘Universal compulsion that has for its object making all citizens fulfil the functions which society deems necessary is not only just’, Maeztu defiantly concluded, ‘it is the very definition of a social regime founded on justice’ and ‘it is just whether [people] like it or not’.38 This ordering of conceptual priority was again surprisingly reminiscent of traditional Fabianism. As Maeztu recognised, the notion that ‘society must … compel every man to exercise the function for which he shows greatest aptitude’ is ‘the same in state socialism … as in guild socialism’.39 Amongst Fabians too there was a dedication to asserting the supremacy of functions over rights of resistance.40 Again, however, the discrepancy emerged with regard to the position of the state vis-àvis the functions. In particular, disagreement raged over the identity of the agency to be charged with deciding the nature of the function. While Fabians were certain that it was the job of a centralised authority representing the whole community ‘systematically to think out the function that each person has to perform and the relation in which each must stand to the whole’, as the Webbs put it, these guildsmen placed the emphasis squarely elsewhere.41 ‘Under guild socialism’, Maeztu insisted, it is the guild itself that ‘allots the man the duties to which he appears best fitted’. The reason was straightforward. Guild appointment of individuals to duties ‘seems to me better than state socialism, for only shoemakers can tell whether another shoemaker is good or bad’.42 Guilds would be the organisations to ensure that individuals were doing the tasks for which they were best fit.43 The key disagreement with Fabianism for this group of theorists, therefore, resulted in an assertion of the superiority of specific group decision-making over the processes of the state. Little else of fundamental import was altered.

Guild socialism and group identity: Figgis

The second group of guild socialists was dismayed by this similarity with Fabian socialism. Led by John Neville Figgis, whose works stretching 37 S. G. Hobson, ‘Liberty without Function’, New Age, 22 May (1919), 69–70. 38 Maeztu, ‘On Compulsion’, 180, and Authority, Liberty, and Function, 267. 39 Maeztu, ‘On Compulsion’, 181. 40 See, for example, S. Webb and B. Webb, The Consumers’ Co-operative Movement (London, 1921), 482. 41 Webb, Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth, 202. 42 Maeztu, ‘On Compulsion’, 181. See too Hobson, Meaning of National Guilds, 164. 43 The question of who would allocate which individuals to which guilds to start with was far less clear.

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from The Gospel and Human Needs (1909) through the widely celebrated Churches in the Modern State (1914) to The Will to Freedom (1917), captured great attention in guild circles, these thinkers rejected two key elements of Maeztu and colleagues’ position. First, Figgis was entirely resistant to the idea of an organic society coterminous with the boundaries of a nation state and possessed of some superiority over the constituent groups, organisations and individuals that composed it. Such a view, he insisted, misapprehended the ‘whole complex structure of civil society’, which was not to be understood as any form of any pre-given, essential ‘union’, but rather as a loose coming together of independent and often rival parts.44 Second, he was even more determined to keep a place for individual liberty in his theoretical system. It was entirely wrong, he insisted, to sacrifice liberty to ‘function’, partly because there was no organic whole for individuals to perform such functions for, and partly simply because it is chiefly ‘with liberty that we are concerned’. ‘Freedom’, Figgis insisted, ‘if rightly pursued, is no petty nor merely clerical ideal; it is the noblest of all the watchwords that appeal to man’.45 It was for freedom that guildsmen campaigned for a smaller state and for devolved authority to groups, and not for ‘function’. Despite this emphasis on difference, however, the actual conception of freedom that Figgis offered was strikingly reminiscent of that advanced by the Fabians. For Figgis an individual’s ‘truest freedom’ was not concerned with ‘mere personal caprice’, as it had been for traditional antistatist liberals, but ‘with realisi[ng] himself’.46 Individuals need to be able to control their desires and to channel their energy towards worthy goals, to ‘alter not only what you do but what you want to do’, as Figgis put it.47 Furthermore, Figgis argued, just as the Fabians had, that as each human personality is an irreducibly social creation ‘fulfilment’ can only be discovered through better social relations.48 ‘The notion of isolated individuality’, Figgis insisted, ‘is the shadow of a dream’.49 Individuals are shaped and continually reshaped by the processes of socialisation, their personalities constantly changed by their fellowship. For Figgis, then, just as much as for the Fabians, an individual’s ideal values and goals, his perfection, and thus his liberty took an essentially J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1914), 40. 45 Figgis, Churches, 52. 46 J. N. Figgis, The Gospel and Human Needs (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 138. See too J. N. Figgis, The Will to Freedom (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), 289, and A. Ulam, Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 83. 47 Figgis, Churches, 89 (emphasis added). 48 Figgis, Churches, 88.â•… 49╇ Ibid. 44

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communal form. Such communalism, moreover, could sometimes be imposed on individuals, especially on those who were tempted by the siren calls of individualism. ‘Authority is … the expression of the social nature of man’, Figgis insisted, and thence obedience to it was a key aspect of ‘the true character of personality’. Each individual might need ‘the discipline … of group-authority’ in order to ‘guard against his own caprice’ and ensure that he actually pursues perfection.50 Figgis’ break with Fabian assumptions concerning liberty came with his account of the locus of the relevant fellowship, the nature of the community through membership of which individuals would reach communal perfection. Whereas Fabians saw a move towards ever wider and broader interaction between individuals in a national context, Figgis stressed that the vast increase in the size and diversity of twentiethcentury nations entailed that ‘in the modern world … no such assertion is possible’.51 While it may have been possible for the much-admired small city-state of the ancient world to be the locus of socialisation, the ‘mother of all her citizens’, that certainly could not be the case today. For Figgis, humans in the twentieth century were socialised within small, tight-knit, local groups, not within a nation state. Individuals could thus only find personal fulfilment in a family or locality, a ‘parish or county, union or regiment’.52 It was on these lines, then, that Figgis connected a concern with liberty and human development with the need to resist the encroaching central state and to insist on a doctrine of group autonomy. In so far as the central state was not conterminous with the community in which socialisation occurred, it could not legitimately claim to be the appropriate authority to charge with the detection and development of individuals’ communal perfection. Associations had to be left to run themselves. Furthermore, it was to be for associations to detect and promote the ‘perfection’ of their own members. Entry requirements were thus to be set by the groups themselves, internal decision structures would vary from group to group, and, occasionally at least, it even appeared that the right exit for disaffected individuals could be severely limited.53

Guild socialism and individualism: Cole, Tawney, Brown

The critical response to Figgis’ brand of guild socialism was just as ferocious as Figgis’ had been to Maeztu’s. ‘It is the individual whom our 50 Figgis, Freedom, 299.â•… 51╇ Figgis, Churches, 72. 52 Ibid., 48.â•… 53╇ See, for example, Figgis, Churches, 45.

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authors neglect’, complained one correspondent in the liberal Nation in his coverage of guild socialist political philosophy at the end of the First World War. ‘To be thrown off state-worship is something; to have passed onto group worship is small advance.’54 ‘It is’, G. D. H. Cole reminded his New Age readers, ‘in the name of individual liberty that I call myself a National Guildsman’.55 But for Cole this was not liberty as it had been reinterpreted by Fabians or by Figgisian guild socialists. Rather, and in sharp contrast, Cole and his colleagues offered an account of freedom grounded in a forthrightly individualistic account of human nature, not in one that stressed communal perfection or fulfilment. As one contemporary reviewer noted, for Cole’s group of guildsmen, ‘man himself, the individual, is the central fact’.56 ‘It is of the essence of the … human’, Cole continued, ‘that he is individual and cannot be absorbed into anything else’.57 This individualism was developed further in two regards. The first was a dedication to the essential variability of individuals’ values and life plans. This individualistic inclination led the theorists to insist on what R. H. Tawney would call the ‘infinite diversities’ of individuals.58 Each individual’s view of the world, what would now be called their ‘conception of the good life’, was potentially different and potentially irreconcilable with the views of others, whether or not they were the members of the same organisations, groups, states or nations. The appreciation that individuals are essentially ‘distinct’ from one another involved recognition that they could not be ‘moulded to a pattern’, whether that pattern came from the state or from a smaller organisation such as church, trade union or region.59 The second consequence was a conviction that individuals were essentially opaque to one another. As such, there could be no knowing another’s ultimate goals better than that other can know them himself.60 If anyone were to try to describe the essential personality of any human other than himself, he would always be led towards error.61 As Cole phrased it, ‘we can only know what we ourselves know to be good’.62 Combining the two, it thus made sense to argue that freedom 54 Anon., ‘Another New Jerusalem’, Nation, 16 February (1918), 164–5. 55 G. D. H. Cole, ‘National Guilds and the Balance of Powers’, New Age, 16 November (1916), 59. 56 Anon., ‘Society and the Guilds’, Nation, 18 February (1915), 436. 57 Cole, Labour, 37 (emphasis added). 58 R. H. Tawney, Equality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 208. 59 H. Laski, ‘Lecture on Political Freedom’, Fabian News, December (1925), 51. 60 H. Laski, ‘Lecture’, 51; H. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925), 143. 61 See also, Laski, Grammar, 145. 62 G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory (London: Methuen, 1920), 93.

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was best understood as that condition under which ‘our desires and our doings can run unimpeded on their way’.63 Whereas others wished to ‘cure men of the excessive value which they grant to their personality’, Cole’s guild socialists developed a political theory that emphasised the importance of ‘the right of men to live their own lives and express their own personalities’.64 It was, therefore, as a vigorous defence of the individual that Cole and his colleagues outlined their proposed system of guild organisation. As with the other groups of guild socialists, the first step was to decentralise authority to a range of organisations that reflected certain key areas of social and economic life. The state would withdraw from the control or detailed regulation of the conduct of these organisations, leaving them to conduct their own business in their own way.65 The prime justification, however, for the decentralisation of authority lay not in a dedication to improved functionality, as on the first group’s account, nor in allowing individuals to find their true communal natures in independent groups and organisations, as in the second, but in a familiar argument about the division of power. ‘If the individual is not to be a mere pigmy in the hands of a colossal€social organism’, Cole declared, ‘there must be a balance of social powers as will preserve individual freedom’ by positioning one social€organisation ‘so nicely against another that the individual may still count’.66 Such commitments had further important ramifications for the way in which groups themselves were to be organised within an ideal guild society. Cole’s guildsmen were insistent, for example, that guilds must have well-developed democratic mechanisms. The protection of the individual member from the oppression of associational guild elites relied upon the possibility that individual members could control their association’s behaviour. Hierarchical power structures were to be dismantled and, theoretically at least, all members of the guild were to be given a say in the construction and implementation of guild aims, rules and regulations. The control over one’s individual life which such mechanisms provided entailed that democratic control was a vital 63 I. Brown, ‘Aspects of the Guild Idea’, New Age, 24 June (1915), 175. 64 R. de Maeztu, ‘Disconnected Connections’, New Age, 16 March (1916), 467; R. H. Tawney, Commonplace Book (diary, 1912–1914; published, Cambridge, 1972), 47 (emphases added). 65 For a detailed overview of the institutional recommendations, see G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920). 66 G. D. H. Cole, ‘National Guilds and the Balance of Power’, New Age, 16 November (1916), 58.

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‘means to freedom’.67 Such a dedication to the critical role of democracy could not have differed more from the position of Maeztu’s or Figgis’ groups. Within their conceptual framework it was possible to suggest that the whole notion of democracy was antithetical to the guild ideal. ‘The guild cannot remain an organic structure’, the argument ran, with democratic structures within which ‘vexatious and frivolous complaints are encouraged’.68 Nothing could have been further from Cole’s conception. Important as they undeniably were, none of Cole’s individualistic assertions should be taken to imply that he or his supporters neglected the concept of community or the principle of function entirely. They did not. There was a commitment to function amongst these guildsmen, as there had been with Maeztu. This commitment was, however, to an unsurprisingly very different approach to the concept and an equally divergent account of its practical implications. Most straightforwardly, whereas Maeztu understood function in terms of the objectively ascertainable long-term interests of the organic whole, Cole was unable to endorse such a view. The resolute conviction that individuals’ ways of looking at the world were inevitably and irreconcilably different led Cole and his colleagues to denounce any organicist notion as ‘essentially false’.69 ‘The enormous variation from one individual to another’, as another New Age sympathiser of Cole’s put it, entailed that any ‘insistence on uniformity is impossible’.70 In place of Maeztu’s account, therefore, functional activity was understood simply to be any action which was productive in some very broad sense. Both the existing capitalist system and its Fabian counterpart were held to be simply incapable of producing the level of goods and services that a society consisting in a collection of free individuals would require. What was important for this second group, then, was that the economy should expand and to produce a broad range of goods to enable citizens to pursue their own lives independent of economic constraints. A functional system was one which ensured continuity of supply. The ‘object of industry’ was simply ‘to produce goods’.71 As if to illustrate the depth of the rift, one opponent explicitly condemned Cole and colleagues for apparently 67 G. D. H. Cole, ‘Freedom in the Guilds’, New Age, 31 December (1914), 213. 68 A. E. Randall, ‘On Aristocracy’, New Age, 18 March (1915), 339–40. 69 G. D. H. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth (London: Headley Bros, 1917), 37. 70 M. W. Robieson, ‘On Certain First Principles’, New Age 25 July (1918), 197–8. 71 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921), 179. See too G. D. H. Cole, ‘A Wasting Asset of Industry’, New Statesman, 20 December (1919), 342.

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considering the questions of what is produced and by whom a ‘matter of complete indifference’.72 A further variation emerging from this definitional disagreement again surrounded the question of who was to decide the nature of each individual’s functional role. In contrast with Maeztu’s and Figgis’ view, within Cole’s framework the guilds were not to choose individuals’ roles nor allocate individuals to functions but rather Â�individuals themselves were to make their own decisions. The process must begin voluntarily. As Tawney put it, all industrial associations ‘must be entered freely’. Their membership must also be subject to revision at any point. As Cole insisted, ‘there [must be] easy transference from guild to guild’.73 This insistence on voluntariness rested partly on the priority of freedom, or more specifically on the elements of value pluralism and individual opacity. Both of those contentions, as Ivor Brown saw it, entailed that ‘the essence of man’s life’ had to be the subject of his own choice.74 It was also, however, a result of these theorists’ conception of function itself. The members of this group, that is, shared a dedication that the best way to motivate people to produce was to set them free from oppressive intervention. ‘The average man is right when he is left alone’, these guildsmen cried.75 It was the tensions implicit in the current system of political and economic organisation€ – with an interfering state and an ineffective capitalistic economic system€– that meant that workers currently did not work as hard as they would in a guild society.76

Guild socialist legacies

Three distinct political theories were thus formed under the guild socialist umbrella. Each of them was dedicated to drawing back the boundaries of the state and allowing smaller, independent groups and organisations to run their own affairs, but each for very different reasons. First, Ramiro de Maeztu and colleagues argued that such decentralisation was paradoxically essential to achieving a more harmonious social order. Second, John Neville Figgis insisted that only individuals 72 A. J. Penty, ‘Can Our Industrial System Survive’, Guildsman, May (1921), 9. 73 Tawney, Acquisitive Society, 74; Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth, 292. 74 I. Brown, ‘Democracy and the Guilds’, New Age, 18 February (1915), 436. 75 I. Brown, ‘The Average Man’, New Age, 11 November (1915), 37. 76 As Cole put it, ‘it may take long to call out the fully human qualities which the … system has debased and driven below the surface. But these qualities exist, and can be called back to the light if the right motives are exercised and brought into play’. See G. D. H. Cole, ‘A Mining Guild’, New Age, 8 May (1919), 22–3.

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in smaller, self-regulating and traditional organisations could truly find the communal fulfilment required for a fully flourishing life. Third, G.€D. H. Cole and his followers argued that diverse individuals seeking protection from overbearing authority would do best in a society which allowed associations of all sorts a far-reaching independence. Each of these three groupings found their own followers outside of Britain, and especially in the United States. As enthusiasm for guild socialism spread amongst east-coast intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of the war, each strand of guild socialist philosophy was picked up by some interested party. Maeztu’s insistence on the organic functionality of group decentralisation was echoed by John Dewey in his Human Nature and Conduct and Reconstruction in Philosophy; Figgis’ call for communal development within small organisations was similarly endorsed in Mary Parker Follett’s influential The New State; while Walter Lippmann warmed so deeply to Cole’s brand of individualism that he employed it in both Public Opinion and The Phantom Public to help him discredit the progressive form of Fabianism that he had helped to create himself in the United States, before his wartime experiences ripped him from statecentrism forever.77 These tendencies were to continue to assert themselves into the 1920s and well beyond. In time, the three divergent strands of guild socialism bled into corporatism, communitarianism, interest-group pluralism and the participatory New Left. In short, there were echoes of all these guild socialist arguments in all of the major left-leaning political philosophies that displayed some scepticism about the continual expansion of state power.78 The relative popularities of each of the three strands ebbed and flowed across the remainder of the twentieth century in a manner which reflected not only the appeal of their original source, but also the plausibility or otherwise of the organic analogies that the each grouping either endorsed or abjured. There were moments when individualism seemed the most appropriate foundation for pluralism 77 See J. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: The Modern Library, 1922); J.€Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (University of London Press, 1921); M.€Follett, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918); W. Lippmann, The Phantom Public: A Sequel to Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1925); W. Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1921). I discuss these influences in depth in Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State, 127–67. 78 For some intriguing references and echoes, see R. A. Dahl, ‘A Brief Intellectual Autobiography’, in H. Daadler, ed., Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession (London: Pinter, 1997) and A. MacIntyre, ‘The Socialism of R. H. Tawney’, New York Review of Books, 30 July (1964).

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(especially in the immediate aftermath of the First World War) and moments when collective belonging seemed to be the more appealing central premise (especially in the aftermath of the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1960s).79 This trend has continued in Britain in the last few decades. In the early 1990s, for example, the social theorist Paul Hirst attempted to develop a model of ‘associative democracy’ that drew on both the Figgis and the Cole traditions (although he infrequently distinguished them) in order to provide a radical alternative to both the moribund statecentric social democracy associated with the British Labour Party and the neoliberal free market ideology then flourishing in the British Conservative Party.80 More recently still, Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ movement has made explicit reference to both G. D. H. Cole and his one-time guild socialist colleague, R. H. Tawney, in its efforts to direct Labour’s attention back to a more democratic and less bureaucratic rendering of the British Labour tradition than has generally been popular on the British Left.81 Once again, key selections are made from among the disparate guild tradition as these new inheritors present their own arguments, and it will be rewarding for future scholars of left pluralist thought to draw the comparisons and the contrasts as clearly as possible. It is not my claim here that the divisions within the early guild socialists necessarily shaped the fortunes of the later pluralist traditions. It is, nonetheless, that a clearer, more precise categorisation of guild socialist political thought is a necessary precondition for understanding those later twentieth-century pluralisms in full. The other chapters of this volume will prove one test of that conviction, of course. But we should also remember that this effort at distinguishing amongst the various traditions provides us with the means by which to begin an evaluation, as well as an interpretation, of the complex traditions that go to build up pluralism, both old and new. Pluralists have long held that the monistic theory of the state is politically troublesome, but they have devised many arguments by which to critique it and many institutional suggestions to try to supersede it. If the history of guild socialism can teach us anything, it is that we should be scholarly and cautious in our assessments of these arguments. We might rightly be 79 On which, see M. Bevir, ‘Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000’, Political Studies 54 (2006), 583–606. 80 See P. Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Social and Economic Governance (London: Polity Press, 1994). 81 See M. Glasman, J. Rutherford, M. Stears and S. White, eds., The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (London: Soundings, 2011).

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critical of the state. It does, indeed, seem likely that orthodox social democracy has relied too heavily on bureaucratic centralisation. But for all of our pluralist enthusiasm, we need to be acutely aware both of the precise nature of the charges that are levied and the alternatives that are proposed.

4

Pluralism and method at the turn of the century Avigail Eisenberg

In the 1910s and 1920s, the pluralist challenge briefly dominated political and philosophical scholarship in the Anglo-American world. In 1919 the pre-eminent philosophical journal, The Philosophical Review, devoted an entire issue to pluralism in metaphysics, psychology and politics. A few years later, in the 1920s, the American Political Science Review published papers by E.D. Ellis,1 Francis Coker2 and W.Y. Elliot3 on topics such as ‘the pluralist state’ and ‘the pragmatic politics of Mr. H.J. Laski’. The early pluralists are mainly remembered today for developing a pluralist idea of the state which was meant to replace organic conceptions and Darwinian-inspired evolutionary approaches to human and social development which dominated the scholarship at the time. But the pluralist state was only one part of a larger revolution in ideas introduced by these scholars. Their primary aim was to introduce new empirical methods to the study of politics. In doing so, they showed that the state was, in fact, made up of a plurality of groups, and that state sovereignty and group power did not follow invented narratives about progressive development. They also used these methods to demystify the relation between groups and individuals by arguing for a pluralist idea of individual development and a more empirically realistic understanding of group personality.4 Several pluralists proposed a reflexive approach to the relation between individuals and groups according to which the stability of the pluralist state depended on how groups shape, and in turn are shaped by, individuals. In these respects, the early pluralists, though only briefly popular, introduced a new way of thinking about how people develop a sense of belonging, affiliation and allegiance to groups and the state which, more than the pluralist 1 E.D. Ellis, ‘The Pluralistic State’, American Political Science Review 14(3) (1920), 393-407. 2 Francis Coker, ‘The Technique of the Pluralistic State’, American Political Science Review 15(2) (1921), 186–213. 3 W.Y. Elliot, ‘The Pragmatic Politics of Mr. H. J. Laski’, American Political Science Review 18(2) (1924), 251–75. 4 See Chapter 2.

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conception of the state itself, had enduring influence in the disciplines of political science, anthropology and psychology.

Method and early political pluralism

The connection between the new empirical methods and pluralism is usually traced to the work of Arthur Bentley who, though not part of the pluralist club, foretold the future of political science in his 1908 book, The Process of Government, in terms that capture the methods endorsed by the pluralists.5 Bentley criticized the ‘dead political science’ of his day for focusing on ‘the most external characteristics of governing institutions’ rather than the group activity which constituted the state and sovereignty.6 He argued that conventional ideas such as sovereignty, the state, public opinion and the public interest were ‘fictions’ that ignored groups whose activities manifest real political power. The ‘raw material’ of political phenomena, he argued, is neither laws nor institutions, nor certainly constitutions,7 but rather group activity. Government was ‘a differentiated, representative group or set of groups … performing specific governing functions for the underlying groups of the population’.8 Behind the political power of any institution or agent of the state was the power that many different groups gave to these institutions and agents through their support and activity. For example, the power of the President or the Congress rested on, and could be reduced to, the activity of groups. As Bentley put it, the joint activities of groups of people, ‘are the cloth … out of which men in individual patterns are cut … The “President Roosevelt” of history, for example, is a very large amount of official activity, involving very many people’.9 Bentley’s book also attacked the formalistic approaches to the study of political institutions because they only recognized legislatures, courts and sometimes political parties as the sites of governance, and based their choices on unfounded assumptions about what counts as Bentley’s main work on governance, The Process of Government, though published in 1908, was not read much until 1951 when David Truman published The Governmental Process which drew attention to Bentley’s idea that group activity and groups are at the heart of politics. Notwithstanding the delayed popularity of the book, Bentley’s argument for a more empirical approach to political analysis was part of a larger movement in Anglo-American scholarship during the first decade of the twentieth century to reform social science methodologies. 6 Arthur Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (University of Chicago Press, 1908), p. 162. 7 Arthur Bentley, Relativity in Man and Society, revised with introduction by Sidney Ratner (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1968), p. 145. 8 Bentley, The Process of Government, p. 209. 9 Ibid., p. 176. 5

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a ‘political institution’. If governance was instead studied empirically, Bentley argued, then all groups which actually participate in it would be part of the study of governance, whether they are officially recognized by the state as political actors or not. ‘No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government. They are an interest group within it.’10 The empirical view thus promised to enlarge the terrain of political analysis well beyond the state and state institutions, and thereby, just as political science was first recognized as a separate discipline in the United States, to broaden considerably what should properly count as the study of politics and governance.11 The empirical view also required political analysts to rethink the relation between individuals and groups which, as John Gunnell explains, led early pluralists to the insight, so crucial in later political science, that groups are fluid rather than static political actors.12 Groups redefine themselves in relation to other groups they encounter13 and in relation to changes in their individual members. The ‘process’ part of governance was what Bentley called the ‘man-society process’, which was a segment of a larger ‘individual-group continuum’. Drawing from Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bentley argued that just as space and time exist on the same continuum, so do individuals and society.14 On this continuum, groups are in a constant state of flux because they are continually shaped and reshaped by the context created by other groups. Individuals are also shaped by their contexts. Their character, power and interests change as groups change. The general idea here is that social and political phenomena undergo fluid processes of continual change in the sense that individuals are shaped by groups and then shape groups in ways that alter groups, change the influences that groups have on individuals, who then reshape groups, and so on. The character, interests and identities of groups and individuals are always changing in relation 10 Ibid., p. 271. 11 The American Political Science Association was established in 1903. The pluralists made a strong case in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to studying politics which depended on incorporating ideas from philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology into political analysis. See John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Geneology of an American Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.€105. 12 See Chapter 7. 13 See Paul Kress, Social Sciences and the Idea of Process (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); see also Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 381. 14 See, in general, Bentley, Relativity in Man and Society. I discuss this aspect of Bentley’s thought in Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 97–9. Sidney Ratner discusses it as well in his excellent introduction to Bentley’s Relativity in Man and Society.

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to each other. No one exists external to these social processes, not even the political analyst whose methods are empirical, but whose cultural and class biases affect the meaning and significance of the observations he or she makes and these effects become part of the context shaping individual and group activity in the governing process.15 Bentley’s ideas signify the start of a new and modernist empiricism in political analysis which, until that time, had been dominated by a developmental historicist framework, and organicist and evolutionary explanations of social and political ideas.16 The organicism popular in the nineteenth-century political theories of Comte, Hegel and Marx held that groups are more than the sum of their parts, and therefore more than the sum of the characters or interests of their individual members.17 The briefly popular idea of ‘group personality’, which the British pluralists challenged and reinterpreted, was initially defended in such organicist terms, as though groups were ‘real’ persons with personalities separate and different from the individual personalities of their members. A new generation of scholars also criticized evolutionary approaches applied to political and social life which held that human nature evolved through natural processes of self-realization, and that governing principles, such as democratic representation and individual liberty, unfolded gradually as long as the social context was right.18 According to popular and scholarly renditions of this view, societies, nations and races progressed from non-literate to highly literate and scientifically advanced,19 and civilizations thereby existed at various stages of a hierarchic process of evolution and growth. The pluralists 15 Bentley, Relativity in Man and Society, pp. 205–6. 16 Mark Bevir, ‘Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000’, Political Studies 54 (2006), 583–606. 17 Organicism was also central to early twentieth-century British thought especially amongst early Fabian socialists such as J.A. Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, Ramsay Macdonald, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. See Chapter 3. 18 John Stuart Mill wrote, in the 1831 essay, The Spirit of the Age, ‘Human nature must proceed step by step, in politics as well as in physics’. However, unlike the Hegelians, Millian liberalism considered social context to be important to individual and national development without also suggesting that social context unfolds according to some preordained process or plan. Mill held that the higher capacities of individual development were developed in contexts that were ‘man-made’ rather than those which occurred through natural processes of self-realization. For a discussion of organicist ideas in the nineteenth century see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), chapter 10. 19 Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 265. These views were, of course, challenged at the time, most notably by Franz Boas in ‘The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology’ published in 1896. But Boas’ critique was not influential for at least another decade.

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rejected evolutionary premises and proposed instead to reassess social and political phenomena, across all disciplines, using methods that were empirical in spirit. Precisely what was meant by ‘empirical methods’ varied considerably across the scholarship. For Graham Wallas and Charles Merriam, empirical methods meant using surveys and statistics to question accepted truths about human psychology and dismantling assumptions about social wholes and historical continuity so as to reveal the disaggregation and discontinuity of real social phenomena.20 For others, like John Dewey, it meant developing a new approach to reasoning, called pragmatism, which located knowledge in the context of experience, 21 experiment, hypothesis and observation. And for British pluralists such as J.N. Figgis, G.D.H. Cole and Harold Laski, the new empirical methods simply meant that theories and concepts had to be based on observations about real world politics. The British pluralists insisted that concepts, like the state and sovereignty, which had become larger than life due to a combination of neo-Hegelian idealism and the tremendous growth of the state in the first decade of the twentieth century, 22 had to be reconceptualized and specifically disassembled into their component parts so that analysis could see how they really worked. Liberalism had to be cleansed of invented narratives about racial and cultural evolution and ‘unverified universalisms’ about the undifferentiated and atomistic nature of individuals. In the spirit of the new methods, J.N. Figgis observed in 1913 that ‘in the real world, the isolated individual does not exist’23 and therefore should not be the premise of political analysis. With the possible exception of Bentley’s attempt to apply Einstein’s theory of relativity to political analysis, the empirical methods being proposed had no pretensions to mimic those found in the physical sciences.24 Methods of political analysis were defended as empirical 20 Bevir, ‘Political Studies’, pp. 588–9. 21 Menand suggests that Dewey used the term ‘experience’ to denote culture in the same way as his friend and correspondent, Oliver Wendel Holmes, had used the terms. In later years, Dewey stated that he wished he had used ‘Culture’ rather than ‘Experience’ in the title of his book Experience and Nature. See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 437. 22 Chapter 3, pp. 40–59. 23 J.N. Figgis, Churches and the Modern State, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913, pp. 87–8. 24 Dewey has sometimes been interpreted as advocating methods for political analysis similar to those used in the physical sciences. But he was clear that this wasn’t his intention: ‘When we say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not absolutistic, we have in mind a certain logic of method, not primarily, the carrying on of experimentation like that of laboratories.’ See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1927), p. 202.

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because they based knowledge on observation and verification and proposed concepts that could be disaggregated. Groups became important to political analysis because observation suggested that people act in groups and because groups could be disaggregated into individual persons whose impact on politics was reducible to ideas, feelings and activities that existed in the social environments. As Bentley argued, individuals are members of groups, they are members of many different groups, they act in groups, and therefore groups belong at the centre of political analysis. The ambition to reinterpret political phenomena using empirical methods thereby led several scholars, in Britain and the United States, to assert a vision of society and the state that was pluralist in the sense that it placed groups at the centre of politics and, according to some versions, argued that groups form a continuously changing context which serves as a source of individual development and empowerment, and a source of social constraint and political stability.

The pluralistic state in Britain

The key challenge for the British pluralists was to show how the new pluralist approach offered a political, not just a methodological, alternative to absolutist or holistic approaches to sovereignty, the rule of law and political stability. Once the British pluralists had disassembled the fiction of state sovereignty and exposed the state to be ‘pluralistic’ in the sense that it was made up of different groups, each holding some power, the question became, what holds this state together? The problem was highlighted by the pluralist reinterpretation of the ‘group personality’ doctrine which had made its way into scholarship at the time through a translation of Otto Gierke’s organicist interpretation of the doctrine.25 On Gierke’s view, groups were ‘real “unitary” persons€ – existing over and above the multiple individual persons of which they were composed’, 26 and regardless of whether or not they received state recognition.27 Because groups possess real personality, Gierke argued that they have the ‘right’ to their legal personality. To 25 Otto von Gierke, Associations and the Law: the Classical and Early Chistian Stages, edited and translated by George Heiman (University of Toronto Press, 1977). 26 Ernst Barker, ‘Introduction’, in Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Sovereignty 1500–1800, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1950), p. xxix. 27 Also see F.W. Maitland’s 1936 discussion of group personality in ‘Moral Personality and Legal Personality’, in Selected Essays, edited by H.D. Hazeltine, G. Lapsley and R.H. Winfield (London: Cambridge University Press). As Jacob Levy argues (Chapter 2), Maitland offered a more persuasive account of the doctrine, and one that could provide pluralists like Laski with inspiration largely because it left behind the mysticism found in Gierke’s original account.

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argue, as Gierke did, that group personality exists separately from state recognition was a direct attack on absolutist theories of sovereignty, in which groups were recognized only as legal fictions, which were controlled by the state to the extent that their very existence depends on the state’s concession or recognition of them. Just as individuals are treated unjustly when they are denied legal recognition as individuals, Gierke believed that groups are treated unjustly when their ‘real personality’ is ignored. For Cole and Laski, Gierke’s argument was politically useful, despite its impenetrable view of groups. The argument for group personality entered public debates in Britain early in the century in relation to the question of whether the state had authority to dictate the terms of church and trade union activities.28 In one of the most famous cases of the time, the Taff Vale case of 1901, the Court of Appeal held that, even though the law denied unions the full legal status of corporations, and thereby denied them legal personality, unions could be treated as though they possessed personality for the purposes of being sued or otherwise being held legally responsible for the acts of their members. The decision was criticized by most social democrats except those, like Laski, who took the doctrine of group personality seriously. Laski argued that, in the long run, Taff Vale would lead to the recognition of a more extensive and advantageous set of group rights and duties for unions. And the fact that the personality of unions was recognized by the court, independently of explicit state legislation, affirmed a sociallygrounded notion of sovereign power and how it is distributed. The case proved that the state is not the absolute sovereign. ‘As a matter of law’, Laski argued, ‘government may possess unlimited power; in actual fact there will always be a system of conditions it dare not attempt to transgress’,29 conditions such as the defiance of trade unionists to stateimposed restrictions on picketing and strikes, or by religious dissenters to restrictions on their practices or beliefs.30 Yet, there were problems with this argument. First, the concept of group personality was intangible and unempirical precisely in ways that raised concerns for the pluralists.31 Laski defended the concept on empirical grounds, after defining it as a ‘unified activity which comes 28 Chapter 3, pp. 40–59. 29 Harold J. Laski, The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921), p. 22. 30 Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problems of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), pp. 136–7. 31 Despite his sympathies for the trade unions, G.D.H. Cole refused to use the phrase ‘group personality’ because of its neo-Hegelian implications.

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from the coalescence of the thoughts and wills of divers men’.32 In contrast to neo-Hegelian approaches, in which the state was presumed to be sovereign, or legal formalistic approaches, in which political power was distributed according to what the constitution stated, Laski suggested that the legal and political status of groups must be commensurate with the recognition that individuals give groups through participating and sharing in their goals. Decisions as to which groups should be recognized in law and where to locate sovereign power ought to be based on whether a group actually possesses political power based on the wills of its members, not on whether it has received the sovereign’s approval or constitutional recognition. A second and more serious problem was that the pluralist approach seemed to promote unstable and possibly antagonistic social and political relations amongst uncoordinated groups. Pluralism seemed to undercut social unity by legitimating the power of any social group, whether legally recognized or not, whether associated with the state or not, and whether business or union. Hobhouse was especially critical of the guild movements championed by Cole and Laski for ‘repelling the suggestion of an underlying unity of aim and insisting on a radical and insuperable antagonism’.33 The challenge for the pluralists was then to show that good governance was possible in the absence of the grand and naturalistic designs proposed by organicist and evolutionary approaches. How is social and political harmony possible amidst the diversity of group interests and power? The British pluralists took this challenge seriously, although they were divided in their responses. On one hand, Cole acknowledged the problem; associations could act in ways that legitimately disrupted social harmony, much as the trade unions had disrupted the harmony of the British state. But pluralism avoided social fragmentation, he argued, by adopting a corporatist form of governance in which each association was limited to a specific function. As long as each performed its own function, including the state, whose function was limited to addressing matters on which the citizenry had ‘an identity of interests’,34 the associations co-existed peacefully. 32 Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays, p. 67. 33 Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 74. Graham Wallas was critical of the pluralists’ empathy for trade unions which he viewed as being characterized by ‘identity, reluctance to change and conservatism’. See Freeden, Liberalism Divided, pp. 74–5. 34 G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory, New York: Frederic A. Stokes Co., 1920, pp. 96 and 135. Also see Avigail Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 71–4.

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On the other hand, Laski met the criticism by arguing that disharmony was not a problem but rather a means to ensuring individual liberty. He used the doctrine of group personality to frame a polyarchic approach to the distribution of sovereignty and group power in which competition amongst groups was the means by which vulnerable groups and individuals could be protected from being dominated by a single powerful group. Pluralism could safeguard individual liberty much as federalism safeguards the freedoms of minority nations by dividing the power of the central state. ‘The secret of liberty is the division of power. But that political system in which a division of power is most securely maintained is a federal system; and, indeed, there is a close connection between the idea of federalism and the idea of liberty.’35 On this view, one virtue of pluralism is that it divided power and sovereignty and thereby required groups to engage in a healthy competition for the loyalties of citizens. A second virtue, at least in Laski’s approach to it, was that, by cultivating group differences, a pluralist state stimulated individual creativity. Laski described individuals as ‘bundles of hyphens’ whose natures are largely determined by their associative ties.36 35 Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays, pp. 86–7. The connection between the scholarship on federalism and pluralism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is largely undeveloped with the notable exception of Jacob Levy’s contribution to this volume where Levy examines the role played by Lord Acton as a mentor and colleague of J. N. Figgis and F. W. Maitland. To this I would add that, like Acton, Laski’s ideas on federalism were developed partly in thinking about Canadian federalism and corresponding with Lord Haldane, a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), which acted as Canada’s ‘supreme court’ until 1949. The decisions of the JCPC were crucial to shaping early Canadian federalism. See Harold J. Laski, ‘Canada’s Constitution’, The New Republic 35 (4 July 1923). Also see David Schneidermann’s assessment of the correspondence between Laski and Haldane in ‘Harold Laski, Viscount Haldane, and the Law of the Canadian constitution in Early Twentieth Century’, University of Toronto Law Journal 48(4) (1998), 521–60. In the 1920s, Laski argued that federalism, because it divided power, could erect obstacles to the development of large-scale cooperative projects, like social welfare programmes. With reference to the Canadian case, his response to the problem was to argue for more pluralism, i.e. functional not merely territorial pluralism. In this respect, his position, once again, ran against the general wisdom on the Left which held that a division of powers threatened cooperative projects and that a strong central state was an asset to a strong social welfare system. By 1939, Laski changed his position and argued, this time with reference to the United States, that federalism renders government impotent to deal with ‘the issues giant capitalism has raised’. See Harold Laski, ‘The Obsolescence of Federalism’, The New Republic 98 (3 May 1939), p. 67. Another connection between Laski and Canadian federalism is found via Pierre Elliot Trudeau whose dissertation Laski supervised at London School of Economics. Trudeau, as Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984, overhauled Canadian federalism, entrenched rights into the Canadian Constitution, and officially recognized Canada’s commitments to multiculturalism. 36 Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays, p. 170.

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He argued that a pluralist state cultivated group differences by giving fuller play to the ‘creative impulses of men’. It increased the chances that people would be exposed to the different perspectives of different groups because where a group is free to pursue its own conception of the good life, and to develop its own character and interests, it will contribute its own unique perspective on social and political life to the public sphere. A pluralist politics would legitimize and publicize these differences and thereby, Laski hoped, cure citizens of ‘undue localism’. And this, in turn, led to a third virtue of pluralism, which is that a pluralist state would provide the fullest guarantee for individual liberty and rights because only in a pluralist state are individuals exposed to the different senses in which rights can be denied to people in different social, religious and class-based positions. Individual awareness is stimulated by exposure to distinctive standpoints which help track the ways in which mainstream guarantees for liberty suit the circumstances of some groups quite well and unfairly deny the circumstances, life experiences or ‘personalities’ of others. Pluralism stimulates ideas, gives life to different group perspectives, and thereby is a helpful companion to both individual liberty and creativity. Whereas John Stuart Mill had argued far before Laski that individuals need protection from majority tyranny to protect their liberty and unique individuality, Laski’s observation differs from Mill’s in part because on Laski’s view the meaning of liberty depends on what it means from the perspectives of different groups. On this reading, his intention was not to suggest that values are relative to the groups that hold them, but instead that the meaning of abstract values depends on how they are lived in real group contexts. Empirically, he argued, we get beyond highly abstract accounts of freedom (e.g. ‘freedom of association’ or ‘freedom of religion’) only by understanding what impairs freedom for different groups. The scope and limits of rights and liberties are unknowable without understanding what depriving or enjoying freedom means in different contexts. ‘It is surely … significant that the movement for the revival of what we broadly term natural law [i.e. the recognition of group personality] should derive its main strength from organized trade unionism.’37 Group life reveals the meaning of human freedom in the same way as organized trade unionism had revealed the wisdom behind the group personality argument. This point was made in the 1910s and 1920s by socialist and communist parties, and trade unions which were amongst the strongest advocates for individual rights largely because they were so frequently denied rights in their 37 Harold J. Laski, ‘The Pluralistic State’, The Philosophical Review 28 (1919), 562–75.

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efforts to organize collectively and attract votes.38 Pluralists like Laski pointed out that ‘group life’ is the precondition which allowed these groups to contribute their valuable perspectives on the meaning of freedom to public debate. Political pluralism is thereby a precondition for understanding the full nature of individual liberty because it protects groups, and not, as the old liberals would have it, because it empowers individuals directly through a set of rights. Where groups are able to develop their distinctive personalities, they develop unique perspectives which pluralist politics empowers by placing within a broader political context in which group power has legitimacy. Laski’s ideas went through many changes in the course of his long career. Arguably, a conception of individual freedom was a constant element in them.39 But the central concern of British pluralism was not to protect the liberal individual as much as it was to expose the dangers of concentrated state power and to show, using empirical methods, that political power was, in fact, pluralistically distributed. According to these pluralists, groups are the central element of politics and the central means to individual freedom. As Laski put it, pluralism ‘does not deny that the individual is influenced by the thousand associations with which he is in contact; but it is unable to perceive that he is absorbed by them’.40 Group personality exists only to denote an aggregate: ‘a number of men who, actually by some common purpose, are capable of a unified activity’.41 And individual liberty, according to the pluralist perspective, was not simply the absence of restraint, nor an ideal which unfolded in the course of human history, but a good which arose when groups were allowed to flourish in a pluralistic society.

Pre-war American pluralism

John Dewey is not usually thought to fit as comfortably in the pluralist camp as Laski, Cole and Figgis in part because pragmatism, rather than pluralism, was the central and guiding idea of his scholarship. Yet, Dewey’s pluralism shares three elements with British pluralism. First, Dewey arrived at pluralism when he introduced pragmatism, which was a new way of reasoning based on empirical methods, to the study of 38 For an excellent study on this era of political organizing in Canada, see Matt James, Misrecognized Materialists: Social Movements in Canadian Constitutional Politics (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), especially chapters 2 and 3. 39 See Freeden, Liberalism Divided, pp. 295–313. 40 Harold J. Laski, Authority and the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 65. 41 Ibid., p. 90.

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social, political and philosophical phenomena. Second, like the early pluralists, Dewey sought to reform concepts like the state, state sovereignty and the public in an effort to rid scholarship of philosophical abstractions. And third, perhaps more than the pluralists before him, Dewey connected his understanding of groups and group power to a pluralist idea of individual development. Another reason to consider Dewey a pluralist is because that is how he described himself. In 1902, he proposed what he called a pluralist perspective in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology: The needs which pluralism endeavours chiefly to serve are (1) the possibility of real change … since monism seems to make change a mere incident in the totality of being … (2) the possibility of real variety, particularly in the differences of persons, as monism seems to lend itself to a pantheistic view, regarding all distinctions as simply limitations of the one being; (3) the possibility of freedom as a self initiating and moving power.42

In this respect, Dewey was influenced by William James, his teacher and mentor, who argued for a pluralistic metaphysics and psychology, and who developed the philosophical approach of pragmatism, the central feature of which was what James called ‘radical empiricism’ which claimed that truth is dependent on verification and knowledge is dependent on experience.43 Pragmatism promised an empirical account of reality that could challenge the nineteenth-century developmental historicism found in the works of Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Marx and Hegel and thereby speak to a new ‘generation of academics, journalists, jurists, and policy makers eager to find scientific solutions to social problems and happy to be given good reasons to ignore the claims for finished cosmologies’.44 According to the pragmatic view, individuals are actively engaged in processes of knowledge and truth creation; ‘the knower is not simply … passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing … The knower is an actor. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates … action which to a great extent transforms the world€– help to make the truth which they declare’.45 These active processes reveal the universe to be pluralistic and fragmented: ‘the pluralistic world is therefore more like a federal republic than like 42 John Dewey, ‘Pluralism’, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 2, edited by James Mark Baldwin (New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1901), p. 306. 43 William James, Principles of Psychology, in The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1890]). 44 Menand, The Metephysical Club, p. 372. 45 William James, ‘Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence’ Essays in Philosophy, in The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1878]), p. 21.

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an empire or kingdom’.46 Pragmatic methods verified that reality is as varied as individual experience and that organic and monistic explanations are based on fabrication not reality. Dewey extended James’ pragmatic approach and traced the pluralist contours of the social and political world. But he was a reluctant pluralist, a fact revealed in The Public and Its Problems, where he develops a pluralist account of state sovereignty, the public, the public–private distinction and individual development yet throughout regrets the pluralist nature of the public sphere. His aim in the book is partly methodological, to challenge the abstract idea of the ‘Public’ found both in neo-Hegelian philosophy and in the ‘old liberalism’, and to explain governance, the state and the public using pragmatic methods. The result is a mix of method-driven and normative arguments that pull in different directions. Methodologically, the definitions Dewey adopted revealed a pluralist public and a plurality of social groups. He defines a public as consisting of all ‘who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for’ and the state as the machinery deployed by a public to respond to the indirect consequences of transactions.47 In simpler times, Dewey explains, the public was unified, because communities were smaller and economies simple. People were more likely to be affected as one unified group by the indirect consequences of transactions and therefore more likely to act as a united Public in responding to these consequences. But the Â�complexity and diversity of modern society has given rise to many different kinds of groups each of which may be affected in unique ways by the myriad of transactions taking place. A pluralism of publics is a feature of the modern condition, and a consequence of diversity. The public is plural because social, cultural and economic groups are ‘affected by indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour’ in different ways and to different degrees.48 Plural publics mean a pluralist state because state power arises from the activities of a public. With many publics, state power is fragmented into responding to many different kinds of interests. On this view, the state is pluralistic not in the sense that it is another one of the publics with its own interests, nor is it an umpire amongst competing publics, but instead because the state is the tool of governance that publics use to regulate public 46 William James, Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943 [1908]), p. 322. 47 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, pp. 15–16. 48 Ibid., p. 137.

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transactions. Depending on the circumstances, the state’s reach might be all-encompassing, as idealists claimed, or strictly circumscribed to regulating pre-specified activities, as liberals insisted. But whether it is extensive or limited, state power depends not on some preconceived formalistic conception of the state, or some organic unfolding of a sovereign ideal, but on the actual nature of transactions that occur and the actual demands of publics. The state’s authority is limited where social transactions lead to few serious consequences for others; its authority is broad and even fragmented where the consequences of transactions lead to different activist publics trying to control the indirect consequences of various transactions. Where there are many publics, no one public controls all of the state’s machinery. Rather, each public can attempt to use only one part of the state’s machinery to regulate the consequences of transactions. This vision of pluralism had ‘obvious points of contact with what is known as the pluralistic conception of state’,49 but also one important difference. For Dewey, pluralism was a regrettable statement of fact, not a normative political ideal. As he put it, ‘there are too many publics and too much of the public concern for our existing resources to cope with’.50 Too many publics exist because modern society has produced too many conjoint activities with indirect consequences. As a result, each public ‘crosses the others and generates its own group of persons especially affected with little to hold these different publics together in an integrated whole’.51 The goal of a great society is, therefore, to overcome this pluralistic and disunited public and, in line with this, the main question for Dewey was how to do so in a way that unified the publics into what he called ‘the Great Community’. And yet, his solutions relied heavily on social pluralism and on a pluralist theory of individual development. In describing ‘The Search for the Great Community’,52 Dewey drew from James’ account of pluralist psychology the idea that a human being is like an association ‘consisting of a multitude of cells each living its own life’. As people associate with a wide variety of different groups and individuals, they develop and change in the process of being influenced by their interactions. ‘[A]s the activity of each cell is conditioned and directed by those with which it interacts, so the human being whom we fasten upon as individual “par excellence” is moved and regulated by his associations with others.’53 The pluralist view, which he contrasted with liberal

49 Ibid., p. 73.╅ 50╇ Ibid., p. 137. 51 Ibid.╅ 52╇ Ibid., chapter 5.╅ 53╇ Ibid., p. 188.

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‘isolationism’, recognized that individuals develop their personalities by interacting within a plurality of different associations and then also recognized that this had consequences for the social and political relations amongst groups in society. One consequence of the view was that individuals should encourage harmony and integration amongst the different social groups to which they are associated because they have an interest in having an integrated and harmonious personality. Ideally, in the ‘Great Community’, group interests will complement each other, and groups will be flexible towards one another’s interests and values, thereby developing individuals with integrated personalities. In this respect, pluralism is more than simply a social fact; it is a substantive good necessary for healthy individual development which has social and political consequences. Pluralistic psychological development was connected to democracy which ‘demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common. Since every individual is a member of many groups, this specification cannot be fulfilled except when different groups interact flexibly and fully in connection with other groups’.54 So Dewey recognized that psychologically and socially, pluralism was both a fact and a value within democratic society. Less ideally, groups can corrupt individual development when they dominate individuals to the exclusion of other groups, and they corrupt society when they dominate all other groups. This is especially true of ‘inflexible’ groups, so-called because they ‘cannot interact flexibly with other groups’ or ‘can act only through isolating itself’. Group enclaves (a term Dewey did not use to my knowledge, but captures his concern) fragment society and isolate those who associate with them by preventing ‘the operation of all interests save those which circumscribe it in its separateness’.55 ‘Life has been impoverished not by the predominance of “society” in general over individuality, but by a domination of one form of association, the family, clan, church, economic institutions, over other actual and possible forms.’56 On this view, what makes the political and social domination of one group so damaging is the way it affects the psychological development of individuals by leading to narrow-mindedness and social isolation. The way to prevent this domination and isolation is through a form of pluralism that ensures all groups are flexible and willing to interact with each other. Another respect in which Dewey presented pluralism as a value rather than merely a regrettable fact was in relation to pragmatism. With its problem-solving ethos, pragmatism was designed to diagnose social 54 Ibid., p. 147.â•…

╇ Ibid., p. 148.╅

55

╇ Ibid., p. 194.

56

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and political domination in order to discover ways to adjust the interests of groups and communities to each other. Communities serve as contexts of human-scale interaction where knowledge, truth and moral standards take shape. Because pragmatism connected the truth of speculations to the particular context in which truth could be tested, it held that moral standards were best understood in relation to the specific communities in which they existed as standards.57 As was true of Laski, Dewey was not arguing that value or truth are relative to context, but rather that people are dependent on community, including the Â�customs, habits and traditions of their community, in order to grasp knowledge and truth. Truth and knowledge depend on engaging community custom, tradition and habit in order to socially transmit and communicate knowledge. Since ‘knowledge is a function of association and communication … it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned … Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers’.58 Dewey made this point especially well in early public debates about immigration where he opposed the Anglo-conformists who argued that immigrants should be forced to abandon their ancestral values and customs in order to adopt American ‘Anglo-Saxon’ values. By the turn of the century, Dewey had gained a reputation as a great educator after establishing the famous ‘Laboratory school’ in 1896, in Chicago, which was an epicentre of the largest wave of immigration in American history.59 At that time, he cautioned against using schools to impose cultural conformity. Pragmatism, he argued, suggested that cultural values, loyalties and traditions provide a context in which knowledge is shared and transmitted, and possibly also, as he argued later, a context for individual development. Immigrant children would ‘lose the positive and conservative values of their own traditions’60 before they were able to acquire the cultural knowledge necessary to absorb the values and standards of their new culture. Rapid assimilation could easily take from these children more than could be replaced by imposing AngloSaxon values on them. The best course of action, however, was not to encourage cultural preservation, but rather to orchestrate a wider form of assimilation in which everyone assimilates ‘one to another’. 57 See also Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), p. 176 and Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G.P. Putnan’s Sons, 1938), p. 34. 58 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 168. 59 Between 1890 and 1920, 15 million immigrants were admitted to the United States. 60 John Dewey, ‘The School as Social Centre’, in The Middle Works 1899–1924, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1976 [1902]), p. 87.

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A similar kind of respect for group differences informed Dewey’s criticisms of social evolutionary theories, which had, since the late 1890s, become a target of scholarly criticism, especially amongst those who championed the new empirical methods.61 In 1904, Dewey joined Columbia University where he was colleagues with Franz Boas and became attracted to how empirical methods were revolutionizing the discipline of anthropology by turning assumptions about cultural superiority and inferiority on their heads. In the foreword to a book written by one of Boas’ students, Paul Radin, Dewey criticized prevailing preconceptions about ‘primitive peoples’ and heralded Radin’s book for challenging conventional notions about the innate inferiority of indigenous peoples.62 In these respects, Dewey’s sensibilities as a scholar and a public philosopher seemed to endorse pluralism. Through pragmatism, pluralism brought knowledge to bear on healthy individual development and healthy community, both of which required individuals to belong to a plurality of groups and to be socialized in a plurality of contexts. Yet, at the same time, Dewey wrote about the pluralistic nature of the public as ‘inchoate’ and ‘disorganized’. He was critical of the pluralistic state, and argued that democracy required an integrated community and a unified public. The problem for him was how to harness the positive features of pluralism without fragmenting community, isolating individuals into group enclaves, and dividing publics against each other. The answer provided in The Public and Its Problems was that the public must be unified into a Great Community of flexible, open and nondominating associations. But this was a utopic solution, which Dewey proposed only as a way of providing direction rather than as an attainable realistic endpoint. Nevertheless, harmony rather than pluralism 61 Starting in 1894, Franz Boas argued that cultures could not be ranked in terms of their progress nor judged using the standards of another culture. ‘All such views are generalizations which either do not sufficiently take into account the social conditions of race, and thus confound cause and effect, or were dictated by scientific or humanitarian bias, by the desire to justify the institution of slavery or to give the greatest freedom to the most highly gifted.’ Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1911), pp. 100–1. 62 See John Dewey, ‘Foreword’, in Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: D. Appelton and Co., 1927). Radin argued that ‘the judgments of civilized peoples … were not initially based on any calm evaluation of facts. If the aborigines were regarded as innately inferior, this was due in part to the tremendous gulf in custom and belief separating them from the conquerors, in part to the apparent simplicity of their ways, and in no small degree to the fact that they were unable to offer any effective resistance’. Dewey agreed with Radin and praised Radin’s ‘thoroughgoing revision of notions that have become current’. My thanks to Michael Asch for pointing out Dewey’s contribution to Radin’s work.

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was essential to democracy and depended on the dissemination of pragmatic methods, which established shared standards of knowledge that publics could use to resolve conflicts amongst themselves.63 Whereas Dewey’s pragmatism challenged some of the prevailing ideas of his time, especially the philosophically abstract concepts, monism and evolutionary approaches to social and political development, he was, at best, a reluctant pluralist, both as a scholar and a public thinker. Despite his early involvement in debates about immigration and anglo-conformism, Dewey is remembered for his reluctance to apply his ideas about pluralism directly to the ongoing debates about immigration and racial politics in the United States.64 William James, for example, was more forthright than Dewey in recognizing that pragmatism and pluralism were philosophical expressions of antiÂ�imperialism and anti-racism.65 And many of James’ students became passionate advocates of pluralism and pragmatism in the context of debates about race and culture in the United States. Notable examples include Horace Kallen, William Du Bois and Alain Locke, each of whom was inspired by James’ pragmatic ideas in constructing their approaches to cultural pluralism (Kallen) and racial relations (Du Bois and Locke).66 In contrast, Dewey’s main work on pluralism, The Public and Its Problems, despite being written at the height of American debates 63 Dewey also argued that customary loyalties protected communities from political manipulation because where people have shared standards for what counts as a good leader, they are less likely to be easily manipulated by individuals whose positions are self-serving (see The Public and Its Problems, pp. 158–63). 64 See Gary Gerstle, ‘The Protean Character of American Liberalism’. The American Historical Review 99(4) (1994), 1055–6. 65 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 379. 66 Menand’s study offers perhaps the only account of the role of this group€– Kallen, Du Bois, Locke as well as Randolph Bourne€– in the debates about cultural pluralism and their relation to each other. He argues that although this group supported cultural pluralism, they were not uniformly supportive of cultural equality. Horace Kallen, in particular, argued for, as Menand describes it, ‘the perfection of men according to their own kind’ (see Menand, The Metaphysical Club, pp. 393–4). In contrast, Du Bois and Locke were interested in the relational nature of group identity, in the same way as Bentley described the relational character of groups and individuals. Du Bois’ position, which seems similar to Franz Fanon’s arguments decades later, was that group identity was not fixed or primordial but was the product of how other groups saw one’s group. The African American lacks a positive group identity because their American world, ‘yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation … this sense … of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 395). Similarly, Locke was interested in the reflexive nature of group identities. He recognized that identities were at the same time constructed by group context and important to individual agency and life’s meaning. According to Menand’s description, Locke’s view recognizes the paradoxical nature of identity: ‘Although racial identity has no basis in biology … and although racial pride is, in itself, socially divisive, the only way to overcome social

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about race and immigration,67 makes no comment about these debates. One explanation for this silence is that by the 1920s, Dewey, like many Progressives, was ambivalent about immigration and worried that the country had absorbed too many immigrants who, along with the divisions created by business and labour, were fragmenting society just as unity was required in order to fight the growing fascist threat. Perhaps the best evidence that Dewey was absorbed by these concerns when he wrote about the public and its problems is the anxiety he expresses in the book about social conflict which psychologically harms individuals and corrupts communities. Nevertheless, his discussion of pluralism in the book, in relation to knowledge creation, individual development and social domination, lends itself to being interpreted as a framework for thinking about how pluralism protects individuals from psychological and social (if not political) domination.

Conclusion

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, political pluralists were key players in a methodological revolution in the social sciences which targeted organicist and evolutionary approaches to understanding society, politics and human nature, and replaced them with more empirical understandings at the centre of which were questions about the nature and status of groups. British and American political pluralists agreed that groups, not isolated individuals, should be the focus of realistic political analysis, a conclusion they reached by engaging empirical methods to redefine concepts like the state, sovereign power and the public in terms that could be disaggregated and that were meant to be verifiable and unmysterious. Both the empiricist and groupist themes of pluralism endured in political analysis throughout the interwar period. Political scientists such as Peter Odegard (1928), Pendelton Herring (1929) and T.V. Smith (1936) shared with the early pluralists a commitment to rid political science of abstractions.68 Like the early pluralists, they criticized the superficiality of legal formalism and rejected political theories which rested on the abstract or isolated individual. At the heart of ‘real’ politics and divisiveness is to stimulate racial pride€– to encourage minority ethnic groups to take satisfaction in their particular practices and achievements.’ See Menand’s discussion of all three scholars, The Metaphysical Club, pp. 388–400. 67 Following the war and a decade of growing racist sentiment, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act, which was enacted in 1924, restricted immigration on the basis of national origin. 68 See Gunnell’s discussion of these thinkers in Chapter 7.

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‘realistic’ notions of democracy, which are terms they often used, are groups, group activities and group interests. In 1951, David Truman revived the group method of political analysis pioneered by Bentley, by grounding it in the behaviour of individuals. Truman thereby became a pioneer in his own right in the behavioural revolution in American political science which would eventually give rise to another rendition of political pluralism, principally developed by Robert Dahl, that explained American democracy in terms of the distribution of power amongst interest groups and the processes by which these groups form and Â�re-form coalitions on a continuous basis.69 The new post-war pluralism was, like early pluralisms, concerned about methods of analysis, and about the way that state power is understood. Both themes are central to Dahl’s theory of polyarchy. The social nature of the individual and the pluralistic development of individual personality were rarely, if ever, mentioned in this scholarship. Ironically, at the height of civil rights struggles and the ethnic revival in the United States, post-war pluralism did not ask questions about the relation between politics and group dominance. The early political pluralists not only argued for methods which placed the group at the centre of politics and thereby challenged the absolutist conceptions of the state, they advanced a developmental and reflexive understanding of the relation between individuals and groups which allowed them to explain how social stability could be secured in a pluralist state, and how individuals belonged and were shaped by groups without being consumed by them. In a pluralist state, groups shape facets of individual personality and, in turn, are shaped by individuals who bring to groups values, perspectives and interests developed in the plurality of other groups, which changes the group, and then the individual again, through a continuous process. Pluralists like Laski and Dewey, and group theorists such as Arthur Bentley, were also amongst the first political scientists to recognize that the processes of group politics give rise to a dilemma between individual freedom and group oppression. On one hand, groups must be empowered€ – morally and legally recognized€ – so they can act as contexts for individual development and as conduits for individual interests and freedom. On the other hand, groups, once empowered, had to be controlled so that they did not become too powerful, capable of distorting development and oppressing individuals. For some pluralists, like Laski, the dilemma was solved when power was distributed amongst a plurality of 69 See especially, Robert A. Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

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associations, none of which dominated all the others, and when individuals associate with a plurality of groups, none of which were dominant or propped up by forces other than those derived from the activities of their individual members. The secret to individual liberty, as Laski proposed, was found in pluralism. Although the pluralists set their sights on changing the methods by which politics is studied, their contributions go beyond this aim and offer insights into a more complex and enduring set of questions about the relation between individual identity and group power.

5

Value pluralism in twentieth-century Anglo-American thought Jan-Werner Müller

A sunset plus a child’s smile gives no sum; a Chartres minus a human life leaves no ascertainable remainder. Whether as human beings faced with such choices, or as theorists formulating rules of action and moral maxims, we must recognize an ultimate pluralism of goods which no pious wishes can synthesize into a simple monism. Sterling Lamprecht, 1920

… it is all a matter of compromise and balance and adjustment and empirical Popperism etc. …

Isaiah Berlin, in a letter to Denis Paul, 30 December 19521

Perhaps, after all, the most attractive conceptions of the leading liberal values do hang together in the right way. We haven’t yet been given reason to abandon that hope.

Ronald Dworkin, 1998

Value pluralism played little role in either British or American political thought before the mid to late twentieth century. To be sure, there were prominent currents of philosophical and psychological pluralism in the United States at the beginning of the century€– William James in particular€– but these did not lead to any clear-cut political prescriptions.2 There were occasional attempts to draw out the implications of specifically ethical pluralism€– as opposed to philosophical, socio-cultural or political-institutional pluralism3€– for political theory, in particular the

Thanks to the participants at the Berkeley workshop on pluralism in October 2009, to the anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press and, in particular, to Mark Bevir for insisting on the importance of Stuart Hampshire. 1 Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 352. 2 See, for instance, William James, The Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, 1920), and ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 1 (1891), 330–54. 3 I adopt this helpful mapping of pluralisms from Andrew Vincent, The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007), 210.

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articles by Sterling Lamprecht in the early 1920s. But they remained without much of an echo.4 At the same time, those political thinkers commonly called pluralists in Britain and the United States were primarily concerned with the defence of group autonomy against a potentially overbearing or even repressive state. While some of them might have shared value pluralist assumptions and even drawn on them for their defence of autonomous group life, it would be hard to argue that their political commitments primarily derived from value pluralism. As Marc Stears has argued, G.€D. H. Cole relied on certain value pluralist intuitions€– the manifold and often contradictory ends of individuals€– to make the case for guild socialism as the best means to promote individual freedom.5 But the guild socialist movement as a whole was clearly animated by a concern with social welfare (and, to some degree, efficiency), rather than any desire to ensure the pursuit of the greatest possible diversity of human ideals. Cole and his wife Margaret were€– in Margaret’s words€– ‘romantics about trade unions’;6 they were not romantics about the romantics in the way that Isaiah Berlin turned out to be. Other figures commonly associated with political pluralism at various points explicitly advocated a monist system of values: Harold Laski, for instance, called for a new ‘faith’ and new values (essentially drawn from the Russian Revolution) in his 1944 Faith, Reason, and Civilization. There he also identified the malaise of the 1930s as having resulted from the absence of a common measure for values; while the fascist regimes, he held, owed their rise to the widespread perception of the ‘fluidity of all values’.7 4 Sterling P. Lamprecht, ‘The Need for a Pluralistic Emphasis in Ethics’, The Journal of Philosophy and Scientific Methods, vol. 17 (1920), 561–72, and ‘Some Political Implications of Ethical Pluralism’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 18 (1921), 225–44. I was pointed in this direction by Henry Hardy’s collection of quotes from pluralist thinkers before Berlin in the IB Virtual Library (http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/pluralism/index.html) and Joshua Cherniss’s insightful entry on Berlin in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/#4.2). Like everyone working on Berlin, I am immeasurably indebted to Hardy for his editorial work; on this occasion I have also benefited from some of his research into pluralist thinking before Berlin. 5 Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford University Press, 2002). 6 Margaret Cole, The Life of G. D. H. Cole (New York: St. Martin’s, 1971), 58. 7 Harold Laski, Faith, Reason, and Civilization: An Essay in Historical Analysis (New York: Viking Press, 1944). He claimed that ‘One cannot say that, in the inter-war years, there was transvaluation of all values, because that assumes the acceptance of a commonly held criterion by which the new values were measured. Rather it is true to say that the common man must have felt that the means of rational calculation had been suspended’ (40); apropos the Axis powers he argued that ‘their one object was to destroy all values save those which were necessary to the maintenance of their

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On the other hand, the non-pluralist Left in both Britain and the United States€– what David Marquand has called the ‘democratic collectivist’ strand of thought in the case of Britain8€– pursued strategies which at least on some level might well be described as ‘value monist’€– at least as far as political values were concerned. This was hardly a specifically Anglo-American phenomenon, however: it was arguably a main characteristic of socialist and social-democratic (and, occasionally, communist) strategies everywhere in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. One could think of Gramsci’s quest for cultural hegemony, the cultural politics of the Austro-Marxists intent on creating ‘Red Vienna’, and the demands for value homogeneity by socialist legal theorists such as Otto Kirchheimer. Kirchheimer argued explicitly that majority rule was only justified if citizens shared moral values and simply used the mechanism of voting to decide about the best ways to implement these shared values.9 Put differently, in the absence of value consensus, seemingly democratic procedures de facto meant oppression of the minority. Broadly speaking, liberal defenders of value pluralism outside the English-speaking world had little or no impact on Anglo-American debates. Max Weber€ – with his claim that ‘the ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion’€– was known, of course.10 But in Britain he became mainly associated with his work on the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism€– a topic also famously taken up by Richard Tawney€– while in the United States he was promoted as a ‘value-free’ social theorist by Talcott Parsons, not as proponent of any controversial meta-ethical claims.11 So this chapter will in fact confirm what many philosophers dealing with value pluralism have long tended to assume: that a position ╇power, and, in a shifting world, it was grimly clear that the maintenance of their power depended upon a fluidity of values which deprived these of their meaning’ (42). 8 David Marquand, Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008). 9 Riccardo Bavaj, ‘Otto Kirchheimers Parlamentarismuskritik in der Weimarer Republik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 55 (2007), 33–51. On the AustroMarxists, see Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919– 1934 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 10 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1995), 152. 11 I am indebted here to exchanges with Peter Ghosh and Joshua Derman. Berlin was clearly rather embarrassed to have to admit to Steven Lukes that he had not read Weber’s value-pluralist texts. See ‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes’, Salmagundi, no. 120 (1998), 52–134.

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regarding value pluralism and its implications for politics only emerged with the lectures and essays by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s. I argue that Berlin did not in any sense ‘derive’ value pluralism from his almost exclusively philosophical, that is, non-political, work in the 1930s. Rather, it was his attempts after the end of the Second World War to comprehend€– and combat€– Soviet Communism that sparked the crucial idea: that totalitarianism could best be understood as a form of monism. Value pluralism, in other words, was a form of anti-Â�utopianism and thus served as a basis for Cold War liberalism. This also held true for Karl Popper€ – although he never commented much on the subject€ – and, to some extent, for Friedrich von Hayek, whose rejection of socialism partly depended on assuming a great plurality of human ends. But value pluralism did not have to have libertarian implications necessarily; it could also be endorsed by a self-confessed democratic socialist like Stuart Hampshire whose conception of procedural justice was in at least some way a genuine institutional response to the political problems potentially created by value pluralism. At the same time, it was precisely value pluralism which was attacked by German émigré scholars in the United States€– Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, above all€– as undermining the West in its struggle with Communism.12 For them, value pluralism€– which they mainly identified with the work of Weber€– amounted to relativism and had contributed to the downfall of the Weimar Republic as well as the rise of Fascism.13 Still, it would be going too far to argue that in the 1950s or 1960s one finds anything that could meaningfully be called a ‘debate’ on value pluralism and its political implications. Individuals pronounced on the question, but it was, by and large, marginal to liberal theory more generally, even to Cold War liberalism; it was completely off the radar screen for most of the Marxist or, for that matter, non-Marxist Left. However, as time went on (and as Berlin’s fame grew, though not necessarily in line with a deepening of his philosophical positions), Berlin himself was ever more frequently pressed by contemporaries on the question whether value pluralism amounted to relativism – he denied the charge, but left may observers wondering why exactly it didn’t. In general, though, not much philosophical or political work was done with this particular aspect of his thought. This situation changed only in the 1990s, with the major debates on multiculturalism (understood as both fact€– the supposedly growing cultural diversity within many 12 See John Gunnell, ‘Reading Max Weber: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 3 (2004), 151–61. 13 Ibid.

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Western states€– and as a value€– for the accommodation or recognition of that diversity). Not least against this background of contested multiculturalism, the question whether value pluralism mandated, allowed or in fact fatally undermined liberalism turned out to be central to the theoretical work of a number of theorists in the English-speaking world, in particular John Gray, John Kekes and George Crowder. These three would stand for entirely different political consequences to be derived from value pluralism: an uneasy pragmatism in the case of Gray, outright conservatism (or, more accurately, traditionalism) with Kekes and a reaffirmation of political liberalism in Crowder’s work. This debate continues. What is safe to say about the twentieth century, though, is that value pluralism played a rather marginal role in Anglo-American political thought. It was crucial for Berlin’s opposition to totalitarianism, and it was radicalized in Stuart Hampshire’s generally understudied (and underappreciated) account of moral conflict, but, overall, it was a rather minor strand in what is conventionally understood as Cold War liberalism more broadly.14 Later on, when value pluralism was more heavily promoted among philosophers as a possible foundation for liberal political theory, the very debate about such foundations had profoundly changed€ – away from controversial generalizations about the moral life to ‘thin’ justifications which were not supposed to rely on ‘comprehensive’ metaphysical or moral claims. Thus, neither broadly speaking Rawlsian liberalism nor multicultural liberalism adopted value pluralist assumptions. Value pluralism could potentially play an important role in philosophically backing up concrete pluralist institutional arrangements (along the lines of Hampshire’s conception of ‘justice as conflict’); but, then again, such arrangements are usually justified on much more pragmatic grounds.

Before Berlin

One can find no small number of thinkers through the ages who in one way or another might have ‘hit upon’ or ‘anticipated’ something that might plausibly be construed as value pluralism: starting with Aristotle, going on to Machiavelli (who Berlin, at least for a while, thought to have been the originator of value pluralism, a view also to some degree endorsed by Hampshire), to Vico and Herder, to James Fitzjames Stephen, who claimed in 1873 that ‘not only are the varieties of morality innumerable, but some of them are conflicting with each other’ (and 14 As opposed to the specific definition I have tried to advance in ‘Fear and Freedom: On Cold War Liberalism’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 45–64.

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who later was also evoked by Berlin as an exponent of the incompatibility of ‘beautiful ideals’).15 But an explicit theory of value pluralism€– and an argument about its implications for politics€– was arguably only presented by the American philosopher Sterling Lamprecht in the early 1920s. In 1920 Lamprecht observed that despite all the fashionable talk of pluralism in a number of areas€– from the ‘pluralistic universe’ to the ‘pluralistic interpretation of history’€– very few thinkers had considered pluralism in ethics.16 He went on to claim that at least he found himself ‘driven to recognize an ultimate and irresolvable pluralism€ – a basic pluralism of goods which men may properly seek to achieve and from among which they must choose’.17 He argued that, more specifically, a plurality of ends had to be recognized, as well as a plurality of ‘plans or programmes of action by which men may justifiably seek to order their lives and guide their conduct’. Like Berlin later on, Lamprecht insisted that value pluralism was obvious in normal moral experience; what he called ‘the naïve mind, not yet befuddled by the intricacies of academic controversies over ethical theory’ could immediately grasp that the moral life was ‘full of dilemmas, ambiguities, loose ends, irresolvable choices’.18 There was no summum bonum, and there was no single measure€– what Lamprecht also called ‘sanction’ or ‘criterion’€– to compare goods. As he put it: the goods of life are utterly incommensurable. Health, beauty, courtesy, knowledge, friendship, all these can not be measured by a common scale and tabulated in a common calculus. They burst all artificial standards brought to bear upon them, and sweep across all barriers of philosophical system-making.19

Consequently, humans were forced to choose and sometimes to make ‘daring decisions’ that could bring about irreparable loss. Moreover, they would have to face the fact that in many cases their most cherished values rested on nothing more than groundless decisions or on ‘a kind of will to believe, often on a veritable will to power’.20 In many ways, then, Lamprecht articulated a view of the moral life which was similar to the thoughts Max Weber was putting forward at around the same time€– including the suggestion that both individual and collective values might ultimately be a matter of a-rational choice. However, the more practical-political lessons Lamprecht derived from this fundamental insight into the nature of morality were very different 15 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’, The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/demcomind.pdfasiah, referring to James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873). 16 Lamprecht, ‘The Need’.â•… 17╇ Ibid., 562. 18 Ibid.â•… 19╇ Ibid., 564.â•… 20╇ Ibid., 567.

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from the ones Weber had drawn€– and from those many future value pluralists would advocate. On the one hand€– conventionally enough€– Lamprecht pointed to the need for compromise and general generosity of spirit vis-à-vis those who have decided in favour of values different than ours.21 But Lamprecht, the Hobbes scholar, also advocated ‘force’ and the establishment of moral-political ‘hierarchies’ essentially to ensure that one particular set of values would prevail. The moral life, he claimed, would always ‘be likely to give rise to personal and national antagonisms for which there is no solution except the force of arms or an arbitrary decision’. In other words: the clash of individual and collective values was inevitable; where compromise could not be found, the state, committed to any set of (ultimately arbitrary) values should step in. Internationally, a supra-national body ought ideally to perform a similar function; here Lamprecht concretely advocated a strong role for the League of Nations as facilitating compromise or at least containing violent conflict where no compromise was possible. If the League proved ineffective, Lamprecht suggested, the great powers should try to keep conflict moderate by trying to fight without appeal to ultimate values€– or the explicit denigration of their opponents’ values. He argued that where ‘compromise is impossible, we must seek an arbitrary settlement through major force without the evil of a long and grueling contest during which all parties permanently reduce their capacity to achieve any real excellence’.22 One hope in this regard was a slow worldwide convergence of values or ‘value hierarchies’ as a result of what later generations learnt to call globalization. Lamprecht claimed that ‘the possibility of a common hierarchy for all humankind grows apace, as social contacts and intercourse increase; for social pressure and the herd instinct drive men to choose codes which conform in large outlines to accepted conventions’.23 Thus appeared at least the future possibility of ‘a higher synthesis whereby destructive force becomes antiquated and might be replaced by some other less evil means of arbitrary decision’.24 In fact, his essay on the implications of pluralism for political philosophy ended with an impassioned Hobbesian plea for nothing less than a global state: ‘one overwhelmingly important practical problem before contemporary society’, he argued, ‘is simply whether this truth [value pluralism] will lead to the erection of a world-wide sovereignty before the clash of competing forces wrecks still further men’s dreams of a better world’.25 21 As he put it: ‘We should not be blind to the goods which we do not select’. Ibid., 568. 22 Ibid., 570.â•… 23╇ Ibid. 567.â•… 24╇ Ibid., 572. 25 Lamprecht, ‘Some Political Implications’, 244.

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Lamprecht insisted that pluralism was neither ‘dogmatic petulance’ nor ‘utter license’, that is: relativism. Still, monists refused to throw in the towel. Quite apart from the problem that many moral philosophers were bound to have with a vision of the moral life as ‘arbitrary’ and as ‘something irrational’, it probably did not help Lamprecht’s case that he hitched his meta-ethical insights so closely to one position in day-to-day politics, and to an endorsement of the League of Nations in particular. While the diagnosis of permanent conflict should have seemed eminently plausible during the inter-war period, this did not make value pluralism itself an attractive theory€– in fact, quite the opposite, as conflict might have only intensified the monist search for a ‘super-value’ as the basis for political harmony.26 For proponents of all-out decisionism or varieties of Lebensphilosophie, on the other hand, Lamprecht’s position might have appeared all too reasonable, too mainstream AngloAmerican. Answers to the question as to why Lamprecht’s thought did not have more of an impact must necessarily remain speculative. But it is at least plausible to think it was partly the prevailing long-term trends in moral philosophy and partly the politics of a time that seemed to call for passionate ideological commitment€– not the admission that such commitment might ultimately be arbitrary and that a politics of compromise might be the best that could be achieved.

Berlin, Oakshott and Hampshire: amiable characters and the liberalism of fear

The Isaiah Berlin of the 1930s is commonly regarded as an apolitical philosopher. And indeed there are no intimations in his writings from the period of anything resembling value pluralism, let alone the idea that value pluralism could have profound implications for politics.27 Still, there is no doubt that Berlin became increasingly politicized during 26 Though, to be sure, there were exceptions, which, however, did not link value pluralism directly to politics. See for instance A. P. Brogan, ‘Objective Pluralism in the Theory of Value’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 41 (1931), 287–95. Also, there was one theorist who built an entire defence of liberal democracy on the claim that democracy and value relativism had an affinity, just as much as autocracy and value absolutism belonged together: Hans Kelsen. Kelsen, however, explicitly rejected pluralism. See his Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), and, for an extended defence of the relationship between democracy and relativism in English, ‘Foundations of Democracy’, Ethics, vol. 66 (1955), 1–101. 27 Joshua L. Cherniss, ‘Berlin’s Early Political Thought’, in George Crowder and Henry Hardy, eds., The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007), 95–118.

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this dismal decade, and that his political activity during the Second World War€– particularly his time working for the British Embassy in Washington, DC€ – pushed him finally to an open engagement with normative questions in politics. Berlin’s major preoccupation€ – certainly from the late 1940s onwards€– was with Soviet Communism and its intellectual roots. In a 1949 sketch on ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’ one finds the first suggestions on Berlin’s part that the philosophical basis of totalitarianism might be something plausibly called monism. Like Jacob Talmon€– whom Berlin considered a friend€– he traced totalitarianism, that is, both Communism and Fascism, back to Rousseau, in particular his supposed belief that there were right answers both to the question of individual conduct and the question of how best to organize society€– and that these right answers should be ‘ruthlessly’ imposed.28 According to Berlin, liberal democrats, in contrast to proponents of the utopian state, were characterized by a desire for ‘a necessarily precarious balance between incompatible ideals based on the recognition of the equal or nearly equal validity of human aspirations as such, none of which must be subordinated to any single uncriticisable single principle [sic]’.29 So we find a basic intuition about totalitarianism being rooted in monism by the late 1940s€– but it would take roughly another decade before Berlin would come to the conclusion that value pluralism was a (profoundly shocking) truth about the moral life in general. In 1958 he delivered his famous lecture on ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’€– surely one of the most celebrated and most criticized texts of the Cold War as a whole€– where he professed pluralism as a ‘truer and more humane ideal’ than those goals pursued by monists (who were always more likely to end up advocating ‘authoritarian structures’). He went on to claim: It is truer, because it does, at least, recognize the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on a scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decisions as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform … It is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, 28 Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955). See also Malachi H. Hacohen, ‘Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism’, History of European Ideas, vol. 34 (2007), 146–57. Talmon’s more directly political thought was at least partially influenced by two British (more or less pluralist) mentors€– Laski and Tawney€– who probably encouraged him in drawing a line between liberalized Social Democracy (fully compatible with Cold War liberalism) and Communism as leading necessarily to a form of totalitarianism. 29 Berlin, ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’.

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or incoherent ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings.

Berlin, like Lamprecht, linked value pluralism to a generous, tolerant and liberal attitude€– but he also advocated standing firm for liberalism, once the shocking truth of value pluralism and thus the ultimately arbitrary foundations of the liberal West had been revealed. He endorsed Schumpeter’s maxim that ‘to realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian’. He also made it clear that value pluralism was the only plausible morality for grown-ups, arguing that ‘the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past’; he conceded that it might be ‘perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity’. Berlin’s very tone must have been reassuring to his listeners and his readers. Value monism€– the supposedly single most important source of Communism€ – was a kind of infantile disorder; once (politically) grown up, men and women had no reason to think much further about it (until the next generation of political infants arrived). Others engaged in the struggle against Soviet Communism could readily endorse these precepts: Karl Popper, who came to argue after Berlin, not in the Open Society and Its Enemies, for value pluralism, even laid a kind of copyright to it (he also went much further than Berlin in stressing the irrational nature of value commitments);30 outside the English-speaking world, there was, most prominently, Raymond Aron, who, however, had arguably derived his value pluralism directly from Max Weber (Aron had studied in Germany and been among the first sociologists in France to engage with Weber’s thought).31 Despite all their rhetorical brilliance (and, some suspected, because of it), Berlin’s pronouncements on value pluralism contained not a few philosophical ambiguities. Berlin himself seemed to be increasingly aware of this and, over time, firmed up on some particular interpretations 30 Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1978), 116. At another point Popper claimed: ‘Eine vollkommene Gesellschaft ist unmöglich, wie man leicht einsehen kann. Zu fast allen Werten, die eine Gesellschaft verwirklichen sollte, gibt es andere Werte, die mit ihnen kollidieren.’ See Karl R. Popper, Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt (Munich: Piper, 1989), 129. 31 For a subtle view of Aron’s account of political judgment as located between Kantianism and Weberian value pluralism, see Philippe Raynaud, ‘Raymond Aron et le jugement politique entre Aristote et Kant’, in Raymond Aron et la liberté politique€: Actes du colloque

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of value pluralism and its political implications. Above all, he became more and more adamant that he was pronouncing on nothing less than a ‘conceptual truth’. As he put it in one of his most-quoted statements on value pluralism: The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist seems to me not merely unobtainable€– that is a truism€– but conceptually incoherent. Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

Still, for decades after his initial endorsements of value pluralism in the 1950s, Berlin was to be pressed on some of the apparent ambiguities of his position. Was value pluralism the same as relativism? (No, said Berlin.) Were values objective or subjectively created? (Berlin went back and forth here.) Was choosing values an irrational process? (Also a bit of back and forth in Berlin’s answers.) And did political conservatism follow from value pluralism? (Absolutely not, according to Berlin.) Berlin responded in various ways to the charge that value pluralism would amount to an ultimately irrational choice and to relativism€– and the related claim that no such thing as liberalism could be derived from it. He certainly encouraged the impression that it was all a matter of a-rational commitment when, for instance, he memorably€– and disarmingly€– said to Steven Lukes: ‘You choose. You plump’.32 But, especially, towards the end of his life, the notion that values were objective and their choice not entirely arbitrary was affirmed more consistently. For one thing, Berlin variously argued that there was a ‘human horizon’ or ‘core’ of objective values which might conflict, but which were all recognizably human€– and thus allowed for mutual human understanding and empathy. He claimed about values that ‘there is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite€– let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be’.33 He went on to clarify that ‘these values are objective€– that is to say, their nature, international organisé par la Fondation Joseph Károlyi et l’Université de Sciences économiques et d’Administration publique de Budapest (Paris: Fallois, 2002), 123–31. Aron€h imself left no doubt that he thought value pluralism a coherent philosophical position€– but not that one could actually live a view of the world as a permanent ‘war of the gods’: ‘La formule de la “guerre des dieux” est la transposition d’un fait indiscutable€– les hommes se sont fait des représentations incompatibles du monde€– en une philosophie que personne ne vit ni ne pense parce qu’elle est contradictoire (toutes les représentations sont équivalents, aucune n’étant ni vraie ni fausse)’. 32 ‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes’, 108. 33 Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, in Henry Hardy, ed., The Power of Ideas (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 1–23; here 12.

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the pursuit of them, is part of what it is to be a human being, and this is an objective given’; furthermore, he flatly denied the charge of relativism, arguing that ‘the multiple values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men’s subjective fantasy’.34 How, many people wondered, did Berlin know this? The answer, time and time again, was that this fundamental ‘conceptual truth’€– if maybe not the exact number of values€– could be derived from ordinary moral experience, a claim that echoed Lamprecht’s defence of the importance of ‘naïve’ common-sense insights vis-à-vis the monist philosophers with their conceptual contortions.35 It might be all the more surprising, then, that Berlin€– who, as I argued above, ‘discovered’ pluralism as part of his struggle with Soviet Communism€ – ended with a position vis-à-vis totalitarianism that would sound to many common-sense observers like tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. In ‘My Intellectual Path’ he confessed that I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe that they are the only salvation. Of course they have to be fought, by war if need be, but I don’t regard the Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central, or that Nordic races alone are truly creative, and so forth. I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.36

In one sense this was a hopeful conclusion: no one was beyond Â�re-education; even supposed moral monsters could be made human again with the right information. In another sense, this was a very curious interpretation of totalitarianism for a thinker justly lauded for having a great capacity of Herderian Hineinfühlen. The idea that the Nazis simply had first looked at what they took to be the facts (just mistakenly) and then chosen their values, seems to be a complete failure of moral psychology: to put it simply, they chose values of racial struggle, the glorification of violence, etc., and then made the facts fit their particular moral picture€– an interpretation, however, which strengthens, rather than undercuts, the idea of value pluralism.37 34 Ibid. 35 As Berlin put it: ‘The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others’. 36 Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, in Henry Hardy, ed., The Power of Ideas (London: Chatto Windus, 2000) 12–13. 37 For a convincing account of the particular Nazi (Volk-based) ethics see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Quite apart from historical interpretations informed by the conceptual pair of monism and pluralism, what concretely was supposed to follow from value pluralism? Most of Berlin’s interpreters have answered ‘liberalism’, although it is curious that he himself never quite spelled this out, except in a late piece co-authored with Bernard Williams (just as he never quite spelled out what he meant by liberalism).38 But his descriptions of the politician (less so, the citizen) capable of responsibly engaging in making decisions in a world of ineradicable value conflict stressed virtues and capacities which might as well have been associated with Burkean conservatism (or a Weberian ethics of responsibility): a sense of reality; almost intuitively right judgment of people, places, and political situations; attention to circumstances and history in general, with Berlin claiming at one point: ‘the concrete situation is almost everything’, and pointing to moral precepts and value commitments being derived from ‘the general patterns of life in which we believe’€– that is, one would think, a sense of tradition.39 His position here seemed closely to resemble that of Michael Oakeshott, with whom Berlin famously entertained a rather fraught relationship. They seemed to agree not only on what right political conduct involved€– they also shared a suspicion of the social sciences and the general technocratic optimism of the post-war period, as well as an almost instinctive aversion to the nanny state that busied itself with ensuring ‘social health’ (Berlin) and efficiency.40 Berlin was not an opponent of the welfare state as such, quite the contrary; but he opposed an idea of social service and a role for the state in general where ‘society is an enormous hospital and all men are inmates, each suffering in greater or lesser degree from some kind of malaise or maladjustment, which it is the duty of education to cure or at least make bearable’.41 This appeared to parallel Oakeshott’s well-known criticism of understanding the state as an ‘entreprise association’, where government becomes a board of managers in charge of a sanatorium for modern human beings incapable of being real individuals and instead enjoying a ‘freedom’ that is merely ‘warm, compensated civility’.42 Moreover, Oakeshott’s insistence€– in a piece from 1948€– that no ideal 38 Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism: a Reply’, Political Studies, vol. 41 (1994), 306–9. 39 See in particular Berlin, ‘Realism in Politics’, in The Power of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy (Princeton University Press, 2002). 40 Berlin, ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’. 41 Ibid. 42 Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (1975; Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 317.

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should be pursued or pushed too hard at the expense of other values sounds Berlinian avant la lettre: Too often the excessive pursuit of one ideal leads to the exclusion of others, perhaps all others; in our eagerness to realise justice we come to forget charity, and a passion for righteousness has made many a man hard and merciless. There is, indeed, no ideal the pursuit of which will not lead to disillusion; chagrin waits at the end for all who take this path. Every admirable ideal has its opposite, no less admirable. Liberty or order, justice or charity, spontaneity or deliberateness, principle or circumstance, self or others, these are the kinds of dilemma with which this form of the moral life is always confronting us, making us see double by directing us always to abstract extremes, none of which is wholly desirable.43

Yet, this discussion of clashing ideals has to be understood in context: Oakeshott, as so often, was setting up a dualism, this time between a morality of habit, on the one hand, and a morality of reflection or of the conscious pursuit of moral ideals on the other. It is only from the perspective of the latter€– the morality which requires everyone to be at least a bit of a philosopher and a ‘self-analyst’€– that the clash of ideals looks so problematic. Oakeshott observed that the moral life of the West was a mixture of the two virtually un-liveable extremes€– only habit and only reflection€– though with an unhealthy preponderance of the philosophically guided pursuit of moral perfection. He argued that this was a form of the moral life which puts upon those who share it, not only the task of translating moral ideals into appropriate forms of conduct, but also the distracting intellectual burden of removing the verbal conflict of ideals before moral behaviour is possible. These conflicting ideals are, of course, reconciled in all amiable characters (that is, when they no longer appear as ideals), but that is not enough; a verbal and theoretical reconciliation is required. In short, this is a form of the moral life which is dangerous in an individual and disastrous in a society.44

Oakeshott, then, was not so much affirming the truth of value pluralism as putting the whole debate about ideals€– whether conflicting or not€– into perspective; he clearly wanted to redress the balance in favour of habit and tradition, and, where that proved unachievable, educate and encourage as many ‘amiable characters’ as possible. This call was justified by the adverse overall consequences for society of over-Â�reflective, over-coherent morality€ – and not based on any conceptual truths. It was historicist through and through (referring to the West only) and 43 Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 465–87; here 476. 44 Ibid., 476.

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came with a typically Oakeshottian evocation of the countryside (and, ultimately, Englishness). He claimed that in a moral life constantly or periodically suffering the ravages of the armies of conflicting ideals, or (when these for the time have passed) falling into the hands of censors and inspectors, the cultivation of a habit of moral behaviour will have as little opportunity as the cultivation of the land when the farmer is confused and distracted by academic critics and political directors.45

Thus, in the end, Berlin and Oakeshott agreed more on a practical injunction of pas trop de zèle and making room for a pluralism of individual pursuits, rather than fundamental claims about the moral life and their direct consequences for politics (in the way that Berlin could simply assert: ‘if pluralism is a valid view … then toleration and liberal consequences follow’). For Oakeshott, the antidote to monism or the ‘selfconscious [sic] pursuit of moral ideals’ was not a reflective recognition of pluralism, but a rehabilitation of habit and tradition at the level of political culture, and the construction of civil, that is to say collective purpose-free association at the level of institutions.46 Thus, for all its apparent lack of clarity, Berlin’s position in twentiethcentury anti-totalitarianism was unique: others, like Popper, Hayek, Schumpeter and Leszek Kolakowski, for instance, alluded to similar ideas and the necessity of basing freedom on the fact that valuable goals could conflict. But only Berlin consistently set up an opposition between monism and pluralism and maintained, without fail, that ‘monism is at the root of every extremism’, while pluralism entailed liberalism.47 But what kind of liberalism exactly was entailed, beyond an insistence on people being tolerant and capable of empathy for ideals which they might not share? Berlin did seem closer to Oakeshott in essentially hoping for the education of more amiable characters. However, there was one thinker who shared at least some of Berlin’s views about value pluralism and offered a more concrete institutional solution for how to deal with it: Stuart Hampshire.48 Hampshire, like Berlin, had been at the centre of Oxford analytical philosophy; and like Berlin he had been driven to political philosophy by the visceral experience of twentieth-century history. Except that in Hampshire’s case the confrontation with National Socialism proved decisive: he had been tasked 45 Ibid., 478–9. 46 See also Paul Franco, ‘Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism’, Political Theory, vol. 31 (2003), 484–507. 47 Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, 14. 48 For an insightful overview, see Peter Lassmann, ‘Pluralism and Pessimism: A Central Theme in the Political Thought of Stuart Hampshire’, History of Political Thought, vol. 30 (2009), 315–35.

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with interrogating one of the leading Nazis, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS chief to face trial at Nuremberg. He had literally come face to face with what he was to call ‘a brutalised and debased Machiavellianism’. As he was to recount in his 1989 Innocence and Experience, ‘unmitigated evil and nastiness are as natural, it seemed, in educated human beings as generosity and sympathy: no more, and no less, natural, a fact that was obvious to Shakespeare but not previously evident to me’.49 To be sure, like Berlin, Hampshire did not want to concede that the Nazis might have had their own morality; rather, they went against even the most minimal understandings of justice: ‘the Nazi fury to destroy had a definite target: the target encompassed reasonableness and legality and the procedures of public discussion, justice for minorities, the protection of the weak, and the protection of human diversity’.50 In particular, the Nazis’ thought and action had even left behind what Hampshire considered a minimum, but genuinely universal standard of justice€– namely the injunction that in a conflict all sides deserve a hearing. Conflict, so Hampshire held, was inevitable and often intractable, but ‘balanced adversarial reasoning’, or audi alteram partem, was universally recognized as the right (and, above all, fair) response to it: as Hampshire put it, ‘fairness in procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature’.51 The ‘universally acceptable rational procedures of negotiation’ and the ‘intellectual procedures for adversary reasoning and compromise’ were also the crucial protection ‘against the perennial evils of human life€– physical suffering, the destructions and mutilations of war, poverty and starvation, enslavement and humiliation’. This was the ‘proper business of politics, as Hobbes perceived’€– and it remained the same over time.52 By contrast, more substantive conceptions of justice were not universal and could change considerably in the course of history. To be sure, adversarial reasoning could also vary across different institutions: parliaments were different from law courts. But the underlying principle was the same, and mostly so, because rationality as such, Hampshire insisted, was about having an internal dialogue where humans listen to arguments pro and con. In other words, procedural justice understood as adversarial reasoning was universal, because rationality was universal. 49 Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8. 50 Ibid., 71. 51 Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 52 Ibid., xi.

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And yet so was conflict. Hampshire stressed time and again that his account of value pluralism went further than Berlin’s (and, by implication, would strengthen his case for justice as procedural fairness in value conflicts). As he put it in Morality and Conflict: I am not merely arguing the case for the plurality of values, and the impossibility of realizing all positive values in a single life, a case that has been persuasively argued by Isaiah Berlin, among others. My thesis entails the plurality, but it is a stronger thesis and differently grounded. Belief in the plurality of values is compatible with the belief that the different and incompatible values are all eternally grounded in the nature of things, and, more specifically, in human nature. Then Aristotle was in error in supposing ultimate conflicts to be in principle, and with luck, avoidable. But still a definite list of essential virtues, deducible from human nature alone, could be drawn up, even if there will always be conflicts between them; and I deny that such a list is possible.53

Hampshire thus historicized value pluralism: what he called ‘ways of life’ and the moral conventions underpinning them change, and new and unforeseen conflicts of values emerge. He went on to argue that There is an implication for political thought: we ought not to plan for a final reconciliation of conflicting moralities in a perfect social order; we ought not even to expect that conflicts between moralities, which prescribe different priorities, will gradually disappear … We know virtually nothing about the factors determining the ebb and flow of moral beliefs, conventions and commitments.54

But then again, if value pluralism might come and go in the course of history, might there not be some hope at least that values could de facto be reconciled at some point? Here Hampshire insisted on another difference with Berlin, this time a more directly philosophical one: Several contemporary moral philosophers have argued that there will always be a plurality of different and incompatible conceptions of the good, and that there cannot be a single comprehensive and consistent theory of human virtue: for instance Isaiah Berlin made this point in an essay on Machiavelli, who had insisted on the incompatibility of Christian innocence with political success and security. But my slogan here ‘all determination is negation’, is intended to present a stronger thesis: the superior power of the negative. Most influential conceptions of the good have defined themselves as rejections of their rivals.55

This suggests that value conflict is inevitably part of human experience (as Hampshire put it, ‘the capacity to envisage conflicts between norms for a complete life, conflicts of ends and values, is natural for human 53 Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 159. 54 Ibid., 160.â•… 55╇ Hampshire, Justice is Conflict, 34.

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beings’).56 And this inevitability then again suggests the universal requirement, fairness in procedures, what Hampshire called ‘a shared negative morality independent of specific conceptions of the good’, or, more particularly, a modern liberal morality of openness, toleration and compromise.57 In the end, Hampshire’s thought had developed quite differently than Berlin’s. In a very broad sense, Hampshire’s confrontation with totalitarianism€– in his case Nazism€– also suggested that monism could lead to political crimes: he argued that ‘the great evil’€– particularly so with the Nazis€ – was ‘the destruction of respect for generally recognised fair procedures of adjudicating and compromising’.58 Hampshire denied that Nazism was anything like a monistic morality; rather it was an onslaught on morality as such. But the case could still be made if one conceived of Nazi thought as a kind of racially conditioned morality which necessarily denies any need to listen to contrary claims or arguments by those who are deemed ‘racially unfit’ to contribute to a conversation about values. Still, Hampshire and Berlin shared much not just in terms of philosophy, but also political sentiments. Both represented what Judith Shklar famously called a ‘liberalism of fear’: a primarily negative liberalism, which strives for no summum bonum, but seeks to avoid the worst€– namely cruelty; a liberalism which draws on memory and historical imagination to keep a sense alive of what political evil€– and the single-minded pursuit of a supposed summum bonum – might entail.59 To be sure, the liberalism of fear was not a fully articulated theory, and it did not have to have value pluralism as a presupposition, as Bernard Williams emphasized.60 It was more of a sensibility.61 But many of those who shared it also felt an affinity to value pluralism and certainly advocated political pluralism to prevent the summum malum of cruelty and humiliation. Liberals of fear also did not have to be over-cautious in their support for ameliorative state action, as critics of Shklar’s notion have sometimes suggested: Berlin supported the post-war British welfare state, 56 Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 145. 57 Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 119. 58 Ibid. 59 Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 60 Bernard Williams, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Geoffrey Hawthorne, ed., In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton University Press, 2005), 52–61. 61 Jonathan Allen, ‘The Place of Negative Morality in Political Theory’, Political Theory, vol. 29 (2001), 337–63.

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while Hampshire was a lifelong self-confessed democratic socialist.62 To be sure, Hampshire’s socialism in the end had little to do with his pluralism; pluralism and socialism never connected along the lines of the guild socialists. And to some extent socialism and pluralism might even have worked against each other: it was because of his pluralism that Hampshire always remained sceptical of Rawls’ political liberalism; Rawls, Hampshire held, was simply too optimistic about the potential for consensus on substantive (as opposed to procedural) notions of justice. But by the same token, in Hampshire’s eyes, pluralism was not a problem for justice; rather, justice was pluralism€– in the sense of being open to a plurality of views and considered value choices and being fair in resolving conflicts between them. This of course left open what exactly listening to contrary claims might entail, and also what principles, if any, ought to guide the forging of compromises, or, at the least, what might distinguish legitimate from illegitimate compromises. Like Berlin, Hampshire denied strenuously that his position amounted to relativism; like Berlin, he insisted that there was a kind of decency that was constitutive of shared humanity. None of this would satisfy critics who sought to hold on to a set of substantive values and who kept indicting Berlin in particular for relativism. Leo Strauss was the leading voice in this critical chorus, although many much less conservative thinkers chimed in, especially in rejecting the supposed link between value pluralism and liberalism.63

Value pluralism after Rawls: too thick, too thin?

As is well known, a number of thinkers after Berlin accepted the ‘conceptual truth’ of value pluralism€– but completely denied that it entailed liberalism. John Gray argued that taking value pluralism seriously meant that liberal values could not possibly be assigned a privileged position in politics. He claimed: If value pluralism is true all the way down, then it follows inexorably that the identity of practitioners of a liberal form of life is a contingent matter, not a privileged expression of universal human nature. If there is value-conflict all the way down, then there is contingency all the way down, too.64 62 Hampshire, Justice is Conflict, ix. 63 Leo Strauss, ‘Relativism’, in Thomas L. Pangle, ed., The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13–26. See also Michael Sandel, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics (New York University Press, 1984), and George Crowder, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism’, Political Studies, vol. 42 (1994), 293–303. 64 John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 1996), 168.

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Like Berlin, Gray denied that value pluralism was a form of scepticism or relativism; rather it amounted to ‘objective pluralism’. At the same time, Gray’s position resembled Hampshire’s in that he also sought to indict Rawls’ political liberalism as implausible, while proposing an institutional solution to the inevitable conflicts among ‘ways of life’. However, while his attack on Rawls was considerably less respectful than Hampshire’s (e.g. ‘late twentieth-century political philosophy aimed to find bad reasons for what conventional liberals believe by instinct’),65 his proposed modus vivendi remained as indeterminate as Hampshire’s fairness in procedures. Similar to Berlin and Hampshire, Gray sought a universal fall-back morality, when he argued that ‘the terms of such modi vivendi will be constrained by a universal minimum morality that specifies a range of generically human goods and bads’.66 However, no strategy was specified as to find out what might count as ‘generically human goods and bads’ which could be said to ‘mark the boundaries of a worthwhile human life’.67 As with Berlin, there was an escape clause that allowed the theorist of value pluralism to meet the charge of relativism€– but no real account of why value pluralism would not ‘go all the way down’ and who was to say what a universal minimum morality would involve. Richard Rorty did not so much concur with notions of ‘objective pluralism’€– which, after all, involved controversial metaphysical claims€– as enlist Berlin in an effort to describe and praise worthy liberal forms of life and admirable liberal characters: Schumpeter’s ‘civilized man’ and Berlin’s politically mature person. In his anti-foundationalist quest (if that is the right word), Rorty self-deprecatingly described himself as a mere ‘underlabourer to Berlin’, trying to clear away ‘some of the philosophical underbrush’.68 His point was not to defend value pluralism€– but to get beyond the whole language of pluralism, relativism and other supposed ‘conceptual truths’; it was about linguistic cleansing, not a new justification for liberalism. But given his desire to hold on to such notions as ‘human horizon’ and ‘central core’, it is doubtful that Berlin would have been entirely comfortable serving in turn the postmodern 65 Gray went on: ‘In its apologetic idiom contemporary political philosophy resembles nineteenth century moral philosophy. Its anxious conventionality of outlook is reminiscent of those nineteenth century intuitionists who treated the habits and prejudices embodied in Victorian folkways as unquestioned points in ethical theory’. See John Gray, ‘Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company’, in Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram, eds., Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity (New York: Routledge, 2001), 85–102; here 85. 66 Ibid., 87.â•… 67╇ Ibid., 99. 68 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 54.

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‘cause of providing contemporary liberal culture with a vocabulary which is all its own, cleansing it of the residues of a vocabulary which was suited to the needs of former days’.69 Rorty, in this sense, was closer to Oakeshott: he wanted to have more amiable characters around€– that is, men and women not tormented by un-decidable metaphysical controversies and instead ready to make liberalism a habit. However, even those not content with attractive descriptions or Â�re-descriptions of liberalism also sought to cut the link between value pluralism and justifications of liberalism€ – but, clearly, for quite different reasons than Rorty. Charles Larmore argued that value pluralism ‘is itself the object of reasonable disagreement in our culture. So liberalism must aim to make its guiding principles independent of it’.70 Plurality of belief and reasonable disagreement were an empirical fact, but not one from which any large and controversial meta-ethical claims could be inferred. Hence€ – and this is crucial€ – value pluralism was effectively ejected from mainstream Rawlsian and even more broadly liberal-egalitarian theory. For those who had taken the turn towards a ‘political liberalism’ alongside Rawls it was far too foundationalist; for those who had not, it potentially spelled a form of moral (and practical) defeatism. Ronald Dworkin in particular defended the hope of combining the right conceptions of core liberal values, rather than throwing in the monist towel too early, and kept insisting that ‘value is one big thing’.71 Not least he lamented that ‘it is the fox who wins too easily: it is his apparent victory, now widely celebrated, that is hollow’.72 The sense that value pluralism made things a little too easy, that, for all the hand-wringing about tragic choices, value pluralism actually absolved theorists of any guilt for abandoning core liberal commitments in order to have trade-offs with other values (such as ‘security’)€– this impression was only reinforced when a thinker like Michael Ignatieff€– a liberal value pluralist and, not least, Berlin’s distinguished biographer€– elaborated an ethics which, against the background of value pluralism, 69 Ibid., 55. 70 Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155. 71 Ronald Dworkin, ‘Do Liberal Values Conflict?’, in Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin and Robert Silvers eds., The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York Review Books, 2001), 73–90, and Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1. For a way to work with Dworkin’s arguments from a broadly speaking Berlinian perspective, see Jonathan Allen, ‘What’s the Matter with Monims?’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 12 (2009), 469–89. 72 Ibid., 6.

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seemed to come perilously close to justifying torture.73 Alternatively, liberal fears that value pluralism plausibly led to conservatism were stoked by the philosophical twists and turns of John Gray (moving from a conservative position to a pragmatic advocacy of a modus vivendi) and the increasingly strident conservatism of the self-confessed value pluralist John Kekes.74 To be sure, there remained liberal defenders of value pluralism: George Crowder, who changed his mind about the link between value pluralism and liberalism after Berlin’s and Williams’ reply to his initial criticism of Berlin’s work, and William Galston, who affirmed that ‘my experiences dealing with policy disputes while in government greatly fortified my belief in value pluralism’ and that ‘the most difficult public choices, I came to believe, are not between good and evil, but between good and good’.75 It is tempting, then, to conclude that value pluralism was bound up with an anti-totalitarian moment in Anglo-American thought, roughly the period from the 1940s to the 1980s.76 Subsequently, value pluralism was too ‘thick’ for those subscribing to Rawls’ political liberalism; at the least, they could simply remain agnostic on the truth of value pluralism and bet on the emergence of an overlapping consensus. The latter, after all, did not depend on the presence or absence of theorists of value pluralism (which is not itself a comprehensive doctrine), but on potentially conflicting comprehensive doctrines finding common ground in endorsing constitutional essentials. At the same time, for those defending liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine, value pluralism€– and the

73 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton University Press, 2004). 74 See in particular John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton University Press, 1993). For the political implications of his value pluralism for contemporary American life see his The Art of Politics: The New Betrayal of America and How to Resist It (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), drawing on Berlin and Oakeshott, with its rather heavy-handed attacks on left-wing ‘ideologues’. 75 Quoted in George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (New York: Continuum, 2002), 5–6. 76 For a while, the ‘war on terror’ clearly seemed in the eyes of some intellectuals like a replay of the Cold War€– and thus necessarily also calling for an anti-totalitarian ‘war of ideas’, and perhaps even a new version of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But in actual fact, there has been no set of intellectuals (or theologians) opposing each other in the way that Western liberals and communists fought each other during the twentieth century. In theory, one could have imagined a confrontation of something like ‘Islamicist monism’ and supposed ‘Western relativism’€– but that is not how the debate has been framed. Rather, value pluralism has come into play in internal Western debates about combating terrorism, and, as suggested above, there it seems to have confirmed certain reservations about pluralism making trade-offs too easy.

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liberalism of fear more broadly€– had to appear as simply too ‘thin’, if not as a form of conservatism in disguise. Yet a conclusion that value pluralism has nothing to say to those no longer living through the totalitarian ‘Age of Extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) would be too hasty: value pluralism can still play an important role with regard to at least one of the two practical challenges identified in the introduction of this volume: multiculturalism. Gray has arguably gone furthest in connecting value pluralism to the question how potentially conflicting ‘ways of life’ can co-exist peacefully; and he essentially advocates legal pluralism as the best form of modus vivendi among different cultures (even hinting that sometimes the right to exist might have to be sacrificed for larger goods, with peace being an obvious example). However, one cannot presume that value conflicts exist only among ‘ways of life’ and not also within them; and one needs something like an account of legitimate compromise both to assess the compromises among ‘ways of life’ as well as the compromises within them. Avishai Margalit’s work on compromises€– one of the few attempts creatively to carry on the tradition of the liberalism of fear€– has been immensely helpful in this respect.77 But it is also limited in its applicability because of Margalit’s insistence that only compromises that bring about or maintain cruelty and humiliation (what he also calls ‘crimes against humanity’, because the very notion of shared humanity becomes threatened) are ‘rotten’ and always have to be ruled out. Short of such extreme scenarios (in which, according to Margalit€– echoing Hampshire here€– the possibility of morality is called into question), one needs criteria for crafting and judging trade-offs and compromises. To be sure, recent public debate about multiculturalism in Europe and North America has hardly conceded that a multicultural policy could be justified on the basis of value pluralism. The actual policies of most Western countries seem to have retreated from both nationalism and multiculturalism; exemptions and accommodation of minority cultural practices is still granted in many cases by many liberal states, but not against the background of comprehensive policy justifications that might plausibly have relied on value pluralism.78 An uneasy pragmatism reigns, with the default option that even if de facto multicultural 77 Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton University Press, 2009). 78 For empirical evidence, see in particular Christian Joppke, ‘The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 55 (2004), 237–57, and Christian Joppke, ‘Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe’, West European Politics, vol. 30 (2007), 1–22.

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accommodations are justified, an overarching civic identity is necessary for present-day Western polities. The point is not that the latter is illegitimate from a value pluralist point of view. In fact, quite the opposite: a liberal constitutional consensus€ – which does not depend on ‘belief in liberal values’ so much as the acceptance of Hampshirian fairness in procedures and liberal rights and thus leaves room for many differences€ – might precisely be justified by the fact that only such a consensus responds appropriately to the pluralistic nature of values.79 In that sense, a fine-grained version of value pluralism€ – as well as attendant theories of legitimate compromise and an account of a minimum morality€– might still have much to contribute to calibrating the relationship between liberal constitutional arrangements and the legitimate diversity within the societies they cover. 79 I am echoing the thought of Bernard Williams who claimed that ‘it is an argument for the liberal society that that society expresses more than any other does a true understanding of the pluralistic nature of values’. However, the society as such does not need to express anything like pluralism as a whole, and neither do individual citizens have to profess belief in liberalism, in the way that David Cameron suggests when he claims that ‘a genuinely liberal country … believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things.’

6

Corporatism and its discontents: pluralism, anti-pluralism and Anglo-American industrial relations, c. 1930–1980 Ben Jackson We were pluralists, believing that a free society consists of a large number of overlapping groups, each with its own interests and objectives which its members are entitled to pursue so long as they do so with reasonable regard to the rights and interests of others. But we were also egalitarians, wishing to see a shift in the distribution of wealth towards those with lower incomes, and a shift of power over the conduct of their working lives and environment towards working men and women; and, for both these reasons, emphasising the importance of trade unions in industry, in the economy, and in society. We therefore attached special importance to collective bargaining as the means whereby trade unions pursue their objectives.

Hugh Clegg1



Introduction

An investigation of the socialist pluralist tradition in the mid twentieth century is not, on the face of it, a promising subject. Marc Stears has described in a previous chapter the radicalism of the socialist pluralists of the early twentieth century: a tradition that criticized statist models of social reform; endorsed participatory democracy and firmly defended the associational autonomy of workers’ organizations. These characteristic Left pluralist themes seem very distant from the standard narrative of the Anglo-American Left in the mid twentieth century. Here the focus is above all on the rise of the state as the key instrument of social reform, a trend usually considered to reach its zenith during and after the Second World War. In recent years this narrative has been I am grateful to Mark Bevir, Kinch Hoekstra, Jacob Levy, Zofia Stemplowska, the anonymous Cambridge University Press readers and the participants at the conference on ‘Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880’ at UC Berkeley in October 2009 for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I am also indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for financial support during my work on it. 1 Quoted in D. Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p.€455.

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extended to include the subsequent onslaught of the neo-liberal right on the statist premises of the Anglo-American post-war settlements, and the right’s success in decisively rolling back the influence of democratic socialism (Britain) and New Deal liberalism (the United States) on public policy and popular political discourse. According to this account, then, the mid twentieth century is the period in which the left learned to love the state, as earlier pluralist ideas€– federalism, syndicalism, guild socialism€– were relegated to the margins of socialist and liberal ideologies by new state-centred reform projects organized around the welfare state, nationalization and economic planning. But this brief social democratic moment was itself delegitimized shortly thereafter and replaced by a neo-liberal discourse grounded on the sovereignty of the individual and an abiding hostility to the state. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is in fact a misleading account of the fate of the socialist pluralist tradition, for two reasons. First, socialists and progressive liberals explicitly theorized the mid-century social settlement as a pluralist enterprise, albeit one that was much less ambitious than the equivalent projects envisaged by guild socialists and syndicalists earlier in the century. Second, the neo-liberal critique of social democracy was articulated as an attack on the existence of certain associations in civil society that were held to threaten both individual liberty and the state. The recurring theme in my examination of these two opposing ideological camps will, of course, be the politics of trade unions (or, in American terms, ‘labor unions’) and thus, indirectly, the working class. This was an issue of great social significance in both Britain and the United States in this period: between 1933 and 1945, the number of unionized workers in the United States increased more than five-fold to over 14 million, about 30 per cent of the labour force. In Britain, trade union membership more than doubled between 1933 and 1950 to over 9€million, about 44 per cent of the labour force.2 Clearly, there was much that distinguished the industrial politics of Britain and the United States in this period, not least the fact that, in spite of their enormous growth, American unions were consistently weaker and less politically influential than their British cousins. Nonetheless, at an ideological level, it is striking that a broadly similar discourse of industrial relations pluralism exercised a powerful€– although fleeting€– grip on elite-level debates in N. Lichtenstein, ‘From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Post-War Era’, in S. Fraser and G. Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 123; G. Bain and R. Price, Profiles of Union Growth: A Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), table 2.1. 2

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both Britain and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. It was this now neglected tradition of Anglo-American corporatist pluralism that neo-liberals viewed with suspicion and sought to rebut.3 The conclusion of this chapter will therefore be that mid-century corporatism was in an important sense a pluralist doctrine, advocating the importance to a democratic society of vibrant, oppositional pressure groups, particularly labour organizations, while neo-liberalism was in this respect anti-pluralist and regarded pressure group activity, particularly by unions, as inimical to the authority of the state.

Corporatist pluralism in depression and war

As the quote from Hugh Clegg at the beginning of this chapter suggests, unions were valued on the Left in the mid twentieth century not only because of their role in rectifying distributive injustice but also as institutions that helped to democratize economic life and public policy. It is this democratic aspect of the corporatist theory of industrial relations that I will focus on in this chapter.4 The leading sponsors of corporatism in this period espoused an intriguing mixture of ideas drawn from a variety of sources, including the earlier socialist pluralism of Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole and the emerging ‘realist’ and pluralist theories of democracy articulated by Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl. The details of these sources have been explored by other contributors to this book (see for example Chapters 3 and 7). But we should also note that the Anglo-American roots of this thinking encompassed other sources as well, and in particular drew on the early work of the leading British Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the influential American institutionalist economist, J. R. Commons. The detailed empirical studies of trade unionism undertaken by the Webbs and Commons led them to proclaim that the gradual emergence of organized labour as a powerful social actor signified the growth of mature democratic self-government on the part of the workers, and was the harbinger of As Nelson Lichtenstein has pointed out, the word ‘corporatist’ would not have been used by the left in the mid twentieth century because of its association with fascism. Nonetheless, the word can be seen in retrospect to capture an important aspect of the new social order envisaged by liberals and socialists at this time, namely the settlement of major social and economic decisions through bargaining between the state and economic interest groups, particularly business and unions: Lichtenstein, ‘Corporatism to Collective Bargaining’, p. 146 n. 6. 4 I have examined the egalitarian view of distributive justice defended by the twentiethcentury British Left in B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought 1900–64 (Manchester University Press, 2007). 3

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a new model of economic organization. Representative organizations drawn from both sides of industry would in future meet to negotiate agreements over pay and conditions, as well as other matters of mutual concern.5 With this eclectic range of sources in mind, a useful point of entry into the later period covered by this chapter is Walter Milne-Bailey’s 1934 book, Trade Unions and the State. Milne-Bailey spent his career in the British trade union movement, culminating in a stint as head of research for the Trades Union Congress between 1926 and 1935, but he also retained an interest in more theoretical discussions. His book was clearly shaped by the problematic legacy of the 1926 General Strike in Britain, in particular by the challenge the strike had purportedly posed to the authority of the state, and by an enthusiasm for the pluralist political theory of Harold Laski. A quote from Laski’s Liberty in the Modern State (1930) served as the epigraph of the book, while Milne-Bailey’s preface paid tribute to Laski’s ‘brilliant and suggestive work’ and his ‘generous counsel throughout the writing of this book’.6 This was not mere politeness on Milne-Bailey’s part. By the 1930s the pluralist episode in British socialism was widely seen as having run out of steam, not least by its staunchest advocates, such as Laski and Cole. It was therefore of some interest that it was the pluralist language of associational autonomy that Milne-Bailey appropriated in order to Â�characterize the relationship between unions and the state. MilneBailey based his analysis on the fundamental pluralist claim that free individuals must be guaranteed the opportunity to form and participate in diverse associations that stand independently of the state in order to enjoy liberty and self-government. ‘Every interposition of such a voluntary group between the individual and the state must, unless the idealist position is adopted with all its implications, result on balance in an enlargement of freedom.’7 Milne-Bailey argued that trade unions were S. Webb and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green, 1894); S. Webb and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, Green, 1897); R. W. Schatz, ‘From Commons to Dunlop: Rethinking the Field of Industrial Relations’, in N. Lichtenstein and H. John Harris (eds.), Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.€97–100. 6 W. Milne-Bailey, Trade Unions and the State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), pp. 9, 11. 7 Milne-Bailey, Trade Unions, pp. 242–5, 273, 356 (quote); for the roots of these ideas in pluralist theory, see D. Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 89–194; M. Stears, Progressives, Pluralists and the Problems of the State (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 88–123, and Chapter 3, this volume; M. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 65–102. 5

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Â� spontaneous, organic associations that had developed among workers from their authentic individual desires for fellowship, solidarity, collective bargaining and greater control over their working lives. Trade unions, he continued, offered ‘no clearer example … of the inherent vitality of a genuine group organization having a common purpose and a vivid group aspiration’.8 Unsurprisingly, Milne-Bailey took the opportunity to criticize both communist and fascist societies for their failure to guarantee individuals a rich associational life independent of the state, but he also observed that within the remaining mature capitalist democracies a clear social trend could be discerned: notionally ‘capitalist’ economies were in fact evolving into a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. Such economies, including Britain, the United States and France, had abandoned laissez-faire in favour of greater state rationalization and planning of economic activity, while the widely discussed split between ownership and control in capitalist enterprises had made the question of private versus social ownership less relevant than in earlier decades.9 The real issue, Milne-Bailey argued, was how to secure greater democratic control over both private and public industrial organizations. He proposed, somewhat in the vein of guild socialism, that greater functional decentralization was the answer, but he was also careful to stipulate that in his view it was necessary to chart a middle way between the industrial autocracy of capitalist business as usual and the grave economic inefficiency that would be precipitated by syndicalism. His middle way envisaged the use of much greater consultation between employers, the state and trade unions, which would yield the threefold benefit of giving workers greater influence on decision-making; attenuating industrial unrest and enhancing the legitimacy of democratic politics. This ‘democratic view of industry’ entailed greater use by parliament of consultative and advisory bodies (including a new National Economic Council); union representation on the boards of publicly-owned industries; works councils in private industry and a strong social commitment to collective bargaining as itself a mechanism of democratic government.10 But Milne-Bailey also ruled out 8 Milne-Bailey, Trade Unions, p. 96. 9 The split between ownership and control referred to the tendency for firms to be run by a salaried managerial class rather than the owners of the enterprise, and for the owners to be a dispersed group of relatively passive shareholders. The classic diagnosis of this trend was A. Berle and G. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1932). 10 Milne-Bailey, Trade Unions, pp. 322–3, 337–54, 360–84. This diagnosis was similar to the one outlined by John Maynard Keynes in The End of Laissez-Faire, with the significant difference that Keynes laid greater stress on a broadly elitist model

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as impractical the ‘crudest notions of democracy’ advocated in earlier pluralist theory. Any stronger form of industrial democracy was classed as likely to impede efficiency and to require a degree of technical expertise that the ‘untrained layman’ lacked. Hence, even before the work of Schumpeter and Dahl, the meaning of industrial democracy had begun to be diluted in corporatist theory: certain managerial prerogatives were to be protected and direct self-government by workers in industry was seen as incompatible with the technical requirements of modern economic production.11 A similar interpretation of the meaning of ‘industrial democracy’ gained currency in the American labour movement around the same time as Milne-Bailey’s book was published in Britain. The immediate industrial context in the United States was of course rather different from Britain. Milne-Bailey had to contend with the gloomy aftermath of the historic defeat of the unions in the General Strike and an unsympathetic Conservative-dominated government. In contrast, theorists of industrial democracy in the United States were inspired by a series of successful union mobilizations in the 1930s, and buoyed by a relatively pro-labour federal government led by the Democrats. The rise of this new and dynamic unionism was associated above all with the unions who worked together under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) after breaking away from the American Federation of Labor in 1935.12 However, in spite of this more promising industrial and political context, the particular understanding of ‘industrial democracy’ defended by the CIO was similar to that outlined by Milne-Bailey. Radical syndicalist proposals, of the sort articulated earlier in the century by the Industrial Workers of the World, were firmly rejected as impractical, and replaced by an emphasis on collective bargaining, social legislation and consultation with worker representatives by both employers and the state. As CIO President Philip Murray put it, such measures were democratic because they introduced ‘a system of rules’ to ‘supplant the arbitrary will of the employer’.13 Murray drew on the American democratic tradition of public corporations runs by experts and professional managers, whereas MilneBailey sought to temper this rule by experts with the active involvement of workers’ representatives. See J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire [1926], in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Volume IX: Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 288–91. 11 Milne-Bailey, Trade Unions, pp. 359–60. 12 R. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 22–41. 13 M. Cook and P. Murray, Organized Labor and Production: Next Steps in Industrial Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), p. 188.

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to substantiate this claim. In his view, liberal democracy was itself threatened by autocratic capitalism: ‘The exploited casual labourers of California and the feudalistic bosses that exploit them are no part .â•›.â•›. of a liberal democratic constitution. Neither are the unhappy serfs of the unorganized mills and factories’.14 While the American constitution was grounded on a federalist desire to pluralize political decision-making, and thus make it more accountable, said Murray, industrial decision-making remained the sole preserve Â� of unaccountable dictators: ‘the maximum of feasible home rule is as wholesome for industrial as it is for political democracy’.15 Unions were therefore essential groups in industrial societies, formed organically out of the desire of workers to influence the conditions in their workplaces and thus enhance their freedom. Indeed, Murray suggested that greater worker involvement in industrial decision-making could only benefit political democracy in a larger sense, since it would help to teach workers about the virtues of democratic citizenship: ‘There is little hope of interesting the average man in political ideas and practices when his political experiences are largely confined to voting at widely spaced elections. By contrast, his contacts with industry fill every hour in the working day’.16 In practical terms, this demand for industrial democracy chiefly amounted to a defence of collective bargaining as the principal means of introducing fair procedures to govern matters such as wages, working hours, health and safety, operational control of the workplace, discipline and promotion.17 However, CIO leaders and theorists also attempted to push forward a broader, although somewhat inchoate, vision of unions taking on the role of worker representatives in a corporatist political economy, through which unions would help to shape industrial planning and welfare state expansion. One version of this promoted by Murray, for example, envisaged the creation of a National Production Council including labour representatives to help plan economic growth, and industry-wide councils that brought together employers, unions and the state to plan production in their own particular field. These ideas also underpinned the influential but ultimately unsuccessful wartime plan proposed by the United Automobile Workers’ Walter Reuther, which sought to reorganize aircraft production under a tripartite 14 Cook and Murray, Organized Labor, p. 248. 15 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 16 Ibid., pp. 39–42, 49, 213–21, quote at pp. 214. This was essentially the same argument that Carole Pateman would later press against elitist theories of democracy in her Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1970). 17 Cook and Murray, Organized Labor, pp. 109–55; Zieger, CIO, p. 120.

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production board.18 All this indicated the direction of travel in leftist political thought on both sides of the Atlantic before 1945: towards a pluralist corporatism which sought to ensure that the vogue for economic planning incorporated an important role for labour representation within it, but also rejected core elements of earlier, more radical pluralist thinking.

Post-war pluralism: collective bargaining as industrial democracy

Milne-Bailey’s book was influential on post-war British writers on industrial relations as they sought to theorize the new social settlement cemented into place by the peculiar conditions of total war. British academics such as Hugh Clegg and Allan Flanders (leaders of the so-called ‘Oxford School’ of industrial relations), alongside Labour politicians such as Anthony Crosland, followed in Milne-Bailey’s footsteps by setting out a social democratic programme that bypassed the familiar socialist focus on nationalization and prioritized instead the promotion of greater material and social equality through fiscal policy, the welfare state and collective bargaining.19 A central component of this social vision was the associational autonomy granted to the trade unions to negotiate wages and conditions on behalf of the working class. Less radical, although roughly similar, views were also expounded after the Second World War in the United States by an influential generation of labour economists and industrial relations scholars broadly sympathetic to the claims of organized labour, some of whom were taught or directly influenced by J. R. Commons. Leading figures in these fields, such as Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Sumner Slichter and Richard Lester, characterized themselves as ‘pluralist’ in their commitment to promoting an inclusive and democratic society through the existence of diverse centres of contending social power, with unions allocated a key role in constraining the power of capital. Although these American authors 18 P. Murray, CIO Re-Employment Plan (Washington, DC: CIO, 1945), p. 10; Lichtenstein, ‘Corporatism to Collective Bargaining’, pp. 125–7; A. Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 203–9, 218; N. Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 154–74; Zieger, CIO, pp. 141–7, 323–8. 19 My understanding of the links between the Oxford School and Labour revisionism is indebted to P. Ackers, ‘Collective Bargaining as Industrial Democracy: Hugh Clegg and the Political Foundations of British Industrial Relations Pluralism’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 45 (2007), 77–101; J. Kelly, Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform (London: Routledge, 2010).

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were careful to describe themselves as ‘liberal pluralists’, and were anxious to effect a reconciliation between labour and capital, they nonetheless envisaged a legitimate and significant economic role for unions and for the state in co-ordinating the bargaining between interest groups.20 Methodologically, post-war Anglo-American industrial relations pluralism drew on an inductive model of social science that emphasized the divergence between a priori theories of social behaviour and the more complex, culturally variegated social reality revealed by detailed empirical studies.21 This transatlantic discourse of pluralist corporatism was in the fortunate position of inheriting the social patriotism of the people’s war. British and American authors alike emphasized the extent to which ‘stable democracies’, in essence the English-speaking nations and the Scandinavians, had developed a mature democratic culture in part because of the important democratizing role played by labour organizations. A Whiggish story about the gradual growth of Anglo-American liberty and democracy was adapted to encompass the emergence of constitutional government in industry thanks to the union movement. The existence of such pressure groups, pluralists argued, helped to diffuse any potentially totalitarian concentrations of power, of the sort exhibited in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.22 As Clegg put it: Stability is given to a democratic system by the articulation and independent organization of many interests whose pressure through the political institutions of the country provides an approximate equilibrium between all the forces with real power within the system, and therefore protects and gives stability to a free society.23 20 For further discussion of American industrial relations pluralism, see K. van Wezel Stone, ‘The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law’, Yale Law Journal, 90 (1981), 1509–80; B. Kaufman (ed.), How Labor Markets Work (Lexington and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1988); Schatz, ‘From Commons to Dunlop’. 21 Y. P. Yonay, The Struggle Over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neo-Classical Economists in American Between the Wars (Princeton University Press, 1998); M. Bevir, ‘Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000’, Political Studies, 54 (2006), 583–606. 22 R. E. Schiller, ‘From Group Rights to Individual Liberties: Post-War Labor Law, Liberalism, and the Waning of Union Strength’, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, 20 (1999), 11–13. 23 H. Clegg, A New Approach to Industrial Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 115; the influence of pluralist political science is evident in this passage. This book was written by Clegg under the aegis of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had organized a conference in Vienna in 1958 on ‘Workers’ Participation in Management’. Both Clegg and Crosland had attended, and Clegg was commissioned to write up the fruits of the discussion as a book. On the broader agenda of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see F. Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).

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Of course, it was recognized that one influential analysis of the Weimar Republic was precisely that it had collapsed under the weight of sectional conflict between excessively powerful interest groups. But this was not taken very seriously as a possible outcome for ‘stable democracies’ that had a well-entrenched, widely-shared democratic culture of compromise and liberty, and that were enjoying the benefits of the post-war economic boom.24 Post-war pluralist writings therefore adopted the socialist pluralist emphasis on independent labour organizations as the primary mechanism by which economic life could be democratized, and stressed the authoritative democratic credentials of a political system that institutionalized the formal representation of unions in the policy-Â�making process. J. K. Galbraith’s famous phrase, ‘countervailing power’, which made its entry into political debate in 1952, was eagerly adopted by the post-war pluralists as crystallizing their vision: a society where the power of capital was constrained and regulated by the state and by powerful civil society organizations such as unions and consumer groups.25 According to this analysis, however, unions could only play their legitimate role in a pluralist democracy if they remained independent of both management and the state. Furthermore, on the basis of the experience of industrial relations in the nationalized industries in Britain since 1945, the ownership of industry was deemed largely irrelevant to the role and status of organized labour. Under both private and public ownership, pluralists argued, independent trade unions would be required to ensure the voices of workers were articulated. By analogy with political democracy, unions were portrayed as creating ‘a two-party legislative system governing the life of the work-place. In their absence, the rules would be set exclusively by the employer’.26 Crucially, though, it was the process of collective bargaining that was said to promote democracy and not direct worker participation in industrial decision-making. Through collective bargaining, rules and procedures could be agreed that would narrow the scope of arbitrary management decisions and hence grant protection and control to workers. Collective bargaining was therefore presented as introducing ‘the “rule of law” in employment relations’.27 Walter 24 For a characteristically sanguine view, see C. Kerr, ‘Industrial Relations and the Liberal Pluralist’ [1955], in his Labor and Management in Industrial Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 8–14. 25 J. K. Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952). 26 Kerr, ‘Industrial Relations and the Liberal Pluralist’, p. 25. 27 A. Flanders, Management and Unions: The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations (London: Faber, 1970), pp. 41–2, 225 (quote). Flanders at times also supported ‘joint

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Reuther gave a flavour of the democratic rhetoric that framed this view after the war: ‘Management has no divine rights. Management has only functions, which it performs well or poorly. The only prerogatives which management has lost turned out to be usurpations of power and privilege to which no group of men have exclusive right in a democratic nation’.28 The corollary of the emphasis on collective bargaining as democratic was that direct democratic control of industry by the workers was deemed unnecessary and undesirable; the role of labour organizations was to act as if they were a parliamentary opposition. In Clegg’s famous phrase: ‘The trade union is thus industry’s opposition€– an opposition which can never become a government’.29 Like Milne-Bailey, the post-war pluralists ruled out the syndicalist or guild socialist dreams of earlier radicals. But they also took this argument further than Milne-Bailey and the CIO strategists of the 1930s by narrowing the definition of industrial democracy to such an extent that it became, to all intents and purposes, co-extensive with collective bargaining. Although union theorists of the 1930s had rejected as impractical the guild socialist form of industrial democracy sketched by Cole and Laski, mechanisms for formal worker representation in industrial decision-making remained an important part of their agenda, alongside collective bargaining, as a means of advancing a new form of economic citizenship. In the post-war period, pluralist theorists appropriated the notion of industrial democracy to characterize the status quo of the post-war settlement and as a motif of social conciliation rather than of the struggle to deepen democracy. In this sense, industrial relations pluralism had become oriented towards the problem of how to maintain order and discipline in the workplace at the expense of the desire to make democracy a lived reality for workers.30

consultation’ between workers and management as a possible mechanism for direct worker participation that could supplement collective bargaining: see Kelly, Ethical Socialism, pp. 102–3, 120. 28 W. Reuther (1948), quoted by N. Lichtenstein, ‘Great Expectations: The Promise of Industrial Jurisprudence and its Demise, 1930–60’, in Lichtenstein and Harris, Industrial Democracy in America, pp. 130–1. 29 H. Clegg, Industrial Democracy and Nationalization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951), p.€22. This aspect of Clegg’s view of industrial democracy was singled out for particular criticism by Carole Pateman: Participation, pp. 71–2. 30 N. Lichtenstein, ‘Pluralism, Post-War Intellectuals and the Demise of the Union Idea’, in S. M. Milkis and J. M. Mileur (eds.), The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

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For and against industrial democracy

Why did the post-war pluralists object to stronger forms of industrial democracy? Three reasons were offered, although they were never very clearly distinguished from one another. First, it was argued that formal worker involvement in the making of industrial decisions (as opposed to merely influencing them) would jeopardize the independence of trade unions. The pluralist analysis depended on the bracing democratic effects of independent groups€– the state, business and unions€– contending with one another; collusion between these groups, in particular between management and unions, was thought likely to undermine the union leadership in the eyes of its members. The suspicion of ‘being in the boss’s pocket’, maintained Clegg, would inevitably attach itself to the union leadership if it was involved in making management decisions.31 Second, pluralists believed that a more radical form of democratic self-government in industry was likely to be extremely inefficient and perhaps even impossible to render workable in practice. A clear functional division was said to exist between managers and workers. While workers could play a role in influencing management decisions, the technical requirements of modern industry, and its large scale, meant that managers must nonetheless be granted the power to make the final decisions themselves.32 Third, and perhaps most interesting from the perspective of this book, pluralists argued that a radical model of industrial democracy offered a romanticized image of democratic self-government that failed to get to grips with the cutting-edge findings on this subject by social scientists. It is clear, for example, that the work of Schumpeter and Dahl had been read and absorbed by these authors.33 From these sources they derived a ‘realist’ view of democracy, which was sceptical of the appetite and capacity of the average citizen when it came to engaging in detailed democratic deliberation, and emphasized bargaining between multiple pressure groups as the primary means of fostering democratic government. This realist theory was also extended to internal union democracy. Pluralists had low expectations of the degree of participation in union affairs that could be reasonably required from union members 31 Clegg, New Approach, pp. 22–3; C. A. R. Crosland, ‘Industrial Democracy and Workers’ Control’, in his The Conservative Enemy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), pp. 218–19. 32 Clegg, Industrial Democracy, pp. 73–4; Flanders, Management, pp. 145–6; C. Kerr, J. Dunlop, F. Harbison and C. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 294–5. 33 Ackers, ‘Collective Bargaining’, 93.

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and saw the centralization and professionalization of union leaderships as inevitable.34 Doubts were also expressed about the normative desirability of a more participatory democracy. Crosland, for example, argued on a number of occasions that it was empirically unrealistic to expect widespread participation in decision-making, since ‘all experience shows that only a small minority of the population will wish to participate’. But he added to this piece of Schumpeterian political sociology the normative claim that this behaviour was entirely justifiable, since the bulk of the population would rightly ‘prefer to lead a full family life and cultivate their gardens’.35 The importance of the individual being free to cultivate his or her garden was a theme that Crosland reprised on a number of occasions€ – as Stuart Hall observed, it was ‘Mr Crosland’s metaphor for happiness’.36 In Crosland’s view, liberty required that individuals should be free to opt out of public life: if we believe in socialism as a means of increasing personal freedom and the range of choice, we do not necessarily want a busy bustling society in which everyone is politically active, and fussing around in an interfering and responsible manner, and herding us all into participating groups. The threat to privacy and freedom would be intolerable.37

There was therefore some truth to E. P. Thompson’s observation that, according to this social democratic revisionism, ‘the main participation demanded of the people is to cross the ballot-paper 13 or 14 million times’.38 Of course, one further interpretation is that these three reasons for limiting direct worker participation in industry were themselves merely cloaks for an underlying desire on the part of Cold War pluralists to preserve or conciliate existing social relations rather than to transform them. Such at any rate was the view taken by the New Left as it emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the key theorists associated with this movement promoted ideals of 34 C. Kerr, ‘Unions and Union Leaders of their own Choosing’, in his Labor and Management, pp. 34–7; R. Lester, As Unions Mature (Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 21–34, 106–7, 149–53. 35 C. A. R. Crosland, ‘Socialists in a Dangerous World’ [1968], in his Socialism Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), pp. 65–6. See also the same point in his Conservative Enemy, p. 229. 36 S. Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review (Autumn 1958), 29. 37 C. A. R. Crosland, ‘A Social-Democratic Britain’ [1971], in his Socialism Now, p.€89. Clegg added that perhaps the most dangerous feature of theories of participatory democracy was that, when applied outside of small groups, they could lapse into the advocacy of a ‘mystical’ general will that would lead to totalitarianism: Industrial Democracy, pp. 34, 121–3. 38 E. P. Thompson, ‘Revolution’, New Left Review, 3 (1960), 6.

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participatory democracy that invoked the heritage of an earlier, more radical socialist pluralism. C. Wright Mills’ first book, for example, was a detailed survey of the American labour movement and its leadership, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (1948), which concluded with a powerful plea for the democratization of the productive process that was inspired by G. D. H. Cole’s guild socialism. According to Mills, unions should ensure that ‘in every workshop or its equivalent the unionized workers would continually strive to encroach upon the functions now performed by owners of industry and their appointed managers’. For it was only through a thorough democratization of the workplace that the goal of human freedom could be realized, by ensuring that workers had the opportunity to enjoy self-rule by participating in the making of every social decision that ‘vitally affected’ them.39 Similar ideas were also expressed by the British New Left as they digested the implications of the pluralist ideas expounded by the Oxford School and Labour revisionists such as Crosland. Raymond Williams’ stress on the moral attractions of the politically assertive aspects of working class culture was particularly influential. Williams powerfully evoked the creation of autonomous proletarian political institutions as sites of active resistance to the inequalities and individualism of capitalism. The proletarian way of life, ‘with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working class .â•›.â•›. institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society’.40 In their willingness to adjust to the apparent success of corporatist capitalism, Williams said, the Labour Party establishment had neglected the need to disseminate a new consciousness, ‘a real feeling of community€ – the true knowledge that we are working for ourselves and for each other’. But the fundamental obstacle to this realization was ‘the plain fact that most of us do not own or control the means and the product of work’.41 When Hugh Clegg’s A New Approach to Industrial Democracy was dissected in the pages of New Left Review, Royden Harrison opened his review with a quote from G. D. H. Cole’s Self-Government in Industry (1917) and proceeded to rebut Clegg’s argument that guild socialist-style workers’ control was impractical and 39 C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1948), pp. 252–5, Cole cited at pp. 253, 258, 310. On the appropriation of Mills’ ideas by the American New Left, see M. Stears, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 179–84. 40 R. Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in N. MacKenzie (ed.), Conviction (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), p. 80. 41 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 301–5, 335.

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undesirable. Democracy, Harrison argued, did not depend on the existence of organized opposition to government, but on the capacity of the people to change governments. A democratic model of industry should therefore involve direct worker control over management. It was essential, Harrison continued, to set about creating an economy that mixed state ownership of large, strategically important industries (but with worker representatives on their boards) with other industries owned and run as co-operatives or owned by the state but run by the workers themselves.42 Yet the New Left critique of post-war pluralism was a double-edged sword. While in one sense the New Left tried to radicalize corporatism in a direction similar to that sought by earlier guild socialists and syndicalists, in another the New Left helped to foster slogans and arguments that could be used against corporatism per se. Two examples seem particularly striking in retrospect. First, the New Left’s critique of union leaderships and bureaucracies, and of the cordial relations between union leaders and corporate bosses, at times cultivated an image of unions as ossified, oligarchic institutions that stood in the way of individual freedom just as surely as large corporations.43 Second, Reuel Schiller has shown that the New Left’s dismissal of interest-group pluralism as a smokescreen for rule by elites paved the way for an eventual reassertion of individual rights over the group rights enjoyed by unions under the pluralist dispensation. The pluralist model of industrial relations allowed unions a modicum of organizational autonomy to mobilize their members in collective action, even if union activities required individuals in the workplace to comply with decisions and actions that they did not personally consent to. However, the New Left’s characterization of unions as just another elite-dominated pressure group generated€– particularly in the United States€– a powerful rhetoric that privileged the individual over the group. New Left writers at times suggested that union collective action simply reflected the interests of an elite class of labour leaders. The group rights enjoyed by unions were, on this New Left account, vulnerable to the claim that they did not in fact serve the interests of their membership. Given these 42 R. Harrison, ‘Retreat From Industrial Democracy’, New Left Review, 4 (1960), 32–8. For a similar New Left critique of Clegg and Crosland, this time invoking Tom Mann and the 1889 London Dock Strike, see K. Coates and T. Topham, The New Unionism: The Case for Workers’ Control (London: Peter Owen, 1972), pp. 18–29, 40–6. 43 Wright Mills, New Men of Power, pp. 224–33; T. Topham, ‘Shop Stewards and Workers’ Control’, New Left Review, 25 (1964), 3–16; L. Williams, ‘Ideological Parallels Between the New Left and the New Right’, The Social Science Journal, 24 (1987), 318–19.

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assumptions, a discourse of individual rights guaranteed by the state began to hold greater appeal than the more traditional call for unionbased Â�solidarity.44 Both of these strands of New Left thinking€– the critique of unions as remote oligarchies and the trumping of group rights by individual rights€– were to have a wide cultural resonance, in part because they intersected with another, much more hostile analysis of corporatism that rose to prominence in the same period.

Neo-liberalism as anti-pluralism

This rival theoretical discourse to both pluralist corporatism and the New Left lurked on the margins of public debate in this period. As corporatist pluralists bestrode high-profile Anglo-American academic and political debates like colossi, neo-liberalism began to take shape in more low-profile settings. Obscure professors and academic scribblers gathered at private conferences and well-appointed, centrally located sets of offices to hone their critique of the post-war settlement. Sympathetic policy organizations also began to emerge on the political scene (notably the American Enterprise Association in 1943 and the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1955). These neo-liberals took much more seriously the parallels between the fate of the Weimar Republic, in their view destroyed by sectional pressure groups, and the trajectory of Western capitalism after 1945. While neo-liberalism is often demotically presented as an ideology that favours the individual and is hostile to the state, more sophisticated analysts have long observed that neo-liberal theorists and politicians were well aware that a strong state would be required to restructure and police the boundaries of the market.45 Neo-liberals placed great emphasis on the damage that would be inflicted on the state, the economy and the individual by the legal latitude afforded to pressure groups, especially trade unions, under corporatist social arrangements. However, this stance left neo-liberal theorists to finesse a tricky problem. According to pluralists, unions were voluntary associations, organically generated by the workers themselves, and an ineradicable feature of a free society. This account seemed to be a close cousin of the neo-liberal preference for ‘spontaneous’ voluntary activity in civil Schiller, ‘Group Rights to Individual Liberties’, 1–73; Lichtenstein, ‘Pluralism, PostWar Intellectuals and the Demise of the Union Idea’. 45 A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); P. Mirowski, ‘Postface: Defining Neo-Liberalism’, in P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds.), The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 44

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society over the coercive legislative actions of the state. How could neo-liberals maintain both a preference for voluntary associationalism and a desire for state action to reduce the power enjoyed by unions? This delicate balancing act was preserved by distinguishing between spontaneous and voluntary forms of association€– which of course they strongly supported€– and coercive forms of association that exercised dangerous levels of power over the individual€ – against which they sought to deploy the state. Friedrich Hayek’s work, for example, at times explicitly drew on the liberal pluralist tradition discussed by Jacob Levy earlier in this book, notably by naming Tocqueville and Acton as inspirational classical liberal precursors and in stipulating that ‘true individualism’ was opposed ‘only against the use of coercion to bring about organization or association, and not against association as such’. The value of the family, the voluntary association and local autonomy were all stressed by Hayek as crucial means of warding off state power over the individual and the pursuit of abstract egalitarian goals from the centre.46 However, these voluntarist modes of association were sharply distinguished in Hayek’s mind from the forms of working-class organization that were fêted by his pluralist contemporaries as essential to a democratic society. Unions, Hayek and his neo-liberal allies believed, were coercive institutions that forced individuals into collective action which they did not support, and were artificially propped up by partisan pro-union labour legislation enacted by the social democratic state. In this sense, neo-liberals saw unions as neither voluntary nor spontaneous. The power of organized labour was therefore a long-standing source of anxiety among free market revivalists. Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism (1922), one of the earliest and most influential works in the neo-liberal canon, had got the ball rolling in the inter-war period by rebutting the economic viability of guild socialism.47 Two other early works laid out the neo-liberal approach in more detail.48 One was W. H. Hutt’s The Theory of Collective Bargaining, published in 1930 and, significantly, reissued in 1975 by the Institute of Economic Affairs. Hutt was a stalwart member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, the international discussion 46 F. A. Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False’, in his Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago University Press, 1948), pp. 16, 23, 28, 31; emphasis in original. 47 L. von Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, second edition, 1932 [1922]), pp. 230–4; translated as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 258–62. 48 The following paragraphs draw on B. Jackson, ‘An Ideology of Class: Neo-Liberalism and the Trade Unions, c. 1930–79’, in C. Griffiths, J. Nott and W. Whyte (eds.), Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays for Ross McKibbin (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 263–81.

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group convened by Hayek from 1947 onwards to revive market liberal ideas. The second early neo-liberal statement on trade unionism was by Henry Simons in a 1944 article entitled ‘Some Reflections on Syndicalism’.49 Simons was based at the Chicago Law School for most of his career and along with colleagues such as Frank Knight and Aaron Director formed the earliest cohort of the ‘Chicago School’ of economics. The influence of both Simons and Hutt was long-lasting€– it can be seen in Hayek’s 1960 Constitution of Liberty, for example, and their work continued to form a key reference point in pamphlets issued by the Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s.50 Methodologically, Hutt and Simons were emblematic of the neo-liberal departure from the inductive empiricism of the mid-century pluralists to a deductive form of economic theory that paid little attention to detailed institutional or empirical studies.51 Hutt and Simons conceptualized unions as monopolies which sought to control the labour supply in order to charge a price for labour in excess of its competitive level. They argued that the monopoly gains reaped by union insiders should therefore not be seen as improving the position of labour as a whole but rather as increasing unemployment and income inequality, since unionized workers were simply advantaging themselves relative to lower-paid members of the working class. As Simons put it, unionism ‘enables an aristocracy of labour to build fences around their occupations, restricting entry, raising arbitrarily the costs and prices of their products, and lowering the wages and incomes of those outside, and of the poor especially’.52 Hutt and Simons further claimed that unions facilitated collusion between certain groups of employers and workers€– bilateral monopoly€– to the detriment of the consumer. Increased prices were the outcome, and since the majority of consumers were workers, they argued this too served to undermine working-class living standards. In the 1975 edition of his book, Hutt quoted a journalist’s observation that the latest contract concluded in the US steel industry resembled ‘a Viking blood oath between union and management to go to commit piracy on the high seas’.53

49 The article was originally drafted in 1941: H. Simons, ‘Some Reflections on Syndicalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 52 (1944), 1 n. 1. 50 See e.g. Trade Unions: Public Goods or Public Bads? IEA Readings 17 (London: IEA, 1978), pp. 25–6, 52. 51 Yonay, Struggle Over the Soul, pp. 184–95; Jackson, ‘An Ideology of Class’, pp.€277–9. 52 Simons, ‘Reflections’, 12. 53 W. H. Hutt, The Theory of Collective Bargaining (London: IEA, 1975 [1930]), pp.€66–73, quote at 102; Simons, ‘Reflections’, 2, 15.

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Hutt and Simons were also appalled by what they regarded as the unacceptable violence used by unions to enforce their interests. Strikes, boycotts, closed shops and other trade union tactics were, in their view, the use of private coercive power to impose an economic settlement on other workers, employers and consumers in a way that threatened the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. ‘Labour monopolies’, said Simons, ‘enjoy an access to violence which is unparalleled in other monopolies’, rendering governments ‘impotent’ and enabling unions to ‘deal with scabs in ways which make even Rockefeller’s early methods seem polite and legitimate’. Unions therefore presented an unparalleled challenge to the liberal state: ‘they are essentially occupational armies, born and reared amidst violence, led by fighters, and capable of becoming peaceful only as their power becomes irresistible’.54 The use of metaphors comparing unionism to legalized piracy and banditry were widespread in both these texts, for what infuriated these authors was that industrial relations legislation in Britain and the United States respectively had actually been designed to facilitate union activities: the 1906 Trade Disputes Act and the 1935 Wagner Act were prime examples of the state support for unions that they deplored. In spite of their great discontent, however, at this stage neither Hutt nor Simons actually mentioned any specific proposals for legislative reform. By the time Hutt’s book was reissued in 1975, he was less reticent. ‘Ideally’, he wrote in a new epilogue, ‘what is needed for the emancipation of labour is the enactment of the principle underlying the British Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 adapted to the 1970s’.55 Later neo-liberal writers, including Hayek, followed Hutt and Simons in their analysis of trade unions. As the post-war boom got underway, a large and increasingly apocalyptic literature on industrial relations was produced by neo-liberal economists and allied think-tanks, the vast majority of it published in the United States.56 54 Simons, ‘Reflections’, 7, 21. 55 Hutt, Theory, p. 119. The British Combination Acts, a legislative response to fears about the seditious influence of Jacobin ideas on the working class, made it illegal for workers to combine for the purposes of improving their wages and conditions. The Acts were repealed in the mid 1820s. 56 A useful list of this literature is cited in F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago University Press, 1960), pp. 505–6 n. 8. Important examples included: J. Viner and F. Machlup, in Wage Determination and the Economics of Liberalism (Washington, DC: US Chamber of Commerce, 1947); D. McCord Wright (ed.), The Impact of the Union (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951); S. Petro, The Labor Policy of a Free Society (New York: Ronald Press, 1957); E. H. Chamberlin, The Economic Analysis of Labor Union Power (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Association, 1958); P. D. Bradley (ed.), The Public Stake in Union Power (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959); Hayek, Constitution, pp. 267–84; W. H. Hutt, The Strike-Threat System (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973). For a valuable account of how this

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According to this literature, the enhanced power enjoyed by organized labour thanks to full employment, a generous welfare state and prounion legislation simultaneously undermined economic efficiency, threatened the legitimacy of the state and coerced unwilling individuals into collective action. Neo-liberals devoted particular attention to the power exerted by unions over individuals who did not wish to join one (through institutions such as the closed shop) and over union members who did not wish to participate in industrial action. ‘The real exploiters in our present society’, wrote Hayek, ‘are not egoistic capitalists or entrepreneurs, and in fact not separate individuals, but organizations which derive their power from the moral support of collective action and the feeling of group loyalty’.57 On this account, solidaristic sentiments between groups of workers were to be viewed with fear and suspicion, for they threatened the sovereignty of the individual, and well-organized pressure groups were deemed to command dangerous, perhaps even totalitarian, concentrations of power. Although business organizations were arguably even more susceptible to these strictures than unions (as Mancur Olson, for example, argued), this was not the view of neo-liberals when confronted with the distributive politics of the post-war boom.58 As Hayek remarked in The Constitution of Liberty: I believe I have myself in the past used the tactical argument that we cannot hope to curb the coercive powers of labour unions unless we at the same time attack enterprise monopoly. I have, however, become convinced that it would be disingenuous to represent the existing monopolies in the field of labour and those in the field of enterprise as being of the same kind.59

Â� neo-liberal discourse about trade unionism was hammered out within the Mont Pèlerin Society in the 1950s, see Y. Steiner, ‘The Neo-Liberals Confront the Trade Unions’, in Mirowski and Plehwe, Road From Mont Pèlerin, pp. 181–203. 57 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume III (London: Routledge, 1979), pp.€89–90. 58 M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 141–8; The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 143–4. Although Olson himself was clear that business organizations were likely to prove more problematic than unions, this did not prevent his work being read as congenial to the anti-union agenda of neo-liberals. Hayek was particularly struck by The Logic of Collective Action and arranged for it to be translated into German: see the correspondence between Hayek and Olson in the F. A. Hayek papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 40–34. 59 Hayek, Constitution, p. 265. As Hayek’s remark suggests, earlier neo-liberal writings had stressed the need for action against both large corporations and trade unions. I have discussed this aspect of early neo-liberal theory in B. Jackson, ‘At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–47’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 142–5.

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According to Hayek and his colleagues, the threat to freedom posed by unions was far more serious than that posed by the capitalist firm. Unions, they argued, were the beneficiaries of explicit state support that effectively exempted them from the scope of the rule of law, Â�rendering them immune from prosecution for the exercise of private coercive power. Two features of this neo-liberal analysis are worth stressing. First, neo-liberals were willing to deploy the coercive power of the state against labour organizations. They envisaged significant state Â�regulation of the labour market in order to diminish the power and status enjoyed by unions, including such reforms as: the prohibition of picketing in numbers; the abolition of the closed shop; the prohibition of secondary action; the removal of social security entitlements from workers on strike and the removal of the right of unions to make contracts that would subsequently bind those who did not voluntarily delegate this authority to the union.60 Some of the fiercest critics of the unions, such as Hutt, took this analysis much further by arguing for the abolition of the right to strike itself by returning to the principles that underpinned the British Combination Acts. This was never a widely supported proposal in these circles but it certainly existed as a legitimate point of view (indeed, as a halfway house support did exist for a strike ban in essential services). However, many of the theorists involved in these debates did favour two further, more radical proposals: first, that unions should be subject to anti-monopoly legislation in exactly the same way as corporations (with a view to abolishing industry-wide unions) and second, that union legal immunities should be removed to render unions liable for damages in civil law.61 Second, neo-liberals consciously rejected the democratic role envisaged for unions by theorists of corporatism. Neo-liberals were suspicious of any union collective action that might interfere with the operation of efficient economic production or that relied for its efficacy on the coercion of individuals in the interests of a larger group. But this placed them in the curious position of commending various forms of association and collective action that were by no means obviously non-coercive or efficiency-enhancing€ – local government and large

60 See e.g. Petro, Labor Policy, pp. 235–47; Hayek, Constitution, pp. 278–9; G. Haberler, Inflation and the Unions (London: IEA, 1972), pp. 45–7. 61 Hayek, Constitution, p. 278; H. G. Lewis, ‘The Labor-Monopoly Problem: A Positive Program’, Journal of Political Economy, 59 (1951), 277–87; M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago University Press, 2002 [1962]), p. 132; Haberler, Inflation, pp. 47–8.

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Â� corporations for example€ – while at the same time singling out trade unions as uniquely coercive associations.62 By the 1970s, then, a well worked out critique of the role played by pressure groups in society had been elaborated by neo-liberals; a critique that contrasted the public interest of individual consumers with sectional producer interests. But the producer interests identified in this critique were almost exclusively those of employees. Employers were only criticized in so far as they failed to be sufficiently firm in their dealings with trade unions. From an initial argument that bosses and workers were conspiring in a joint monopoly against the public, neoliberals rapidly moved to the claim that workers were conspiring against the public. They did so on the basis of certain arguments derived from deductive economic theory, in particular that unions drove up prices, increased unemployment and increased income inequality; on the libertarian grounds that unions exercised unacceptable coercive power over the individual and on the basis that for the state to cede such legal latitude to economic pressure groups was in effect for the state to surrender its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Neo-liberal theory therefore envisaged a society in which individuals would enjoy a rich consumer life, full of market-based choice-making and agency, but exercise little control over their roles in the process of production, which was to be the prerogative of unilateral managerial decision. The democratization of economic life envisaged by corporatist pluralists was, on this account, far too extreme. Similarly, the corporatist vision of a state that proceeded by deliberating over its social and economic plans with relevant interest groups, especially unions, was seen as at best pandering to producer interests and at worst incipiently totalitarian.

Conclusion

As we have seen, mid-century Anglo-American socialist pluralism was a mixture of diverse theoretical elements€– in some ways a compromise between the contending economic philosophies of capitalism and socialism. Corporatist pluralists envisaged social democracy as not merely an exercise in redistributing economic resources (important though this objective was), but also as centrally concerned with the democratization of economic life. They were strongly committed to the 62 The treatment of trade unions as uniquely coercive organizations in neo-liberal analysis has been stressed by Lord Wedderburn, ‘Freedom of Association and Philosophies of Labour Law’, Industrial Law Journal, 18 (1989), 8. I have explored the weaknesses of the neo-liberal approach to unions in greater detail in Jackson, ‘An Ideology of Class’, pp. 277–81.

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notion that employees should have greater control and agency in their working lives than would be permitted under unregulated capitalism. This was to be achieved by allotting a powerful role to unions in industry and politics, and in particular by prioritizing collective bargaining as the primary means of representing and articulating workers’ interests. However, the boundaries of this industrial democracy were drawn more narrowly than had been entertained by earlier socialist pluralists such as Laski and Cole. Some observers might well see this transition in pluralist thought as a welcome accommodation on the part of pluralist theory to the basic facts of industrial life€– the institutional proposals of Laski and Cole were, after all, hardly beyond reproach. Nonetheless, as the New Left pointed out, one consequence of this narrowing of the pluralist horizon was that these corporatists incorporated within their theory of industrial relations an elitist view of democracy that to some extent stood in tension with their egalitarian and democratic commitments and promoted a democratic theory of trade unionism largely grounded on opposition to managerial power. It is certainly arguable that a more constructive and durable corporatist culture might have been constructed from an industrial relations system that established greater common ground between the management and the workforce, and experimented with worker involvement in industrial decisionmaking.63 While this latter suggestion offers a possible synthesis of the distributive politics of post-war pluralism with elements of the New Left participatory agenda that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, we have also seen that there were tendencies within the New Left that were less hospitable to associational pluralism and that converged with certain currents within neo-liberalism.64 The New Left shared with the neoliberals a critique of contemporary trade union practices€– the image of ‘big labour’ and so on€– and had some difficulties with accommodating the associational rights of unions. These views were of course taken 63 This is not a grossly idealist claim. In Britain, industrial relations experts such as Clegg and Flanders were highly influential in public policy discussions, notably in the deliberations of the Donovan Commission in 1968, so their writings had a fairly clear impact on the institutional design of British industrial relations: for further discussion, see P. Davies and M. Freedland, Labour Legislation and Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 238–74. US pluralists were similarly influential in the framing of public policy and active in advising industry: for example, John Dunlop was Director of the Cost of Living Council in 1973–1974 and Secretary of Labor in 1975–1976. 64 For further discussion of the overlap between neo-liberalism and the New Left, see Williams, ‘Ideological Parallels’; M. Kenny, The First New Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), pp. 202–3; J. Kelley, Bringing the Market Back In (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 96–100.

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much further by neo-liberals, who were scathing about the coercion inherent in labour organizations and sought to exempt the sphere of economic production from the scope of democratic scrutiny. And it was this neo-liberal view that famously triumphed in Anglo-American public discourse and policy-making during the 1980s. The response of late twentieth-century socialist and empirical pluralists to this development will be examined in subsequent chapters. But as I have shown in this chapter, it is too quick to categorize the ideological battle-lines of the mid twentieth century as a confrontation between statist socialists or liberals and nascent neo-liberal individualism. Mid-century British democratic socialism and New Deal liberalism were pluralist doctrines. They respected the associational autonomy of working-class institutions; sought to deploy the state to accomplish the universal access to education, health and social security that the working class had been unable to accomplish on its own; and embraced the contest between contending interest groups as crucial to the democratization of civil society and the state. Many criticisms might now be made of the theory that underpinned this vision, and of how far Democratic and Labour politicians were in practice willing to implement it, but from the vantage point of the twenty-first century it is apparent that socialist pluralist aspirations were in fact closer to becoming a lived reality in British and American workplaces in the mid twentieth century than at any time before or since.

7

The rise and fall of the democratic dogma and the emergence of empirical democratic theory John G. Gunnell



Introduction

Although the basic purpose of this chapter is to provide an account of the origins of an empirical and normative pluralist theory of democracy in the discipline of American political science during the late 1920s, it is necessary to clarify significant developments which preceded and followed this period. These include the Federalist’s paradoxical account of the basis of republican government; the persistent nineteenth-Â�century attachment to the assumption that democracy presupposed the existence of an intelligible American people which was the original reference of the term “state” as distinguished from “government”; the crisis in democratic theory that characterized the decline of the organic and developmental historicist theory of the state in the early years of the twentieth century; the degree to which both progressives, such as John Dewey, and conservatives, such as W.Y. Elliott, remained attached to the basic premise of nineteenth-century democratic theory; the emergence, during the 1920s, of a particular American form of pluralist empirical democratic theory which, despite the impact of English conceptions, was fundamentally different; and the extent to which the image of democracy, which dominated the discipline of political science during the behavioral era, was in all essential respects a Â�re-articulation of a Â�theory that had been formulated and embedded in the field a Â�generation earlier.1 For a further elaboration of some of these themes, see John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 1998); “The Real Revolution in Political Science,” PS: Political Science, 37 (2004), 47–50; “Political Science on the Cusp: Recovering a Discipline’s Past,” American Political Science Review, 99 (2005), 597–609; “The Founding of the American Political Science Association: Discipline, Profession, Political Theory, and Politics,” American Political Science Review 100 (2006), 479–86. 1

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In 1952, Bernard Berelson posed the question of how the social scientific study of public opinion could contribute to bringing democratic practice and democratic theory into closer harmony. What he was asking, however, was not how the practice of American politics might be brought into accord with the theory but how the theory might be tailored to fit the practice. The traditional image of democracy, he claimed, assumed a knowledgeable citizenry acting in a rational manner and dedicated to the public interest. He argued that although research indicated that the image did not conform very closely to the facts of American politics, this was “not necessarily a matter for disillusionment or even disappointment.”2 As Berelson, and his collaborators in the Elmira study of voting later concluded, the lack of active participation, for example, might very well indicate contentment. What mattered was less the activity of individual citizens than how the political “system” and its “collective properties” produced a symbiotic relationship between a complex of diverse “cleavages,” which moved the system, and “a basic consensus,” which served to “hold it together.”3 Berelson’s concept, which came to be known as “empirical democratic theory,” was, however, not as novel as most proponents and critics assumed. By the early 1930s, its principal elements had not only been fully articulated in the discipline of political science but were becoming a premise of public policy. In the broadest sense, this concept reflected an accomodational approach to democratic theory, which was deeply entrenched in the American experience. The authors of the American Constitution claimed that the proposed institutions would represent the essence of popular government, and when Tocqueville studied the United States, he assumed that he was studying democracy itself and not merely a token. And the adaptation of the German theory of the state, which would dominate nineteenth-century American political thought, maintained that the idea of democracy was objectified in the practice of American politics. It is important, however, despite both distinct family resemblances and historical continuities, not to assimilate empirical democratic theory, without considerable qualification, to the image of politics that was propounded in the Federalist Papers.

2 Bernard Berelson, “Democratic Theory and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 16 (Autumn, 1952): 313–30. 3 Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, eds., Voting (University of Chicago Press, 1954).

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The nineteenth-century background

The Federalist vision of the American polity was rhetorically ambivalent and paradoxical. Although the authors imagined a republican form of government characterized by the dynamism of an inherently factional society constrained by institutional structures, they also, despite the heritage of republican thought, literally invented the idea of an organic American people and public. This collectivity was conceived as both the author and subject of the Constitution, as transcending the individual states and diverse social and economic interests, and as giving substance to the idea of popular sovereignty and the essential values of popular government. This dialectic of diversity and unity would continue to inform the democratic conversation in the United States, but during the nineteenth century, it was, despite the arguments of some, such as John C. Calhoun, the idea of unity and the existence of an American people that won out as the hallmark of democracy. The curriculum which dominated American colleges and Â�universities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was largely informed by Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy and a conception of practical ethics devoted to civic education. This philosophy valorized the idea of social solidarity and the republican duties of virtuous citizens devoted to the public weal, but it did not advance any systematic theory of democracy or account of the United States as a democratic form of government. This task fell to the German émigré Francis Lieber who can reasonably be designated the founder of American political science and who came to the United States shortly after the first visit of his acquaintance and correspondent, Tocqueville. Like Tocqueville, Lieber assumed that in studying American institutions, he was studying the essence of popular government, and he took seriously Tocqueville’s suggestion that the new world of American democracy required a “new science of politics.” He was the first both to initiate such a field of study and to present a comprehensive theoretical account of popular sovereignty in the United States. Lieber transplanted the German philosophy of the state into the American context and grafted it on to traditional republican theory and an account of US political institutions. He claimed that the long historical sojourn of the idea of political liberty in Western civilization had found its full maturation and realization in the United States. Prior to Lieber’s work, the term “state,” apart from referring to the several states, had little currency either in the discourse of American politics or in commentary on politics. As Lieber made clear in volume one of his first major work, published in 1838, what was most distinctive about

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this theory was the fact that the word “state” did not refer to the institutions of government but rather, and explicitly, to a natural and “aboriginal” sovereign community or people that preceded and authorized the Constitution, which in turn authorized and limited the government. The state was what he designated as a “jural society,” a “res publica,” “res communis,” and “res populi” that was the font of law and public policy. Despite all the social and institutional diversity, which was essential to the freedoms realized in such a system, the state was an “organism” in which all the parts added up to an integral whole. The voice of this people, as in the case of traditional republican theory, was that of the majority which, in turn, spoke in the form of “public opinion” which constituted the “sense and sentiment of the community, necessarily irresistible, sharing its sovereign power everywhere” and standing behind and above positive law, parties, and political leaders.4 The basic elements of this theory of the state were accepted and elaborated by the next generation of American scholars who imbibed German scholarship and infused it into the fields of history and the emerging social sciences. Both the Union cause and American nationalism lent force to this account of democracy. The core ideas were promulgated by public intellectuals such as Orestes Brownson (The American Republic, 1866); the historian George Bancroft in his ten-volume history of the United States (completed in 1874); political scientists such as Theodore Woolsey at Yale (Political Science or the State, Theoretically and Practically Considered, 1877); Herbert Baxter Adams at The Johns Hopkins; Bernard Moses at Berkeley; and publicists such as Elisha Mulford (The Nation, 1887). Although James Bryce did not subscribe to the metaphysics of Staatslehre, his much more empirical account of American politics also located sovereignty in a public opinion which was an expression of a “people” and represented the “mind and conscience of the whole nation.” Bryce’s extravagant defense of public opinion was free from the mysticism of German philosophy, but it in many respects reinforced the basic assumption of the theory of the state. Although this theory had served to justify, in the case of Lieber and others, a conservative defense of limited government, it was, in principle, ideologically neutral, and it was embraced by those, such as the economist Richard Ely, who favored something close to a socialist agenda. John Dewey, one of Ely’s students at Hopkins, was, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, still very much committed to T.H. Green’s neo-Hegelian idealist revision of liberalism, and he found a justification for progressive democracy in this theory. Dewey responded Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics (London: Wm. Smith, 1839). 4

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to Henry Maine’s critique of modern mass democracy by claiming that democracy was less a system of rule than an “ethical conception” that was based on the idea of a “community” constituting an “organism” in which individuals shared in the sovereignty of “a common will” of which government was only an institutional vehicle. Dewey later made a similar argument when attempting to demonstrate how John Austin’s theory of sovereignty had been misunderstood. Austin had claimed that moral law was above positive law, and Dewey argued that Austin’s insistence that positive law must emanate from a “determinate source” was the only thing that distinguished his notion of sovereignty “from the force exerted by public opinion.” Dewey favored Rousseau’s idea of a general will and the view that governments were only “organs of expression” and that one must look for “the residence of sovereignty in the whole complex of social activities” which generate “public opinion.”5 The most elaborate historical and philosophical rendition of the theory of the state was that of John W. Burgess, Lieber’s successor at Columbia, who, like most of the political scientists of his generation, studied Staatwissenschaft in Germany and continued to adapt it to a vision of American democracy as a limited form of government.6 Burgess insisted that the United States was the zenith of the kind of “self-conscious democracy” which informed the modern constitutional state. An “original sovereign state” came into existence at the point of the American Revolution and stood behind both the Constitution and government which represented its objective organized form. This theory was the intellectual centerpiece of Burgess’s School of Political Science, which, along with Baxter’s program at The Johns Hopkins, educated a large part of the next generation of influential American political scientists such as Charles Merriam, Charles Beard, W.W. Willoughby, and Woodrow Wilson. Although it might sometimes seem puzzling that so many reformist thinkers emerged from a theoretical context that was largely the creation of conservatives, part of the explanation is that what changed was the ideology regarding the role of government rather than the fundamental premise of the theory of democracy. Just as the theory of the state reached its most articulate form in the last decade of the nineteenth century,7 significant empirical anomalies 5 John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” University of Michigan Philosophical Papers, Second Series, No. 1 (Ann Arbor: Andrews, 1888); “Austin’s Theory of Sovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly 9 (March, 1894), 31–52. 6 John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston: Ginn, 1890). 7 For example, Frank Sargent Hoffman, The Sphere of State or the People as a Body-Politic (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894); John A. Jameson, “National Sovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly 5 (June, 1890), 213; Charles Platt, “Positive Laws and Other

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and intellectual challenges had begun to appear. When Wilson wrote his famous essay on the “Study of Administration,” he complained that what inhibited efficient administration in modern society was that Â�government “must instruct and persuade a multitudinous monarch called public opinion” which we have “enthroned.” Public opinion, he argued, really consisted of “a score of differing opinions” and had no “definite locality.” In a young nation, it was volatile and consisted of little more than a mass of “prejudices” to which government must be sensitive and “responsible” but which it must also continually attempt to “educate.”8 In his influential text, he continued to talk about society as an “organism” and government as an “organ,” but what he was actually discussing was “politics” and the historical relationship between government and individuals.9 His concept of the state was no longer that of Lieber and Burgess. The nascent transformation in the concept of the state foreshadowed a fundamental crisis in democratic theory which was apparent by the turn of the century. Although Willoughby is often identified as a typical nineteenthcentury theorist of the state, he and others slowly but inexorably began to transform sovereignty into a juristic or legal concept and to identify the “state” with the institutions of government.10

The crisis of democratic theory

In 1907, the Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart, who became the first chair of the department of Government at Harvard, surveyed the history of theories of popular government in the United States. He concluded that these formulations had all failed to give an adequate account of American democracy and that, in the end, Americans had “furnished no acceptable philosophical basis for their government,” even though there was no doubt about its democratic character.11 For Hart, exactly how the realities of American politics generated democratic attributes remained a mystery. Arthur Bentley’s account of those realities, which were the fruit of a journalistic excursion from academia, ╇L aws,” Political Science Quarterly 9 (March, 1894), 53–63 and “A Triad of Political Conceptions; State, Sovereignty, and Government,” Political Science Quarterly 10 (June, 1895), 292–323. 8 Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (June, 1897), 197–222. 9 Woodrow Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1898). 10 W.W. Willoughby, An Examination of the Nature of the State€ – A Study in Political Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1896). 11 Albert Bushnell Hart, “The Growth of American Theories of Popular Government,” American Political Science Review 2 (1907), 531–60.

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was not immediately influential in the discourse of political science, but it captured the sense of a growing disparity between politics and democratic theory. As Avigail Eisenberg has demonstrated, he offered a devastating critique of the theory of the state, and adumbrated the empirical dimension of an emerging theory of democracy. Bentley argued that society was nothing more than “the complex of groups that compose it” and the “interests” that were manifest in the activity of these groups. He famously noted that “when the groups are stated, everything is stated.” Groups, however, were fluid entities with a changing composition. They were identified in terms of the issues they engaged and their relationship to and competition with other groups as they pursued domination through the use of “force” in the form of “numbers, techniques, and intensity.” This process tended to produce a degree of “equilibrium,” and the principal role of government was to achieve further “adjustment” among groups. Bentley noted that if he had any occasion to use the word “state”, it would only be to designate the institutions of “government.” He stated that “what Professor Burgess so admirably studied under the name of the ‘state behind the government,’ is from my point of view nothing else than government itself.” The state, he claimed, was “no factor in our investigation.” Bentley argued that sovereignty, including popular sovereignty, as a locus of determinate power and authority, was a myth. He dismissed all ideas of the so-called “people” ruling as well as the very utility of attempting to distinguish particular forms of government such as democracy apart from indicating a system in which there were elections and in which groups gained a measure of representation by putting “pressure” on government. When it came to the matter of public opinion and public interest, Bentley was particularly severe. Such notions, he argued, were an “absurdity” and only a metaphysical ghost presumed to lie behind the statutes and the interests that produced them. Political scientists, particularly, had failed in “coming to close quarters with public opinion,” which was only a phenomenon of the “group process.” There was no opinion “indicating the existence of a social whole” with attributes such as a will, ideas, sentiments, and feelings. It amounted to nothing more than observable group activity ranging from highly organized opinions to mass acquiescence, with “various degrees of generality and intensity.” Just as there was no “social whole,” there was no “opinion of the whole society,” even though every group claimed to speak for such a public.12 12 Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Bloomington: Principia Press, 1949).

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Apart from hinting at how group activity might perform a representative function, Bentley’s book offered little indication of a positive contribution to democratic theory, but his attempt to “fashion a tool” for social inquiry and his focus on groups as the “raw material” of political life tended to belie his ultimate concerns. If placed in the wider context of his career, however, the point of the book is more evident. More than a decade earlier, he had claimed that the basic purpose of social science was to create a “better art of social control” and produce “a more perfect social philosophy” based on a realistic scientific understanding of social phenomena.13 He had been a student of Ely at Hopkins and closely associated with Dewey and progressive values, and like most progressives, he remained attached to the idea of unity as the basis of democracy, even if it was necessary to create that unity. Despite the influence of a work such as William James’s A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and the political metaphor of a federated republic that he employed, pragmatists and progressives did not embrace a normative pluralist theory of democracy. Most of these individuals clung to the basic premise of nineteenth-century democratic theory. It was not that progressives were insensitive to the facts of diversity in society, but they were, at the very least, wary of them. The founding of the American Political Science Association in 1903 represented an ideological and methodological transformation in the discipline, but it did not entail any fundamental shift in democratic theory. Although, by the turn of the century, increased awareness of social and cultural diversity, and contentiousness, did little to give credence to the traditional idea of the people and the existence of a substantive public, many progressive intellectuals, such as Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life, 1910) and social scientists, such as C.H. Cooley (Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind, 1909), continued to believe that if the term “democracy” had any meaning, there must be an, at least latent, intelligible democratic public or, failing that, one must be forged by a unity of social science and public policy. Charles Beard praised Bentley’s “realism,” which would be reflected in his own An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). The latter was severely criticized for reducing the image of society to a mass of conflicting interests, but this was the view of political reality that was gaining ground. What was understood as political reality, however, still did not coincide with what was assumed to constitute democracy. Although A. Lawrence Lowell clung to the idea that popular 13 Arthur Bentley, “The Units of Investigation in Social Science,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 5 (1895), 87–113.

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government required a certain “homogeneity” expressed by public opinion, he concluded that in modern society, public opinion amounted to little more than a shifting “majority which required effective leadership and administration” to guide it (Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913). For individuals such as Walter Lippmann (Preface to Politics, 1913; Drift and Mastery, 1914), the need was to whip into shape a complex society which was governed by “demolatry” or the whims of public opinion and to create some form of distributive justice among the range of diverse interests, which his English mentor Graham Wallas had defined as constituting the “great society.” Lippmann claimed that this was to be achieved by the application of political science as “the discipline of democracy.” It was this spirit that animated the founders of the APSA (such as Willoughby, Wilson, and Frank Goodnow) who believed that democracy required science working through government to tame and control interests and define the common good. It was not simply a growing recognition of diverse economic and political interests that precipitated rethinking the concept of democracy. The issue of immigration was much on the minds of many progressives. Some, such as the sociologist E.A. Ross (Social Control, 1901; The New World in the Old, 1914) and Woodrow Wilson argued that democracy required cultural unity, but others, such as Horace Kallen claimed that democracy entailed “cultural pluralism” (“Democracy vs. the Melting Pot,” 1914). Dewey was sympathetic to cultural diversity as an important dimension of a democratic society, but he did not accept pluralism as the foundation of political democracy. Charles Merriam, who would become the impresario of a new science of politics and leader of the Chicago School, saw this diversity as one more reason to support the idea of democracy from the top down through social control and civic education, even if this required, as Merriam and his student Harold Lasswell would argue, the application of the techniques of propaganda which had proved so effective during World War I. The war increased both renewed concerns about what constituted democracy, and the recognition of the reality of diversity was by this point complemented with a normative perspective introduced by a new wave of intellectual influence from England which paralleled a widespread rejection of German philosophy.

Pluralism as a theory of democracy

As the hold of German philosophy receded, English theorists such as Wallas, G.D.H. Cole, Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, C.E.G. Catlin, and A.D. Lindsay, as well as Europeans such as Hugo Krabbe and Leon

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Duguit, added weight to the critique of what Barker referred to as the “discredited state.” It was during his short period at Harvard that Laski introduced the term “pluralism” into the conversation about American politics. He attacked the very idea of the state and the “exultation of unity,” and he criticized the assumption that sovereignty resided in any particular element of society or organ of government. He defended a neo-medieval conception of society as a composite of autonomous but related associations (Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 1917; Authority in the Modern State, 1919) of which government was only one element. Although Laski found inspiration in American pragmatist and progressive thought, and in what he took to be the pluralist character of American society, his real concern was the concentration of power in the British parliament. He did not really grasp either the theory or practice of American “pluralism” or the idea of the state that had dominated American thought during the nineteenth century. But, as Eisenberg makes clear and which is further discussed by Jacob Levy and Marc Stears, British pluralism certainly served to animate the democratic conversation and to place a focus on group life and cultural diversity. Similarly, ideas such as the anthropologist Franz Boas’s emphasis on the “plasticity” of race and, as Jan-Werner Müller points out, some early claims about value pluralism, all contributed to the shift away from assumptions about democratic unity. These trends, however, had limited direct impact on the American theory of normative and empirical pluralism which would take shape by the end of the 1920s. While Henry Adams pointed to the Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) and the fact that the reality of politics, for at least a century, had consisted of little more than the pursuit of self-interest, individuals such as Mary Parker Follett (The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government, 1918) struggled to reconcile the facts of the modern “pluralist state” with the idea of democracy. She believed that “pluralism was the most vital trend in political thought” but that it had failed to formulate a positive vision of unity that satisfied the idea of democracy. In the end, despite the ideological difference, her account of the state as a collective community sounded much like that of Lieber. In 1921, Lippmann published an extended critique of the concept of public opinion that had informed “traditional democratic theory,” which he referred to as “the original democratic dogma.” Although there was, he claimed, something like a “National Will, a Group Mind, or Social Purpose,” it was really an ephemeral product of a “counterfeit environment” of symbols which enabled individual citizens to cope with the complexities around them and which did not reflect reality. This symbolic realm was a creation of elites and persuasion, and what

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was required was a “political science” that would better guide government and “group life” by mediating perception and reality. Democracy did not rest on either individuals or some “Oversoul” but rather on civic education informed by “organized intelligence” administered by experts in conjunction with social scientists.14 This vision, which closely coincided with that of Merriam, was hardly one that reflected much faith in the natural course of group politics. Apart from the manner in which the facts of pluralism tended to conflict with the ideological propensities of both progressives and conservatives, it created problems for the identity of political science as a discipline and profession, which had been predicated upon the idea of the state as its intellectual “domain.” The concept of the group was as much, or more, the province of sociology and other fields as it was the subject of political science. Furthermore, political science saw itself as devoted to achieving practical purchase through cognitive authority, and the claim to access the sublime character of the invisible state was viewed as the key to that authority. At this point there was also no clear sense of how groups, as conceived by someone such as Bentley, were tied to a theory of democracy. The turn in political science during this period to a more empirical naturalistic model of science was certainly a part and reflection of a wider intellectual trend in social science, but it was also in part a search for a new basis of identity and authority. For Merriam, Wilson, Henry Jones Ford, and others, the capacity to speak truth to power was tied to the claim to possess a scientific grasp of society, and Merriam, after the war, was concerned not only with democracy in the United States but with its worldwide future. For Merriam, groups were perceived as more a problem than a solution. There were, however, the beginnings of a more positive image of group activity. The sociologist, Harry Elmer Barnes, who was much involved in the conversations of political science, drew upon Bentley, American sociologists such as Albion Small and Franklin Giddings, and the work of the English and European pluralists in advancing an account of interest groups as a vehicle of political representation. In the same volume of the APSR in which Merriam famously set forth his manifesto for a new science of politics, Barnes presented the first coherent picture of the group theory of democracy which he claimed penetrated “beneath the surface of things” and revealed “the real nature of social and political processes.” Although political institutions were the highest form of association, they were, he maintained, like society as a whole, the product of “contesting interest groups seeking a realization of their aims 14 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1921).

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and reaching an adjustment with the continuing aspirations of other groups.” The role of the “state,” which he unequivocally identified as government, was that of an “umpire” whose task was that of “adjusting the relation of groups to each other and to the state.” Barnes was very aware of the challenge that group theory posed to the dominant vision of democracy, and he took pains to demonstrate that the group process achieved democratic values. He claimed that “every interest group can express itself and secure representation for itself in a fair and equitable manner,” while the government serves “to furnish the necessary restraint upon this conflict of interests and to ensure that the process will be beneficial rather than destructive. Government is the agency and avenue through which these groups carry on the public phases of their conflict and realize their objectives, or effect a temporary satisfactory adjustment of their aims with the opposing aspirations of other groups.”15 By the mid 1920s, pluralism, as both a “realist” account of society and as a normative stance, was gaining ground in the conversation and literature of political science, but among both progressive and conservative political scientists, the “democratic dogma” did not die easily. Although some philosophers and political theorists found pluralism congenial,16 many, such as Ellen Deborah Ellis and Francis Coker, still could not see how the realities of group politics added up to democracy.17 Although Merriam took full account of these realities, and what he sometimes referred to as “jungle politics,” he also continued to be far from sanguine about how this state of affairs could be equated with democracy. He maintained that the “theory of political pluralism” was basically a “rationalization of actually existing and developing group solidarity, and in fact can be interpreted and understood successfully in no other way.”18 In 1925, Lippmann extended his critique of the democratic dogma of “liberalism” and its attachment to the idea of a “phantom public” and the belief that society was a homogeneous body. But, like Barnes, he now presented a somewhat more positive view of the situation. He 15 Harry Elmer Barnes, “Some Contributions of Sociology to Modern Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 15 (1921), 532–3. 16 George H. Sabine, “Pluralism: A Point of View,” American Political Science Review 17 (1923), 34–50. 17 Ellen Deborah Ellis, “The Pluralistic State,” American Political Science Review 14 (1920), 393–407; Francis Coker, “Pluralistic Theory and the Attack on State Sovereignty,” in Charles Merriam and Harry Elmer Barnes, eds., A History of Political Theories: Recent Times (New York: Macmillan, 1924). 18 Charles Merriam, “Recent Tendencies in Political Thought,” in Merriam and Barnes, A History of Political Theories.

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claimed that the traditional idea of democracy had been an “unattainable” and “false ideal” but that a more modest and realistic ideal was possible. Democracy, or the “essence of popular government,” was Â�simply a system that included a process of elections in which a majority of eligible individual voters expressed, on the basis of diverse and unfathomable motives, either acceptance or rejection of government elites and their proposals. Although voters were not in any sense fully rational, they could at least hopefully recognize what did and did not serve their own interests. The problem, however, was that society was characterized by a “deep pluralism” where various groups pursued their self-interest. The fundamental task was to achieve an “adjustment” among these groups and prevent any one group from attaining an unfair status and claiming to embody the “public interest,” which really only amounted to moments of “adjustment” among groups. There were, he claimed, Â�neither a people nor a public as such and no “organic unity and purpose” represented by terms such as “Society, the Nation, the Community.” Similarly, public opinion was “just the voice of interested spectators” stepping forward on occasion to address issues that affected their interest and then returning “to their own affairs.” The role of political science was to aid the democratic process through empirical sampling of opinion, helping to define criteria of judgment on matters of public policy, and facilitating civic education.19 By this point, Willoughby explicitly claimed that the state, and sovereignty, was “not a real thing” but rather, like the “people” and the “nation,” a conceptual construction and abstraction invented by “the jurist or philosopher.” Although he noted that a society might be bound together by a certain unity of values, he rejected all “organismic” images of the state as a “moral entity” with “mystical transcendental attributes.”20 The idea of the state, however, did not die easily, and it was sustained by two of the principal theorists of the period. After the war, Dewey had joined in rejecting the idealist account of the state, and he embraced much of the English pluralist critique as well as the image of society as composed of groups and associations. He also took Lippmann’s realism seriously, and he shared the belief in the application of science in the service of democracy. Where he diverged was with respect to dismissing the idea of a substantive public. Dewey rejected all general philosophical theories of the state, but he focused on what he claimed was, in many instances, “factually” the existence of 19 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925). 20 W.W. Willoughby and Lindsay Rogers, An Introduction to the Problem of Government (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925).

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the state as an “organized public” with the institutions of government as its external manifestation. He remained committed to the belief that an authentic state consisted of a coherent public realm and that it was possible to create such a realm if it did not fully exist. Although, as Eisenberg points out, Dewey, like the pluralists, viewed society as a complex of individuals and associations, he insisted that in the end democracy required that the “great society” be transformed into a “great community” that constituted a “self-conscious” national public and that transcended pressure groups, parties, and other “factions.” The basic problem of modern society was that there was a tendency for such a public to be “eclipsed,” “lost,” “bewildered,” “confused and scattered.” Like Lippmann, he argued that the solution was the application of science through experts, but where he differed from Lippmann was in his belief that the task was to create a consolidated participatory citizenry rather than simply manage and reconcile group interests. He claimed that scientific inquiry would play a large role in the “formation of public opinion” about “public affairs” and would constitute a considered “judgment,” which would be “entertained by those who constitute the public” rather than something that was public “only in name” and an expression of various interests.21 Conservatives such as William Yandell Elliott decried pluralism, pragmatism, and scientism as the ruin of both politics and political science and as implicated in both the rise of totalitarianism and the decline of the constitutional state. The extended positions of Elliott and G.E.G. Catlin, the progressive English émigré who embraced both pluralism and the approach of the Chicago School of social science,22 represented one of the most visible and pivotal aspects of the paradigm shift that was taking place in political science. Although Elliott chose Dewey as one of his principal intellectual opponents, his basic theoretical claim, despite their ideological differences, was quite similar. Elliott argued that despite the reality of group life, democracy depended on the existence of an overarching “co-organic community” or, at the very least, on a “mythos” attesting to a belief in the existence of such a community.23 The theory of pluralism that Elliott attacked most vigorously was that of Laski, but this was not the theory that was most significantly taking shape in political science. What to some extent obscured the latter was that it had not been elaborated in the major work of any particular 21 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1927). 22 See, e.g., G.E.G. Catlin, The Science and Method of Politics (New York: Knopf, 1927). 23 William Yandell Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional State (New York: Macmillan, 1928).

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individual. Although adumbrated by Bentley, Barnes, Lippmann, and others, the most extensive and coherent account was yet to be articulated by a relatively forgotten group of individuals, which included John Dickinson who had just begun to join the conversation about democratic theory. In an extended discussion of the concept of sovereignty, Dickinson echoed Willoughby’s claim that sovereignty was a legal or juristic concept applicable to any political regime. He criticized Laski for the oxymoronic notion that it made sense to talk about divided or dispersed sovereignty. Sovereignty, including popular sovereignty, did not belong to the “nature of things” and was not located in some entity such as the people or in a particular element of government. Behind any ascription of legal sovereignty was a mass of social, economic, and moral facts, and the task of government was to act as a “great central coordinating agency” for “adjusting the contrary aims and interests of competing groups and individuals.”24 Although still only hinting at the normative implications, Peter Odegard’s Pressure Politics: the Story of the Anti-saloon League (1928) was the first major empirical study that reflected the premises of the emerging pluralist theory. This was followed by Pendelton Herring’s Group Representation Before Congress (1929), which went further in suggesting the manner in which interest groups performed the function of “national representation” and acted as a vehicle of “public opinion” in a democratic society. Odegard reviewed this book and was quick to accentuate its democratic implications. He claimed that humans, as “political animals,” were “factional animals” and that in a democratic society it was groups rather than individuals that counted. Although some might “bewail this prevailing pluralism and cry out for the ‘good old days’ when America was not an organocracy, when there was an ‘American people’ equal under universal suffrage animated by a national consciousness,” the reality was that “since the beginning of history we have been governed by groups,” and “public opinion in any other sense than organized group opinion remains a phantom.” To the extent that this situation was even more the case in modern society, it was a “healthy democratic development.”25 At this point, Lindsay, the progressive English intellectual to whom Elliott had dedicated his book, stepped in to endorse the peculiarly 24 John Dickinson, “A Working Theory of Sovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly 42 (1927), 524–48 and “A Working Theory of Sovereignty II,” Political Science A Quarterly 43 (1928), 32–63. 25 Peter Odegard, review of Group Representation Before Congress, American Political Science Review 23 (1929), 469–71.

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American version of pluralism, which was far removed from Elliott’s position on the dangers inherent in proliferating “voluntary associations.” The formal institutions of government, Lindsay claimed, were a “secondary matter.” Although politics might seem to be a “dirty business” marked by interest and coercion, what was essential to democracy was not some “dogma” but rather the capacity to “represent differences,” and this was accomplished by the activity of “a society of non-political associations” which operated within the constraints of a broad consensus and which it was the task of the state to regulate and adjust.26 In another long two-part article, Dickinson more fully described the evolving pluralist vision regarding the “relativity” and “nature and operation of what might be called ‘non-political’ agencies of order” or the groups that represented various interests in society. Drawing upon anthropological literature, he attempted to advance a basic theory of group life and how it was regulated. In primitive societies, this regulatory function was performed by “custom” and “religion,” but in modern less static societies, despite considerable voluntary adjustment and the development of “mediating agencies,” it was the role of government to adjust and adjudicate differences and provide an environment in which group interests could, within limits, be freely pursued. This was the essence of democratic society, and, in the end, government, by allowing access to groups and responding to their claims, should appear as a virtual “transcript of the relative strength of interests in the community.” “Adjustment” of group activity was achieved through a combination of the countervailing forces of group competition and government action, but the whole process was further constrained by an underlying “consensus” which amounted to a kind of “general will” to which all parties in the process adhered.27 In the same issue of the APSR, Edwin Corwin focused on what the emerging pluralist theory implied for the future of the discipline. He argued that because American political science had been a “telic, normative” discipline which “sprang from the matrix of the democratic dogma,” the future of the discipline was severely challenged by the manner in which contemporary pluralism and scientism had undermined citizen rationality and the capacity for self-rule.28 Dickinson, who would soon play a significant role in the Roosevelt administration, once again contrasted at length what he took to be 26 A.D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). 27 John Dickinson, “Social Order and Political Authority, I and II,” American Political Science Review 23 (1929), 293–328. 28 Edwin Corwin, “The Democratic Dogma and the Future of Political Science,” American Political Science Review 23 (1929), 569–92.

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“democratic realities” with the “democratic dogma.” Despite what many were inclined to believe, he insisted that democracy was not on the decline but, overall, moving forward. Unlike Elliott, he believed that the progress of democracy in the world was evident, but like Elliott, although for very different reasons, he maintained that Weimar Germany was a manifestation of that progress which was based on liberalism and pluralism. The problem with perceiving what was really going on, he argued, was that many people had a false idea about what democracy entailed. They accepted a “stereotype” that was out of phase with the facts. Once these “fictions” were dispelled, it was possible to see that the basis of democracy was not some social whole, a popular will, and an actively participating electorate but rather group competition adjusted and arbitrated by the government. Dickinson claimed that what was “right” about public policy was “relative” to how government decided with respect to what interests should “win” in the game of politics, and although many would be dissatisfied with any particular outcome, the criterion was whether they had an opportunity in the future to express their interests and gain a hearing. The pressure of interests moved the political process, and democracy was a matter of access to government and of bargaining among groups within the parameters of a basic consensus.29 Another principal voice in the new conversation about democracy was that of Francis G. Wilson. Since Dickinson and Wilson were individuals who today would be identified, respectively, as liberal and conservative, their agreement indicates the extent to which the new theory of democracy, like the old, was ideologically an equal opportunity construction. Wilson designated this theory of democracy and public opinion as “pragmatic,” which assumed that “political philosophy must be based on the facts of political life.” He concluded that much of what had been once considered essential to democracy, such as citizen participation, was not necessarily an indicator and that maybe apathy signaled satisfaction and stability. “Real” public opinion was less a matter of attitudes on particular issues than a deep “consensus” in society on matters such as the Constitution, and “public interest” referred primarily to the sum of “competition and compromise of interests,” which it was the “prime function of government” to represent and balance.30

29 John Dickinson, “Democratic Realities and Democratic Dogma,” American Political Science Review 24 (1930), 283–309. 30 Francis G. Wilson, “The Pragmatic Electorate,” American Political Science Review 24 (1930), 16–37. Also “Concepts of Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 27 (1933), 371–91.

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The pluralist orthodoxy

Although there were a few who clung to what was now consistently referred to as the “democratic dogma,”31 the American version of pluralism had, by the 1930s, become the received view that constituted the theoretical core of what came, during this decade, to be designated as liberalism and liberal democracy as well as the counterpoint to what was perceived as the growth of totalitarian regimes in many other countries. Odegard claimed that the “public mind” was basically the composite product of group activity, and Lasswell maintained that a “realistic political science” must focus on groups and their psychological propensities and that what constituted the “public” was, as Bentley had claimed, what, at any moment, amounted to the sum of group activity. Herring continued to insist that the term “public interest” was nothing but a reference to the compromises of “special interests” which were the actual basis of representative government.32 Wilson summed up the decade of struggle between “monism” and “pluralism” by noting that pluralism was no longer, as in the case of Laski, a critical attack on state sovereignty but a “general theory” of democracy which recognized that the state was only a “coordinating agency.”33 At this point even Elliott, without changing his ideological position, acquiesced and defended the pluralist/totalitarian dichotomy. He stated that “pressures by freely organized groups upon the state are a necessary and creative factor in free government” and that the “state must fulfill the role of a responsible referee”€– a role that he did not, however, believe was manifest in the New Deal.34 Although Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism was predicated to a large extent on the ideology of progressivism, the theory of democracy that informed it accepted, as Ben Jackson indicates, the idea that the United States was a pluralist nation both culturally and in terms of what had come to be understood as the nature of pluralist politics. What, by the late 1930s, came to be designated as liberalism and

31 See, for example, Robert M. McIver, Society: Its Structures and Changes (New York: Long and Smith, 1931); C.H. McIlwain, “A Fragment on Sovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly 48 (1933), 94–106. 32 Peter Odegard, The American Public Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930); Harold Lasswell, “The Measurement of Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 25 (1931), 311–26 and Psychopathology and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1930); Pendelton Herring, “Special Interests and the Interstate Commerce Commission,” American Political Science Review 27 (1933). 33 Francis Wilson, “Concepts of Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 27 (1933), 371–91. 34 W.Y. Elliott, The Need for Constitutional Reform (New York: Wittlesey House, 1935).

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conservatism in American politics were only different perspectives on the role of government in a pluralist democratic society. In his 1935 Presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Walter J. Shepard, who had been a consistent participant in the conversation about pluralism, addressed the fundamental transformation that had taken place. He noted that democratic theory and democratic practice had become two different things and that it was time to bring them into accord by removing the theoretical constraints on democratic politics, which, for Shepard, clearly included the remaining constraints on the policies of the New Deal. Although for a century and a half Americans had been under the spell of the “democratic idea,” which included beliefs in individualism and popular sovereignty, this, he argued, had now been discredited. Even the concept of the state as a juristic entity was a “fiction” and only “a collective name for governmental institutions” which themselves only amounted to ideologically informed “behavior patterns.”35 From the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s, the concept of pluralism morphed into the tenets of liberalism both in politics and political theory. George Sabine had early on embraced the basic principles of pluralist and pragmatic democracy,36 and his magisterial and influential text (A History of Political Theory, 1937) was in many respects a historical validation of this image which had become the fundamental premise of the theory and practice of American political science and which would resonate well into the last quarter of the twentieth century. There was, however, with one exception, no further significant gloss on the formulation of empirical democratic theory. The exception was Herring’s Politics of Democracy, written on the eve of World War II. In the five years between Shepard’s address and Herring’s book, liberalism and pluralism, in both theory and practice, had been subjected to some harsh and unprecedented criticism. Not the least of the criticism was from émigré scholars on both the left and right. They were quick to point out that the liberal regime and social pluralism of Weimar, which had been celebrated by a number of political scientists including Elliott, Dickinson, Lindsay, and Carl Friedrich, was less a bulwark against totalitarianism than a threshold. In this context, it was no longer enough to speak in generalities, as individuals such as Sabine and the Chicago philosopher T.V. Smith had, about 35 Walter J. Shepard, “Democracy in Transition,” American Political Science Review 29 (1935), 18–19. 36 E.g. “The Pragmatic Approach to Politics,” American Political Science Review 24 (1930), 865–85.

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the virtues of diversity, toleration, compromise, and the application of intelligence to Â�democracy. This prompted Herring to return to a more concrete defense of the theory that he claimed was inherent in democratic practice and which could serve as a contrast to the ideologies of the enemies in the impending conflict, and his realist account of politics now reflected an even more distinctly pronounced normative slant. Herring never questioned the assumption that the practice of American politics was the practice of democracy. He began by Â�cataloguing the features of what was often associated with the “rogue’s gallery of American politics”€– special interests, the role of money, pressure politics, party machines, bureaucracy, propaganda, patronage, etc. All these, he argued, were actually “integral to the democratic process,” and it was finally time to stop being blinded by the “democratic dogma.” Such ideals placed too great a burden on the practice of politics and obscured how that practice illustrated the truth of democracy. It was important to “search for ideals that suit the interests and the institutions,” because “political analysis is one thing; political philosophy is another.” He claimed that the “ultimate evaluation of democracy is to be found in the procedures through which it works” which were primarily through “extralegal implementation.” The idea of political authority residing in the state or even law was a “fiction,” because power was dispersed throughout society. With these premises in mind, “a science of politics may be developed and intelligence may be applied to our common problems.” For Herring, the goal of the democratic process was “to seek a balance of interests” through “bargaining.” A “good citizen cannot act without allying himself with various interests,” and the reconciliation of power conflicts required “interest adjustment through the careful formulation of public policy” which was the “product of political compromise.” In the end, he insisted, “democratic government is not a set of principles which must be consistently followed but rather a method for compromising differences and for freely expressing disagreement according to generally accepted rules of procedure.” Herring was willing to allow that there was a place for the “myth of the public interest” and “public opinion” which provided a justification for the resolution of conflict and reflected an underlying consensus on the “rules of the game,” but there was no “people” in the traditional sense of the term. Politics consisted of the free play of interest groups, and the aim was “compromise” and “adjustment” facilitated by effective parties and strong leadership.37 E.E. Schattschneider did not commit himself to the thesis of Herring’s book, but he praised it as transformational and as 37 Pendelton Herring, The Politics of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).

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the “most thoroughgoing defense of American politics ever written by a reputable scholar.” Odegard suggested that it was comparable to the work of Tocqueville and “one of the most lucidly expressed and penetrating analyses of the theoretical assumptions upon which American democracy rests.”38

Behavioralism and democracy: back to the future

What might indeed seem passing strange is how quickly the whole tradition of empirical democratic theory seemed to fade from the memory of the discipline even though it continued to inform the field. When David Truman resurrected Bentley in The Governmental Process (1951), he acknowledged Herring but indicated little grasp of the context of Bentley’s work and what had followed it. He suggested that earlier pluralism had been promising but that it had failed to develop a “real theory.” Much like Herring, one of Truman’s goals was to provide a more positive image of interest groups. He argued that the political process could not be understood apart from the activity of “organized” interest groups which were as much a part of the political system as formal governmental institutions and which operated within an unorganized “ideological consensus” that provided the “rules of the game.” Although Truman admitted that there might be “pathogenic” aspects of group politics, he stressed that even though there was no such thing as an inclusive public interest, something functionally comparable was achieved by government acting as a center of “interest based” power to which interest groups sought “access.” Individuals participating in multiple potential groups representing various broad interests produced an equilibrium of inputs and outputs in public policy. Earl Latham focused on an “analytic” rather than “philosophic” account of The Group Basis of Politics (1952), and when Berelson and his colleagues challenged “traditional normative theory,” they gave no indication of who represented such a theory or of the extent to which their revision was a thin repetition of the arguments that had been advanced a generation earlier. Their invocation of Schumpeter’s claim about democracy as a method39 failed to recognize that references to his work had begun in the early part of the century and extended to Herring’s account of the politics of democracy. It was, however, Robert 38 E.E. Schattschneider, American Political Science Review 34 (1940), Review of The Politics of Democracy, 788-89; Peter Odegard, Political Science Quarterly 55 (1940), Review of The Politics of Democracy, 474–5. 39 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942).

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Dahl who more than anyone else provided a full re-articulation of empirical democratic theory, but when Dahl and Charles Lindblom argued, in their Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953), that “polyarchy, not democracy,” was the answer to the problems of modern politics and that it was necessary to put the “democratic dogma” to rest, they only indicated a certain debt to James Madison. Dahl reached all the way back to Barker and Laski for the term “polyarchy,” but he indicated only the vaguest knowledge of this work and of what Barker and Laski meant by the term. It is difficult to account for the intellectual amnesia that seems to have characterized the post-war restatement of the pluralist theory of democracy€ – particularly because the impetus, as with the origins of the earlier formulation, was to provide a contrast model with the image of totalitarianism. The most likely hypothesis may be that, like the behavioral movement in political science as a whole, it was important to Â�sustain its image as a “revolution” in the discipline when in fact it was at most a reformation. With respect to both its claim to be truly scientific and its claim to embody a new theory of democracy, it was more a conservative riposte which defended methodological and normative commitments which had characterized the discipline for at least a generation. Behavioralism was in part a response to the continuing wave of criticism that now emanated from the sub-field of political theory and what heretofore had been the core of the discipline and the principal site of discussions of its nature and identity. Despite the very overt focus on the application of scientific methods, it was the theory of democracy that was at the heart of the controversy about behavioralism. The behavioral emphasis on the separation of fact and value was possible precisely because, like their forbears, behavioralists were committed to the idea that the values were embedded in the facts. At the advent of the behavioral movement the presence of the enemies was felt but somewhat difficult to locate. The first chapter of David Easton’s Political System (1953) was devoted to a description of prevailing anti-scientific and anti-liberal sentiment, but the locus of this sentiment was nebulous. Behavioralism, however, needed something to revolt against and that turned out to be a mythical past attributed to the discipline. After the Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions had sponsored several series of lectures by individuals such as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, who were some of the leading émigré critics of scientism and pluralism, and who the Foundation characterized as expressing “the point of view of the philosopher and moralist,” they invited Dahl as a representative of those “political theorists” who were involved in “testing democratic ideas empirically.” In what became

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A€ Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), Dahl presented an account of democracy which, like that of Truman and Latham, did not include any feature that had not been articulated during the long conversation that had begun with Bentley. There was no acknowledgment by Dahl that his argument was other than a radical innovation, but he found it difficult to give meaning to his putative divergence from “traditional democratic theory.” He strained to find a quarrel with Madison (on whose Federalist 10 he often seemed to apply only a thin gloss), and he invented the bogey of “populist democracy” as a contrast model and as another name for what had been called the “democratic dogma.” His real concerns were to counter the growing criticisms of science and liberal democracy which were being advanced by political theorists, confront the more indigenous criticisms of individuals such as C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956), and provide a basis for defending American democracy from the challenge of Russian Marxist ideology. In seeking to codify the features of a group theory of politics, Dahl presented what he referred to as a “descriptive method” for constructing a democratic theory. This involved isolating the essential attributes of “all those nation states and social organizations that are commonly called democratic by political scientists.” What most distinguished democracy from totalitarian regimes, he concluded, were basically “competitive politics” and the “bribery of the electorate by politicians.” Such “polyarchies” were not only identified by the presence of elections, which were a means of aggregating diverse individual preferences and of holding officials responsible, but by the “social prerequisites” of multiple associations which, despite conflicts with one another, were bound together by an “underlying consensus” on values and procedures. For Dahl, the “American hybrid” was the paradigm in which all the “social variables” were manifest. Beneath the “chaff” of formal dimensions of politics and government were “groups of various types and sizes, all seeking in various ways to advance their goals, usually at the expense, in part, of others.” In this context, substantive majorities would not be a problem, and in effect “minorities” would rule within a process of “endless bargaining” with respect to particular issues and with the acquiescence of an “apathetic” numerical majority that was never mobilized at any one time. In this situation, the “manifold specialized groups become vested interests” and “part of the fundamental warp and woof of the society,” but there would be a “steady appeasement of relatively small groups” and “a high probability that an active and legitimate group in the population can make itself heard at some crucial stage in the process of decision.”

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What is somewhat remarkable about Dahl’s formulation was that not only was it hardly new but that in some ways it was not nearly as complex as the analysis advanced by individuals such as Dickinson and Herring. But it did incorporate and rationalize earlier work produced during the 1950s, consolidate the empirical and normative dimensions of such work, and provide a sharp image which would be widely dispersed in the literature and research programs of political science. Dahl’s account in Who Governs? (1961), attempted to demonstrate further the character of pluralist politics and the fact that any general “concern of citizens with the life of the democratic polis” was a “myth.” In works such as Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man (1960), Harry Eckstein’s A Theory of Stable Democracy (1961), and Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) the same model was projected. Lindblom did acknowledge that the contemporary theory of “how people can coordinate with each other without anyone’s coordinating them, without a dominant purpose, and without rules that fully prescribe their relations to each other” was an attempt to complete the “unfinished business of pluralist thought” which reached back to Bentley and the English pluralists, but he did not elaborate on this connection.40 Most theorists of the period were, at best, only vaguely cognizant of the legacy which they had inherited, and what is equally remarkable is that the wide range of criticisms of pluralism and the behavioral movement in political science and its account of democracy, which characterized the 1960s, accepted arguments such as that of Dahl as a novel challenge to the amorphous idea of “traditional democratic theory.” This was evident in Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (1960) which in many respects was a story of the degradation of political theory and “the political” as it succumbed to modern liberalism and pluralism. While individuals such as Glendon Shubert declared that the idea of a substantive public interest was a myth (The Public Interest: A Critique of a Political Concept, 1960), the attack on liberalism qua pluralism would be the principal theme of much of the literature of political theory during the 1960s. New versions of the “democratic dogma” would be advanced by critics of behavioralism such as Wolin and Carole Pateman (Participation and Democratic Theory, 1970). And echoes of the progressive image of unity and its distaste for interest-group pluralism would be visible in works such as Schattschneider’s The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (1960) and Grant McConnell’s Private Power and American Democracy (1966). By the end of the 1960s, 40 Charles Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 3, 12.

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the anti-democratic aspects of pluralism had been widely discussed (e.g., William Connolly, ed., The Bias of Pluralism, 1969). Robert Paul Wolff attacked the Poverty of Liberalism (1969), and Theodore Lowi announced The End of Liberalism (1969) and provided the most expansive historical and empirical account of how “interest-group liberalism,” as an amalgam of “capitalism, statism, and pluralism,” had displaced government as a representative of the public interest. In many ways, the discourse of 1960s resembled that of the 1920s as the debate about pluralism became the axis of the discourse of academic democratic theory. And, again, it was not the reality of pluralism that was at issue, but rather whether it was the foundation or the pathology of democratic society. Although Easton had been the principal spokesperson for behavioralism’s dedication to emulating the methods of the natural sciences, he had, from the beginning of his career, like his predecessor, Merriam, been less than sympathetic to the normative dimensions of pluralism. In his 1969 announcement of a “new revolution” in political science, he declared “the failure of the current pluralist interpretations of democracy.” Although by the 1970s even Dahl and Lindblom had deviated considerably from their early pluralist commitments, pluralism was a resilient concept. Robert Adcock and Mark Vail explore an important dimension of the concept of pluralism in political science after the 1960s, and by end of the twentieth century, yet new forms of the pluralist imagination had once again come to dominate the conversation of democratic theory. As Mark Bevir and Toby Reiner demonstrate, associationist theories took on new life, and, as Ruth Abbey illustrates, identity politics and multiculturalism presented new challenges. The fall of Communism in 1989 seemed to many to entail the triumph of pluralism and the location of democracy in the complexities of civil society, and theorists as diverse as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls adapted their work to a valorization of pluralism. All this, however, did not take place without some serious opposition from the endemic remains of a communitarian image of democracy.41 41 For a summary discussion of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century pluralist democratic theory, see Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity, chapter 6.

8

Liberalism, pluralism, multiculturalism: contemporary debates Ruth Abbey



Introduction

As chapters in this volume by Jacob Levy, Jan-Werner Müller, Ben Jackson, and Mark Bevir and Toby Reiner illustrate, the ability of the liberal tradition of political theory to acknowledge and incorporate pluralism has long been a topic of contention. This chapter considers some of the positions adopted by liberal political theorists about pluralism in the wake of the liberal/communitarian debate of the 1970s and 1980s.1 Among the developments that contributed to the eclipse of this debate were, first, John Rawls’s amendments to his theory of justice as fairness and, second, an increased theoretical attention to multiculturalism in Western societies and the challenges this poses to liberalism’s ability to recognize and respond to cultural diversity. This chapter begins with a brief account of Rawls’s attempt to make his theory of justice as fairness more hospitable to pluralism by adducing a purely political form of liberalism. It goes on to consider Charles Taylor’s argument about the relationship between liberalism and the politics of recognition. A form of liberalism that is not difference-blind is elaborated by Will Kymlicka in his defense of group-differentiated rights. The relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism appears through a different lens in the work of Chandran Kukathas. An argument about how liberals who value gender equality should scrutinize claims by minority and religious groups for rights is advanced by Susan Moller Okin. Lest this suggest that all contemporary liberals support multiculturalism in some form or other, the chapter ends by raising some of the concerns about multiculturalism enunciated by Brian Barry.

For discussions of some of the protagonists and issues in this debate, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 1

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Political liberalism

Liberalism’s long-standing concern with pluralism is underscored by developments within Rawls’s revisions to his theory of justice. In the wake of A Theory of Justice, he set out to create more space in his theory for what he calls reasonable pluralism. The source of pluralism in a liberal society is freedom: in a society that respects and promotes the basic civil and political freedoms€– of speech, thought, expression, publication, assembly, and conscience€– people use their reason to develop different and ultimately conflicting worldviews and moral positions. As Rawls says, “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the free exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime.”2 He strives to make his theory of justice as fairness applicable and appealing to people with a wide variety of reasonable worldviews and moral positions.3 In the service of this goal, Rawls outlines what he calls a purely political liberalism, believing that all his theory of justice needs is an overlapping consensus on the principles of right, leaving individuals free to live according to their own values in other areas, assuming that these positions are reasonable.4 Rawls takes political liberalism to be more respectful of pluralism that are more comprehensive liberal doctrines, for as their name implies, comprehensive doctrines cover a wider scope of issues and areas. They include “conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole.”5 By contrast with comprehensive liberal doctrines, political liberalism has three formal features: 1. Its principles of justice apply to a society’s basic structure only.6 2. It is freestanding, independent of any particular comprehensive doctrine. Rawls hopes that the principles of political liberalism will be compatible with, and affirmable by, a citizens holding a wide range of comprehensive doctrines, in part because they are not seen to rely on any particular comprehensive doctrine.7

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xviii. 3 Ibid., 28.â•… 4╇ Ibid., 30.â•… 5╇ Ibid., 13. 6 Ibid., 11, 13. Cf. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14, 19. 7 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 12–13, 374. 2

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3. It gives expression to fundamental ideas implicit in society’s public political culture.8 Indeed, one of the things that detaches political liberalism from any particular metaphysical view or comprehensive doctrine is that it articulates ideas and values that are already present (but perhaps only tacitly) in a society’s public political culture.9 Despite Rawls’s attempts to make justice as fairness more hospitable to pluralism, it has been argued that the individualism of his approach places a constitutive limitation on its ability to recognize or respond to different types of pluralism. According to Bhikhu Parekh, Rawls “is sensitive to moral but not cultural plurality, and takes little account of the cultural aspirations of such communities as the indigenous peoples, national minorities, subnational groups, and the immigrants.”10 Thus while Rawls was busy developing the implications of moral pluralism for his theory of justice as fairness, others were contemplating the implications of the pluralism created in Western societies by the co-existence of different cultural groups.

The politics of recognition

An important step in this direction was taken in Charles Taylor’s 1992 essay, “The Politics of Recognition.”11 Taylor’s analysis of the politics of recognition grapples with the rise of multiculturalism within liberaldemocratic societies and the challenges this poses for their practices, values, institutions, and self-understandings. It has been described as “an essay of immense importance for the contemporary philosophical discussion of multiculturalism.”12 Taylor’s thinking has been heavily influenced by the enduring struggle in his home province of Quebec 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Cf. Samuel Freeman, “Editor’s Introduction: John Rawls€ – An Overview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31. Political liberalism’s claim to be freestanding assumes that the public political culture has not itself been unduly shaped by any particular metaphysical or comprehensive doctrine. 10 Rethinking Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, second edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 89. 11 I cite, however, the edition published in 1994 which included not only the responses to Taylor’s essay from Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf, and Steven C. Rockefeller, but also additional responses from Jürgen Habermas and K. Anthony Appiah. “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73. 12 David Scott, “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31 (2003), 98. It has also been a highly controversial writing. For a discussion of some lines of criticism, see Ruth Abbey, “Pluralism in Practice: The Political Thought of Charles Taylor,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (2002), 98–123.

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about its place within the Canadian federation.13 Yet while ethnic, cultural, or national origin can spur demands for recognition, they can also be waged on the basis of sexuality, gender, or religion.14 These movements reflect the emergence into the public realm of issues associated with identity. According to Taylor, “With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognise is the unique identity of this individual or group, its distinctness from everybody else.”15 His analysis proceeds from a basic communitarian point about the nature of identity. Part of what makes someone the person they are in a full, robust, and free way is being recognized as this by others. A person’s sense of self is, therefore, not something that can be achieved alone: it is an intersubjective creation, depending on others for its realization.16 Conversely, the failure to have one’s identity accurately acknowledged can distort or damage an individual’s sense of who he or she is. If an individual or group is seen by others as in some way inferior, this can become internalized, harming self-perception.17 As Alan Patten observes, “The main tendency in liberal theory has been simply to ignore recognition claims of these kinds. In John Rawls’s influential account of liberalism, for instance, there is no consideration of the implications for liberal citizenship of national or linguistic diversity, nor … of recognition claims based on ethnic, sexual or gender identity.”18 Traditionally, liberal notions of justice and tolerance have required that social institutions be blind to individuals’ particularities and respond to each as undifferentiated equals. Individuals are all seen as bearers of rights and sometimes duties, and as worthy of equal respect in the public realm. This approach underlines similarities, the things we share when we abstract from the details that individuate us. However, in requiring all persons to strip away the particular aspects of their identities upon entering the public realm, this model presupposes actors who can unproblematically divorce their private from their public persona, or their sense of the good from their duty to the right, or their religious convictions from their political conduct. Assimilating all individuals into a single model of public personhood thus amounts to a denial of their equality and individuality because this model privileges, 13 Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 58–59. 14 Ibid., 25–26.â•… 15╇ Ibid., 38. Cf. 43. 16 Ibid., 32–35.â•… 17╇ Ibid., 25–26, 36–37. 18 “Equality of Recognition and the Liberal Theory of Citizenship,” in Iain HampsherMonk and Catriona McKinnon, eds., The Demands of Citizenship (London: Continuum, 2000), 194–195.

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even if only tacitly, some forms of identity or ways of being over others. This style of liberalism is thus exposed as effectively prioritizing a certain approach to politics, personal identity, and the relationship between them, all the while purporting to be neutral.19 The politics of recognition as Taylor portrays it is best understood, however, as both a continuation of and a challenge to the liberal tradition. Its challenge lies in rejecting the idea of difference-blindness. It is skeptical about some of liberalism’s other fundamental tenets too, such as the belief in state neutrality, and its notion of tolerance as indifference.20 But the politics of recognition retains the liberal promise of treating citizens as free and equal individuals while holding that the difference-blind approach cannot achieve these goals for everyone. Recognition of dignity can now involve public acknowledgment of diffÂ� erence. From this perspective, a politics that acknowledges differences is truer to the core liberal ideals of freedom, equality, and respect for individuality. The logic of treating people as free and equal individuals must extend into a recognition of their salient particularities. Thus, as a development of the liberal ideals of freedom and equality, the recognition of one’s own or others’ dignity can now involve acknowledgment of difference. Whether the politics of recognition can be rendered compatible with liberalism depends in part on whether liberalism must necessarily be difference-blind, insisting upon rights being identical for all citizens. Taylor suggests that the “accusation of homogenization”21 can be avoided by some forms of liberalism. Here he draws on the experience of Canada in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the way it handled issues related to the province of Quebec. Taylor submits that the sort of laws enacted in Quebec regarding the language of education for schools and shop-signage are not incompatible with all forms of liberalism, even if they are eschewed by its dominant form.22 By his reckoning, a politics that includes measures to ensure collective goals, such as those pursued in Quebec for the preservation of its distinct culture, could still be considered liberal. What would be decisive is the way a regime treats those who are not part of the dominant group, for it would have to guarantee their basic rights such as “life, liberty, due process, free speech, free practice of religion, and so on.”23 Any rights of the majority to pursue collective goals could not infringe upon 19 Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 43–44. Cf. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 89. 20 Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 39–44, 57–58, 60–62. 21 Ibid., 52, cf. 61.â•… 22╇ Ibid., 52–57.â•… 23╇ Ibid., 59.

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such “fundamental liberties.”24 Hence Taylor’s conclusion that a society “with strong collective goals can be liberal.”25 With this move, he is, in effect, pluralizing our understanding of liberalism.26

Group-differentiated rights

A fuller articulation and defense of a form of liberal politics that is not difference-blind, and which creates space for the pursuit of collective goals by political means, has been advanced by Will Kymlicka. His first book, Liberalism, Community and Culture (1989), aimed to show that many of the criticisms leveled by communitarians against liberalism were either unfounded or could and should be addressed from within liberalism. Despite charges from its communitarian critics, liberalism can acknowledge the fact that “our individual lives and our moral deliberations are related to, and situated in, a shared social context.”27 Kymlicka also argues forcefully that liberalism can and must acknowledge and accommodate at least some manifestations of cultural differÂ� ence. And despite the general neglect of, or antagonism toward, group rights by most contemporary liberal political theorists, he tries to persuade his fellow liberals that their tradition contains the normative resources to justify some rights for some minority groups.28 Liberalism, Community and Culture represents a turning point for contemporary liberal political theory as it is considered in this chapter, for it encapsulates the movement from responding to charges from communitarians to demonstrating liberalism’s capacity to recognize and respond to cultural pluralism within Western societies.29 24 Ibid., 59, cf. 60.â•… 25╇ Ibid., 59. 26 As I have argued elsewhere, Taylor can be seen as a liberal thinker, but one who operates with a different perspective and pedigree from the Kantian or deontological liberalism that dominates Anglo-American liberalism due to Rawls’s towering influence. Abbey, “Pluralism in Practice,” 98–123. 27 Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1989), 2. 28 Although expressing admiration for Kymlicka’s work, Taylor thinks it fails to acknowledge that many minority groups care about culture not just as a resource in the present but also as something to be preserved into the future. “Politics of Recognition,” 40–41, note 16. The goal of “la survivance” in Quebec, for example, aims to produce future generations of French speakers. Ibid., 58–59. For the claim that a liberal approach should not protect a language for future, as opposed to current, speakers, see Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 65. 29 Rajeev Bhargava also points to some of the connections between these debates in “Introducing Multiculturalism,” in Rajeev Bhargava, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, and R. Sudarshan, eds., Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1999). See especially 37–38, 48.

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Kymlicka’s insistence that liberalism could and should accommodate some manifestations of cultural difference, and should accord group rights to some minority groups, was reiterated in his next work, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, published in 1995. Kymlicka bases his defense of group rights on the liberal goods of liberty and equality. With regard to liberty, he maintains that “the liberal value of freedom of choice has certain cultural preconditions, and hence … issues of cultural membership must be incorporated into liberal principles.”30 An individual’s ability to exercise free choice in a meaningful way depends in part on participation in an authentic cultural context, one that she or he feels attached to.31 Yet access to such a context is unevenly distributed in Western societies: those who feel themselves to be part of the mainstream can choose more freely or authentically than those whose cultures are under pressure or in danger of atrophying.32 Respecting the equality of individuals means giving all individuals access to a meaningful, authentic culture,33 but this goal cannot always be achieved by treating all members of a society identically. Because members of minority groups face challenges in their access to an authentic culture that those in the majority do not,34 the traditional liberal mechanisms for protecting diversity within society€– the affirmation of individual rights and negative liberties, the belief in state neutrality and the separation of public and private spheres€– are insufficient. Ensuring the equal protection of authentic cultural membership can, therefore, require different treatment, depending on how a group is placed vis-à-vis mainstream culture.35 In some cases, minority groups should be given a right to protect and preserve their traditional societal cultures. The sort of group differentiated rights Kymlicka has in mind for national minority groups include indigenous hunting and fishing rights; self-government and territorial autonomy rights; access to government services in the minority group’s language; and access to schooling in that language.36 30 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford University Press, 1995), 76, cf. 8, 80–84. 31 Cf. Bhargava, “Introducing Multiculturalism,” 2, 7. 32 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 77. For a fuller discussion, see Maurice Rickard, “Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and Minority Protection,” Social Theory and Practice 20 (1994), 143–171. 33 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 108–109. 34 Ibid., 109–110, 113. 35 Ibid., 108. Cf. Rickard, “Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and Minority Protection.” 36 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 109–111. For a fuller discussion of the sorts of things covered by cultural rights, see Jacob Levy, “Classifying Cultural Rights,” in W. Kymlicka and I. Shapiro, eds., Nomos XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights (New York University Press, 1997).

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But Kymlicka’s liberal defense of group rights does not generate a slate of rights to which all minority groups are entitled: it is, instead, a contextual argument according to which the rights any group can legitimately claim to protect its societal culture depend upon the health of, and the particular threats to, that culture.37 Kymlicka thus takes the fact of cultural pluralism in Western societies and tries to persuade his fellow liberals that it deserves political expression€ – at least in those cases where a minority group’s societal culture is in danger of decaying against its members’ wills. His argument is pluralist in three major ways. First, cultural pluralism itself has different sources: some is created via immigration, while some is created via conquest. Kymlicka characterizes non-immigrant groups as “nations within,” recalling that “The incorporation of such national minorities has typically been involuntary, due to colonization, conquest or the ceding of territory from one imperial power to another.”38 When dramatic changes to a group’s culture are introduced by forces beyond its choice and control, liberalism should be as concerned with this as it always has been with any undeserved situations that impede an individual’s ability to live freely and equally.39 These different origins of minority cultural groups lead to the second element of pluralism in Kymlicka’s theory of justice: different groups within the same society are eligible to receive different rights. Members of a cultural group who have freely chosen to migrate to a new country are not entitled to group rights in the way that minority national groupings are.40 At one point Kymlicka even suggests that these different cultural groups represent two different forms of multiculturalism: “one focused on immigrant ethnicity; the other on€minority nationalism.”41 The third way in which Kymlicka’s theory of minority rights is pluralist is that the rights themselves differ from one minority group to another. As we have seen, the particular rights that 37 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 110. 38 Will Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism and the ‘Nations Within,’” in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 221. 39 Will Kymlicka, “The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas,” Political Theory 20 (1992), 140. 40 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 78–79, 95–97, 101. In “Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and Minority Protection,” Rickard argues, by contrast, that because the challenges these groups face to protect their cultures differ in degree rather than kind, a liberal approach to multiculturalism should be open to some rights of cultural protection for immigrant groups. Kukathas also finds Kymlicka’s defense of cultural rights for national minorities but not for immigrant groups to be incompatible with his liberal egalitarianism. See “Cultural Rights Again: A Rejoinder to Kymlicka,” Political Theory 20 (1992), 676. 41 Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism,” 219.

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any group can legitimately claim vary with not just their history but also with their current situation and needs. His general principle here is that rights are needed to combat disadvantages, and just as disadvantages differ from one group to the next, so should rights.42 However, while different groups might be deserving of different rights, one thing that remains constant is Kymlicka’s distinction between groups being given rights to protect their culture against external pressures versus internal rights to limit their individual members’ freedoms.43 To earn the support of liberals, minority group rights should not enhance the control of some group members over others. A major argument advanced by Kymlicka in favor of group rights is, therefore, the power it gives those in minority groups to preserve their cultures and thus, in turn, to foster the circumstances of authentic individual choice. Whereas for Rawls it is the ability of individuals to make free choices about their conceptions of the good that generates and perpetuates moral pluralism in a society, for Kymlicka, ongoing cultural pluralism contributes to an individual’s capacity to make free, meaningful, and authentic choices.

Freedom to dissociate

A different view about the appropriate liberal response to cultural pluralism is advanced by Chandran Kukathas in his 1992 article, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?”44 Like Taylor, he underlines liberalism’s concern with the power of majorities over minorities.45 And Kukathas agrees with Kymlicka that liberalism can and should care about the health of minority cultural communities. He thus follows Kymlicka in articulating a form of liberalism that values community and culture,46 42 Kymlicka, “Reply to Kukathas,” 141. Cf. Rickard who wants cultural protection to be recognized as a basic, constitutional right, but resists entrenching any culturallybased form of fixed legal pluralism. He advocates a general right to cultural protection that is context sensitive, allowing different groups to invoke it in arguing for particular actions to address the specific challenges confronting them. 43 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 7–8, 109, 110, 113, 123, 126; Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2002), 340–343. 44 This article was first published in 1992, although I cite its 1995 republication. “Are there any Cultural Rights?” in Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford University Press, 1995), 230, 240–241. It first appeared before Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship, but is reacting to the earlier arguments in this direction from Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Kukathas lays out his position in greater detail in The Liberal Archipelago€– A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2003). 45 Kukathas, “Cultural Rights,” 230, 236. 46 Ibid., 248.

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which suggests that he too is carving out a form of liberalism that is responsive to some of the earlier communitarian critiques. Rejecting any necessary conflict between recognizing the value of the individual and recognizing that of the group, Kukathas insists that for liberals who adhere to a belief in the moral primacy of the individual,47 the individual must always assume priority. Groups matter derivatively€– because they matter to individuals.48 Kukathas disagrees, however, about the appropriate political response to minority cultural groups: no additional group rights are called for because the traditional liberal suite of negative rights can accommodate this concern with minority groups: “there is no need to depart from the liberal language of individual rights to do justice to them.”49 He proposes that “without establishing cultural rights, it may be possible to account for the legitimate claims of cultural minorities in a liberal social order.”50 In opposition to Kymlicka, Kukathas holds that groups are not entitled to rights to preserve their existence.51 His primary reason for refusing to accord rights to groups is related to his aforementioned belief in their derivative status. Groups possess an ontological instability that individuals do not: groups wax and wane, changing in response to individuals’ desires, needs, and choices but also in reaction to legal and political forces.52 Attributing rights to a minority group could impose an artificial permanence on entities that are naturally and appropriately protean. Being comprised of individuals makes groups not just protean but also internally plural. Kukathas’s insistence upon recognizing the internal plurality of any minority group or cultural community is offered as a corrective to much contemporary liberal thought, which he sees as insufficiently pluralist, and therefore insufficiently liberal.53 He deems Rawls’s stipulation, for example, that members of a community share a comprehensive doctrine, to require too much unity and agreement within a group.54 He further argues that the priority political liberalism gives to membership of the polity, while designed to recognize and protect pluralism, ends up diluting pluralism because it weakens or reduces “the authority of the other communities to which people belong.”55 Rather than require any overlapping consensus on 47 Ibid., 230, 246.â•… 48╇ Ibid., 233–234. 49 Ibid., 230; emphasis original. 50 Ibid., 250.â•… 51╇ Ibid., 239. 52 Ibid., 232–233, 239. Cf. Kukathas, “Liberalism, Communitarianism and Political Community,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996), 92. 53 Kukathas, “Liberalism, Communitarianism and Political Community,” 82. 54 Ibid., 88–89.â•… 55╇ Ibid., 94.

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the principles of justice, Kuthathas declares that a political community “need be no more than an association of people who recognize the terms of coexistence.”56 He thus seems to favor the sort of modus vivendi approach57 that Rawls deems too weak to secure a stable and self-reproducing just society.58 But Rawls is accused of being illustrative rather than unique in the importance he attributes to membership of the polity, for, as we have seen, Kukathas judges most contemporary liberal thought to be insufficiently receptive to pluralism, notwithstanding its proclaimed commitment to this value.59 Kukathas’s liberal approach to multiculturalism thus underscores the intramural diversity of any group. A significant (but potentially shifting) fault line within any community or cultural group is power.60 He freely acknowledges that some group members will be more powerful than others, and members of a group might well have conflicting interests, even over the question about the value of preserving their culture.61 Attributing rights to the group can entrench the power of their more powerful members over the less powerful ones, whereas empowering some group members over others is incompatible with liberalism’s commitment to citizen equality. There may be minorities within the minority group and liberalism cannot countenance consolidating power over such minorities within, nor run the risk of making them permanent minorities.62 In this regard then, Kukathas’s brand of liberalism is more attuned to pluralism than Kymlicka’s, for it attends to differences of interest, status, and power within the group itself. Kymlicka could, of course, reply that his defense extends only to external group rights€– those which allow the group to preserve itself against outside threats and challenges€– and not to internal rights, which allow some members of the group to exercise power over others. Kukathas could reply, however, that having the power to define what rights a group 56 Ibid., 104. 57 Cf. Kymlicka, “Reply to Kukathas,” 144. Although Kukathas does not use this terminology, I base this inference on the conclusion of his article about the meaning and value of political community. See “Liberalism, Communitarianism and Political Community,” 104. Kukathas’s position seems to intersect with that of John Gray who, in The Two Faces of Liberalism (London: Polity Press, 2000), argues that Rawlsian liberalism is insufficiently pluralist. Gray’s conclusion is based on attention to value pluralism rather than multiculturalism, but these two strands can easily dovetail, as indicated by Bhargava, “Introducing Multiculturalism,” 17. 58 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 148. 59 Kukathas, “Liberalism, Communitarianism and Political Community,” 94–98. Bhargava also develops some of the implications of political liberalism for the multiculturalism debate, “Introducing Multiculturalism,” 26–29. 60 Kukathas, “Are there any Cultural Rights?” 234. 61 Ibid., 236.â•… 62╇ Ibid., 236.

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needs, based on what elements of its culture it wishes to protect, is a way in which some group members are empowered over others. (As we shall see below, this is a concern shared by Susan Okin.) This poses the question of how meaningful Kymlicka’s separation between internal and external rights is. Another way in which Kukathas’s position is more pluralist than Kymlicka’s appears in its greater tolerance for the continued existence of illiberal groups, for Kukathas’s position allows a greater range of groups and values to persist.63 But there is, nonetheless, a crucial liberal proviso to Kukathas’s argument: any group, no matter how illiberal, must respect its members’ freedom to exit if it is to warrant toleration. When such freedom exists, we can assume that individuals are freely perpetuating their group’s illiberal practices and values and are not trapped in these groups against their will. Freedom of exit is the flip side of the liberal commitment to free association which lies at the heart of Kukathas’s pluralism. “The primacy of freedom of association is all-important”64 in his approach, with the freedom to exit being “a corollary right.”65 The centrality of free association also appears in his definition of cultural communities as “associations of individuals whose freedom to live according to communal practices each finds acceptable is of fundamental importance.”66 However, upon closer inspection, the freedom to exit emerges as more fundamental than free association in Kukathas’s position. This is because many of the minority groups and cultures whose persistence he defends in the name of liberal pluralism do not permit truly free association€– in some cases, those not born into the group are not allowed to join. As this indicates, while belonging to the group in the first place might not be fully voluntary, continuing participation must be in order for any group to earn toleration.67 The index that continuing participation is voluntary is the freedom its members have to dissociate. Although he takes community and culture seriously, Kukathas maintains that liberalism should be neutral on the question of cultural preservation or assimilation.68 As his aforementioned definition of cultural communities as associations of individuals who should be free “to live according to communal practices each finds acceptable” implies, what 63 Ibid., 241–243, 246–247, 249, 251. 64 Ibid., 248, cf. 247. 65 Ibid., 250, cf. 249. An early statement of the exit option is provided by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty’s discussion of Mormonism. See The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, edited by A. Ryan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 113. 66 Kukathas, “Are there any Cultural Rights?” 238. 67 Ibid., 238–239.â•… 68╇ Ibid., 237.

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matters is whether individuals choose to perpetuate the group’s identity and practices.69 He predicts that “cultural communities without the broad support or commitment of their members will … wither.” 70 Placing freedom of association at the front and center of his liberalism also means that members of each group should be the ones to make decisions about their culture’s continuation. There should be no outside interference in this,71 whereas imputing rights to a minority group seems to involve a form of external interference by requiring state intervention. However, the strong inside/outside separation implied here is troubled by Kukathas’s own elaboration on what substantive freedom of exit requires. As we have seen, he is not worried about illiberal groups if their members are at liberty to dissociate themselves from the group. Assuming tacit consent, he infers that those who stay when they are free to leave are staying freely. But in order for this liberal proviso to do the normative and political work Kukathas requires of it, there has to be an “outside” society to which those dissatisfied with their community and its culture can escape and which will be willing to receive them. As he freely admits, Kukathas’s brand of liberal pluralism couldn’t work if society were “a social union of social unions,”72 all of which were all illiberal groups that did not permit freedom of entry and only allowed freedom of exit.73 So that the exiting individual isn’t moving “from the frying pan into the fire,” the ambient society has to be liberal€– or at least more liberal than the group from which the person is departing. From this standpoint, it is the liberalism and porousness of the “outside” society€– its genuine freedom of association€– that underwrites the acceptability of illiberal practices by minority groups within that society. Because minority groups who engage in illiberal practices are only acceptable if their members can move to the ambient liberal society, it is the supposed “outside” that legitimates the “inside.” This suggests that the relationship between minority and mainstream cultures is better conceived as a nested, rather than an inside/outside, one.

Gender and group rights

Taylor, Kymlicka, and Kukathas agree on the general point that liberalism should be hospitable to the social and cultural pluralism reflected in multiculturalism, although they differ about why and how. But no contemporary liberal theorist of multiculturalism advocates unrestrained 69 Ibid., 238.â•… 70╇ Ibid., 239.â•… 71╇ Ibid., 239.â•… 73 Ibid., 252. Cf. “Cultural Rights Again,” 677.

72

╇ Ibid., 249.

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pluralism: there are always liberal limits to what can be deemed acceptable. The debate among liberal supporters of multiculturalism thus swirls around what the limits on pluralism should be, where and how they should be drawn, and what sort of political expression, if any, should be given to cultural pluralism. It is in this spirit that we should approach Susan Moller Okin’s contribution to the debate about liberalism and multiculturalism in her short and highly controversial essay, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”74 Okin has been credited with sparking the debate about “cultural disagreements over women’s status, roles and arrangements in liberal democratic states.” 75 Even commentators critical of Okin refer to her “path-breaking contribution” to questions of gender and multiculturalism.76 Okin addresses her remarks to those who assume that group rights for minority cultures and religions represent a logical extension of liberal values. The position under interrogation holds that in the context of basically liberal democracies … minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should also be protected through special group rights or privileges.77

She is intervening in a debate about what should be acceptable within the parameters of a liberal social formation and proceeds from the premise that only groups who are internally liberal can be candidates for such rights. As this suggests, Kymlicka is Okin’s major interlocutor in this essay, for he is, in her estimation, “the foremost contemporary [liberal] defender of cultural group rights.”78 Kymlicka’s initial articulation of his position elicited Okin’s enthusiastic commendation, for she took Liberalism, Community and Culture to provide “a very powerful liberal argument for the protection of the collective rights of minority 74 Originally published in the Boston Review (October/November 1997), it was Â�re-published in 1999. See Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 74–75. Only occasional minor differences in wording separate the two. The 1999 version is cited here. 75 Barbara Arneil, Monique Deveaux, Rita Dhamoon, and Avigail Eisenberg, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Sexual Justice / Cultural Justice: Critical Perspectives in Political Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1. 76 Ayelet Shachar, “What We Owe Women: The View from Multicultural Feminism,” in Debra Satz and Rob Reich, eds., Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 144, cf. 146. See also Alison Jaggar, “Okin and the Challenge of Essentialism,” in ibid., 168. For a discussion of the essay’s reception, see Ruth Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), 87–95. 77 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 10–11; emphasis original. 78 Ibid., 11.

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cultures”79 and to demonstrate “skillfully that the rights of minority cultures in multinational states can be defended on liberal grounds.”80 The skepticism that Okin comes to evince about group rights does not, however, lead her to repudiate Kymlicka’s liberal defense of multiculturalism altogether. Rather, her position is better understood as an immanent critique of his. We can also see Okin as incorporating some of Kukathas’s perspectives on the internal heterogeneity of groups, and in particular their unequal distribution of power, into her analysis.81 Okin recommends that liberals “strive toward … a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other’s moral equals.”82 As part of this she asks that the practices and beliefs pertaining to gender of any cultural or religious minority be carefully scrutinized before any argument could be mounted that it deserves special rights to preserve its traditional culture and beliefs.83 From a liberal standpoint, gender equality must be part and parcel of the requirement that such groups enjoy autonomy only in so far as they are internally liberal in their practices. So Okin should be read as following Kymlicka by advancing a defense of multiculturalism which underscores the liberal values of equal personhood, equal liberty, and non-domination, but which pays close attention to gender in the realization of these values. Yet when this step of including gender equality among the central values of liberalism is taken, significant tensions emerge, in Okin’s estimation, between liberalism and the endorsement of group rights for minority cultures and religions.84 The potential for conflict between gender equality and group rights had gone largely unnoticed,85 whereas in Okin’s view, the link between maintaining traditional cultures and enhancing men’s control over women “shouts out to us in the examples given in the literature on cultural diversity and group rights within liberal states.”86 A number of the issues listed in her essay bear this out: it is females who wear the veil; females who undergo clitoridectomies; females who are victims of so-called honor killings; females who are the multiplied spouses in polygamy (making it more appropriate to speak of polygyny); females who are most likely to be disadvantaged by traditional laws about marriage, divorce, and child custody; females who are 79 Susan Okin, “Review of Liberalism, Community, and Culture by Will Kymlicka,” Political Theory 19 (1991), 123. 80 Ibid., 127. 81 Note 4, page 133 of “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” indicates that she was familiar with his article. 82 Ibid., 131.â•… 83╇ Ibid., 117. 84 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 9, 10, 11, 20–21. Cf. Susan Okin, “Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions,” Ethics 108 (1998), 664. 85 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 9, 20.â•… 86╇ Ibid., 17.

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treated yet more unfairly after rape; and females who are more likely to be consigned to a life of unpaid domestic labor.87 Many of the practices that cast the legitimacy of group rights into doubt for Okin are associated with immigrant, rather than national, groups.88 But it should be recalled that Kymlicka does not, as Okin acknowledges, defend group rights for voluntary immigrants to liberal societies.89 This suggests that her concern goes beyond his quite specific defense of group rights to challenge the legitimacy of the practices and attitudes that some minority cultural groups exhibit. Okin ventures two explanations as to why liberal defenders of group rights have been deaf to the ways in which perpetuating such traditions can be tantamount to perpetuating men’s power over women. The first is that much of this takes place in the private sphere which has traditionally been treated, albeit selectively, as if it were beyond the purview of politics.90 Liberal defenders of group rights might assume that formal, de jure equalities for women suffice, but this ignores entirely the powerful impact that dynamics within the domestic realm have on women’s lives. As Okin says, the distribution of responsibilities and power at home has a major impact on who can participate in and influence the more public parts of cultural life, where rules and regulations about both public and private life are made. The more a culture requires or expects of women in the domestic sphere, the less opportunity they have of achieving equality with men in either sphere.91

A second reason why liberal defenders of group rights have ignored the ways in which reproducing traditional cultures and doctrines can reproduce men’s power over women is that their focus has been on power relations among, rather than within, groups. The question preoccupying proponents of group rights had been to what extent members of minority groups are disadvantaged by having to conform to the rules and mores of mainstream culture and politics, rather than what power relations within those groups are like. When attention is paid to this latter issue, it emerges that group rights might not benefit all group members equally. When pertaining to the sort of practices outlined above, they serve, in Okin’s estimation at least, the interests of men to the detriment of women.92 She chides liberal defenders of group rights for 87 Ibid., 13–15, 17. 88 Cf. Jeff Spinner-Halev, “Feminism, Multiculturalism, Oppression and the State,” Ethics 112 (2001), 87–88. 89 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 133, note 2. Nor does he claim, pace Okin’s implication, that immigrant groups have their own societal cultures. Ibid., 11. 90 Ibid., 21–23.â•… 91╇ Ibid., 13.â•… 92╇ Ibid., 12, 23–24.

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treating minority groups as monoliths and for ignoring the power differences within them.93 Because of the diversity and power differentials within minority groups, Okin insists that “there can be no justification for assuming that the groups’ self-proclaimed leaders€– invariably composed of their older and their male members€ – represent the interest of all of the group’s members.”94 It is, therefore, “not enough for those representing the liberal state simply to listen to the requests of the selfstyled group leaders,”95 for these soi-disant representatives might not accurately or effectively represent the gamut of opinions, interests, and perspectives in the group. In expressing these concerns about group rights, Okin can be seen as applying Kukathas’s insights about plurality and power differences within minority groups to the question of gender for, as we have seen, his approach to multiculturalism underscores the intramural diversity of any group and recognizes that group members might have conflicting interests and views, even over the question about the value of preserving their culture. In her concerns about group rights, Okin echoes, albeit tacitly, Kukathas’s belief that attributing rights to the group can entrench the power of their more powerful members over the less powerful ones. And she would agree with him that empowering some group members over others is incompatible with liberalism’s commitment to citizen equality. In these ways, Okin is effectively applying Kukathas’s cautions about group rights but directing their focus toward issues of gender. Yet when claiming that some of the practices of minority cultural and religious groups might serve the interests of men to the detriment of women, Okin issues an important caveat. Older female members of such minorities can themselves advocate practices that Okin deems disadvantageous to women.96 She attributes this to the phenomenon of adaptive preferences, for when individuals cannot exercise a wide range of choices, and feel unable to change their situation, they can become satisfied with and attached to what they do have.97 Younger women, by contrast, might be less invested in continuing certain aspects of their culture or religion. Hence Okin’s recommendation that, when interrogating intra-group power dynamics, “the perspective of the younger women” be afforded special attention.98 Her original essay closes with the warning that “Unless … young women … are fully represented in negotiations about group rights, their interests may be harmed rather than promoted.”99 But from this we should not infer that she thinks all women of the same generation think alike, as illustrated by her remarks 93 Ibid., 12.â•… 97 Ibid., 126.â•…

╇ Ibid., 24.â•… 95╇ Ibid., 117.â•… ╇ Ibid., 117, cf. 126–127.â•…

94

98

╇ Ibid., 22, 24. ╇ Ibid., 24.

96 99

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about the (first) headscarf debate in France. She finds that young women “are often at odds with each other€ – some viewing their cultural practices or insignia as positive statements of their identity, others seeing such things as imposed on them by their families or cultural leaders.”100 In training her feminist gaze on the debate about liberalism and multiculturalism, Okin injects yet more awareness of pluralism into the discussion, for she not only adds gender as an axis of difference among group members but also acknowledges that women themselves differ from one another. The category of women is itself a heterogeneous one. One of Kymlicka’s arguments in favor of group rights derives from the Rawlsian primary good of self-esteem. Those who belong to nonmainstream cultures are not being afforded equal respect if their culture is allowed to wither and they have to adapt to a new one.101 Okin takes up this appeal to the social bases of self-esteem and asks that it be considered from the standpoint of gender, urging that all girls and boys in liberal societies grow up in cultures and households where they are valued as persons and treated as equals. One of the things she finds promising about liberal cultures is that: most families in such cultures, with the exception of some religious fundamentalists, do not communicate to their daughters that they are of less value than boys, that their lives are to be confined to domesticity and service to men and children, and that their sexuality is of value only in marriage, in the service of men, and for reproductive ends.102

She fears that many traditional cultures and religions do not offer this equality to females, which makes a serious dent in the self-esteem defense for group rights.103 But Okin is not suggesting that minority cultures are uniquely culpable in their tendency toward women’s subordination. On the contrary, “most cultures have as one of their principal aims the control of women by men.”104 Liberal societies are far from perfect when it comes to gender equality. She is the first to admit that “Western cultures, of course, still practice many forms of sex discrimination.”105 What distinguishes them from more traditional cultures is the presence and public affirmation of values that can be mobilized to attack and begin to undo women’s subordination. Thus Okin refers to “the 100 Ibid., 126. 101 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 108–109. See Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 20. 102 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 17, cf. 19. 103 Ibid., 22.â•… 104╇ Ibid., 13.â•… 105╇ Ibid., 16.

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norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in their practices).”106 Liberal societies have, partly due to feminist pressure, taken some strides in attaining equality and freedom for women and in making this, officially at least, a presumptive norm in many areas. Thus whatever the many and varied shortcomings of liberal societies when it comes to realizing gender equality, Okin finds hope in the fact that women in liberal cultures are “legally guaranteed many of the same freedoms and opportunities as men.”107 Wanting these advances and expectations to be accessible to all women in liberal societies, she fears that the provision of group rights to cultural and religious minorities might obstruct this. Kymlicka’s reply to Okin suggests that he would accept my depiction of her critique of his work as an immanent one. He is persuaded by Okin’s argument that “a liberal egalitarian (and feminist) approach to multiculturalism must look carefully at intragroup inequalities, and specifically at gender inequalities, when examining the legitimacy of group norms.”108 He accepts that “a more subtle account of internal restrictions which helps us identify limitations on the freedom of women within ethnocultural groups” is needed.109 But Kymlicka maintains that Okin’s concerns can be folded into his central distinction, mentioned above, between giving minority groups rights to protect their culture against external pressures and giving them rights to limit individual members’ freedoms.110 He agrees that “the domestic oppressions Okin discusses [are] paradigmatic examples of the sort of ‘internal restrictions’ which liberals must oppose.”111 He has always claimed that to earn the support of liberals, group rights must not enhance the control of some group members over others. Kymlicka fears, however, that Okin exaggerates the normative distance between a liberal form of feminism and a liberal form of multiculturalism. She fails to appreciate their allegiance “in a broader struggle for a more inclusive justice,”112 and their shared conviction that the traditional liberal view of individual rights is inadequate for addressing the injustices faced by women and by members of ethnocultural minorities.113 But here I think that Kymlicka exaggerates Okin’s hostility toward group rights in particular and multiculturalism in general. He takes her to advocate “that feminists should be deeply skeptical about the 106 Ibid., 9.â•… 107╇ Ibid., 16–17. 108 Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Complacencies,” in Cohen et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, 31. 109 Ibid., 32.â•… 110╇ Ibid., 31–32.â•… 111╇ Ibid., 32.â•… 112╇ Ibid., 32.â•… 113╇ Ibid., 32–34.

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very category of minority group rights”114 and that multiculturalism be viewed “as a likely threat to whatever gains feminists have made over the last few decades.”115 But Okin does not present herself as implacably imposed to group rights. If it could be shown that some group rights were necessary to protect either a group’s language or its members from discrimination, and that this did not unduly disadvantage women, Okin would not rule group rights out altogether.116 Her essay does not, therefore, signal an outright rejection of rights for minority cultural and religious groups, nor does it repudiate entirely the value of multiculturalism. As she says in a closely related publication, “I do not mean to suggest that all aspects of multiculturalism are, or should be, a problem for all feminist positions or projects.”117 Nor is hers an antipluralist position, but rather one which probes how much diversity liberalism should support once gender equality is incorporated as a central value. Okin is adamant that the only approach to multiculturalism that liberals should endorse is one “that gives the issues of gender and other intra-group inequalities their due.”118 My claim above that Okin is effectively, if tacitly, extending some of Kukathas’s concerns about group rights to the issue of gender is not, however, intended to suggest that she endorses his wider approach to the relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism. In “Mistresses of their Own Destiny: Group Rights, Gender and the Realistic Rights of Exit,”119 Okin engages positions such as Kukathas’s which set great store by the right of an adult individual to leave his or her religious or cultural group. Despite this work’s title, Okin acknowledges that Kukathas is not a defender of special rights for minority groups. She portrays him rather as “the most extreme defender of tolerance for the internal practices … of diverse groups within liberal contexts.”120 She complains that Kukathas tolerates too much pluralism and diversity, and permits too many illiberal practices within minority groups. As we have seen, the right of exit is supposed to provide reassurance that individuals are not trapped in their communities against their will. Yet Okin finds that theorists who prioritize the exit option neglect gender as a factor in making this option viable. While it can be difficult for any individual to leave his or her cultural or religious group 114 Ibid., 32.â•… 115╇ Ibid., 32. 116 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 23. Cf. Okin, “Feminism and Multiculturalism,” 680. 117 Okin, “Feminism and Multiculturalism,” 664. 118 Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad?” 131. 119 Ethics 112 (2002), 205–230. 120 Ibid., 214.

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because of its influence on the person’s sense of self, and because of attachments to a familiar way of life and loved individuals,121 leaving can be even harder for women than for men.122 When gender is taken into account, it transpires that this supposedly fundamental freedom is not distributed equally among group members. Or, rather, while all a group’s adult members might be formally free to leave, there could be a gender gap in their capacity to exercise this freedom. Okin specifies three mutually reinforcing reasons why it can be harder for women to exit. First, women in traditional cultures tend to receive less formal education than men, for it is often assumed that they need less education to master what they must know for their future in the household. However, a limited education can be an obstacle to making one’s way in mainstream society.123 Being refused an education, or receiving only a limited one, can, therefore, be an impediment to flight. Second, women in traditional cultures and religions often marry early, and if children issue from the union it can be very hard for a woman to leave. Taking the children or leaving them behind both pose problems,124 which are compounded by the fact that divorce and custody laws in some minority groups can be highly unfavorable to women. Finally, arguments about the exit option take a level of self-esteem and agency for granted. But if women are raised to believe that their purpose is to be of service to men, the idea of leaving might never occur. A certain level of self-esteem and conception of agency are needed to even conceive of exercising the exit option, but women in traditional cultural and religious groups are less likely to have had these attitudes and capacities inculcated in them than are men.125 Okin contends that all these considerations force a reassessment of the assumption that, when there is a surrounding liberal culture to which one can escape, remaining within a minority religion or culture represents a form of tacit consent. Less powerful members of a group may, precisely because of their powerlessness, be least likely to perceive themselves as having an exit option. Their lack of power can be exacerbated by the fact that their being unable or unlikely to leave can make other group members less attentive to their concerns. Less powerful members are, therefore, caught in a double bind: assuming that their inability or unwillingness to leave is recognized by the group’s more powerful members (and Okin’s scenario assumes common knowledge), their power to improve their situation is weakened by their voice being 121 ╇ Ibid., 222.â•… 122╇ Ibid., 206–207.â•… 123╇ Ibid., 216–217, 224. 124 Ibid., 218–219, 224.â•… 125╇ Ibid., 207, 219–220.

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discounted because of their inability or reluctance to leave.126 This is to say nothing of the fear that might prevent such group members from speaking out: less powerful members who are unlikely to leave a group might think twice before being openly critical, given the reprisals that could ensue. In drawing attention to these barriers to exit, Okin effectively echoes a critique that Kymlicka had previously mounted of Kukathas. Questioning how substantial people’s freedom of exit from minority groups really is, Kymlicka complains that Kukathas seems to think that someone who has been denied an education (perhaps because she is female) and who is denied the right to associate with or speak to anyone outside her culture nonetheless has a substantial freedom to leave, assuming she can enter a market society. Most liberals, I think, would argue that she does not have a substantial freedom to leave because she lacks the preconditions for making a meaningful choice.127

Although she does not cite Kymlicka, Okin expresses the same reservations. Like Kymlicka, she complains that Kukathas specifies only one condition on making this option meaningful€– the existence of an ambient liberal culture to exit to. She deems this to be a significant shortcoming in a position that accords so much normative weight to the right to dissociate. She speculates, however, that were Kukathas to offer a thicker account of the conditions that make this freedom substantive, he could not continue to tolerate some of the illiberal group practices he currently allows.128

The flight from enlightenment

Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (2001) advocates skepticism about multiculturalism from a liberal point of view. Barry distinguishes what we might call the fact of pluralism from its being given political expression, observing that the term multiculturalism can be used at both levels€– to describe cultural pluralism within a society and to refer to a political program designed to recognize and protect that diversity.129 But it is possible to acknowledge and even value social and cultural pluralism without insisting that this be translated into a political program. With regard to 126 Ibid., 214. 127 Kymlicka, “Reply to Kukathas,” 143. Barry makes similar observations about the importance of education in Culture and Equality, 240. 128 Okin, “Mistresses of their own Destiny,” 228. 129 Barry, Culture and Equality, 22.

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social and cultural pluralism, Barry says that “Diversity is a fact and is here to stay.”130 His concern is “views that support the politicization of group identities, where the basis of the common identity is claimed to be cultural.”131 What troubles him is “a political programme that aims to institutionalize cultural difference by segmenting society.”132 As this reference to “segmenting society” suggests, Barry finds the politics of difference to be divisive, for it emphasizes the things that separate discrete groups within society rather than what unifies them as citizens.133 He also fears that this makes the citizenry subject to a “divide and rule” strategy: with different cultural groups thus cut off from one another, it becomes hard to mount campaigns in support of broader, shared goals, such as campaigns for redistribution.134 Some of Barry’s other reasons for opposing the politicization of cultural groups effectively echo concerns articulated by Kukathas. Barry suspects that politicizing cultural groups encourages their more entrepreneurial members to exaggerate the group’s cultural identity and distinctiveness because this is what the political process rewards. He implies that there is something artificial about “recognizing” cultural difference in this way.135 Barry bemoans not just the politicization of group identities, but also the development of group specific policies.136 He shares Kukathas’s belief that groups or cultures are not appropriate rights-bearers. Only individuals qualify for this status.137 Barry also joins Kukathas in acknowledging that communities and cultures matter to individuals. Both insist, however, that liberalism’s commitment to the moral primacy of the individual means that groups can only matter derivatively€– because they matter to individuals. As Barry says, “liberal individualism has the implication that a group has no value over and above its value to its members (and to other people outside it) but this is quite compatible with a full recognition of the role played in our well-being by the communities and associations to which we belong.”138 But just as individual well-being can be fostered by communities, so communities should be judged according to their ability to foster the well-being of each of their members. Hence Barry’s claim that “diversity is desirable … only to the degree, that each of the diverse groups functions in a way that is well adapted to advance the welfare and secure the rights of its members.”139 He accuses Kukathas of being too lax on this score, of tolerating diversity even when a cultural group harms some of its members.140 130 Ibid., 21.â•… 131╇ Ibid., 5.â•… 132╇ Ibid., 23, cf. 24. 133 Ibid., 3.â•… 134╇ Ibid., 11–12.â•… 135╇ Ibid., 21. 136 Ibid., 24.â•… 137╇ Ibid., 67, 113.â•… 138╇ Ibid., 123, cf. 148. 139 Ibid., 134.â•… 140╇ Ibid., 141–143.

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Along with condemning the politicization of group identities, Barry rejects any argument that traditional liberal ways of dealing with such diversity are inadequate. He reaffirms a sort of enlightenment liberalism, according to which “there should be only one status of citizen … everybody enjoys the same legal and political rights. These rights should be assigned to individual citizens, with no special rights (or disabilities) accorded to some and not to others on the basis of group membership.”141 Rawls’s A Theory of Justice represents the most recent incarnation of this type of liberalism.142 The vantage point adopted in the Original Position is not blind to difference but strives to take it into account in the right way; to deal with difference in a manner compatible with justice.143 Difference-blind liberalism is, therefore, to be defended rather than jettisoned.144 Barry deems his preferred model to have been very successful in accommodating culturally distinct groups so far, for “the problems thrown up by a uniform system of liberal laws have been relatively few.”145 He refuses any suggestion that this model of citizenship is obsolete, maintaining instead that it can continue to manage any legitimate challenges that confront it.146

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed a selection of protagonists and issues in the debate about liberalism and pluralism in the last decade of the twentieth century. It has suggested that with the demise of the liberal/communitarian debate, a liberal preoccupation with pluralism became apparent. Rawls focuses on freedom as the source of pluralism in a liberal society, whereas the other liberals surveyed here turn to cultures as sources of pluralism. Bhikhu Parekh deems liberalism to be “the most hospitable of all political doctrines to cultural diversity.”147 This strong statement of liberalism’s ability to accommodate pluralism comes from a thinker who is, nonetheless, resistant to the position that many liberals arrogate to themselves in the debate about multiculturalism. Rather than judge multiculturalism by liberal standards, Parekh insists that multiculturalism relativizes liberalism by showing it to be but one framework within 141 Ibid., 7. 142 Ibid., 7, 16. Although Barry is critical of many of the amendments Rawls made to justice as fairness (ibid., 331, n. 27), this aspect of Rawls’s approach carries over into Political Liberalism. 143 Ibid., 69.â•… 144╇ Ibid., 12, 63, 65. 145 Ibid., 21, cf. 317.â•… 146╇ Ibid., 24. 147 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 13–14, 369. Cf. his “A Varied Moral World” in Is Multiculturalism Bad? 74–75.

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a morally and politically plural society.148 He concludes that because multiculturalism cannot be adequately judged from within any particular framework, dialogue across frameworks is required. But if Parekh is right about liberalism’s hospitality toward a plurality of cultural doctrines, one of the things this chapter has shown is how much dispute there is among liberals themselves about how much diversity should be accepted in a liberal society and whether this should be given political expression. There is considerable pluralism within liberalism about pluralism, which in turn suggests the existence of different definitions of liberalism among thinkers calling themselves liberal.149 148 Rethinking Multiculturalism, 112. 149 Cf. Kukathas “Cultural Rights Again,” 676, 680. Barry, however, maintains that neither Kymlicka nor Kukathas qualify as liberals. Culture and Equality, 133, 137. See also Parekh on a pluralist understanding of liberalism, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 111, 369, cf. “A Varied Moral World,” 71. For a fuller discussion of the pluralization of contemporary liberalism, see Ruth Abbey, “Is Liberalism Now an Essentially Contested Concept?” Journal of New Political Science 27 (2005), 461–480.

9

The revival of radical pluralism: associationism and difference Mark Bevir and Toby Reiner



Introduction

Today, radical and socialist pluralisms are usually associated with attempts to accommodate difference. Where the left once aimed to redistribute wealth, there is now a live debate about the importance of€ – and difficulty in achieving€ – recognition for minority groups. However, older concerns with class, labor, and redistribution continue to echo in socialist pluralisms. Associationists continue to draw on syndicalist and guild theories about the importance of trade unions and other organized groups or secondary associations. Both associationists and difference theorists have contributed to a revival of radical pluralism. We begin this chapter by locating the revival of radical pluralism in its context. Anglophone thinkers turned to pluralism against the background of radical traditions that arose out of the moral critique of Stalinism, most notably, the New Left and Althusserian Marxism. Today’s radical pluralism is a response from within those traditions to dilemmas posed by the political success of neoliberalism and the rise of new social movements. In the United States, radical pluralists operated against the backdrop of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and the rapid emergence and decline of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. In the UK, the impact of Althusserian Marxism meant that radical pluralists tended to develop their positions so as to differentiate themselves from structuralism. The different contexts posed similar dilemmas for radical pluralists. Hence, each country produced both associationists and difference theorists. Having situated the revival of radical pluralism in context, we examine its two major strands€– associationism and difference theory€– on each side of the Atlantic. In the United States, we take Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers’s work on “associative democracy” to be paradigmatic of associationism. It accords to “secondary groups an extensive and explicitly public role” in the belief that a “deliberate politics 179

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of association can harness group contributions to democratic order … improve economic performance and government efficiency and advance egalitarian-democratic norms of popular sovereignty.”1 We take Iris Marion Young to be an exemplar of American difference theory, because she highlighted the importance of a democratic ethos of equal citizenship and focused on accommodating the different ethnic, religious, and racial groups extant in the American polity. In Young’s case, the women’s movement demonstrates the impact of new social movements on radical pluralism. We also show how Young became increasingly preoccupied with the accommodation of difference in civil society. Young relied upon an account of civil society in which secondary associations such as churches, neighbourhood organizations, and clubs are central to the attempt to achieve a more inclusive democracy. Thus, Young combined elements of difference theory and associationism. So too does Michael Walzer, whom we take as the American exemplar of a type of pluralism that draws equally on associationism and on difference theory. In the UK, we take Paul Hirst to be the associationist par excellence because of his focus on the importance of associations€ – above all, of trade unions€– for radical projects. Hirst, initially a champion of Althusser, used the work of pluralists such as Cole and Laski to demonstrate how the Thatcher government’s attack on the trade union movement was damaging British democracy. We then consider the work of Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian-born theorist working in Britain, who is taken to be the major British difference theorist because of her emphasis on identity in her study of agonistic democracy.2 We conclude that whereas associationists maintain strong interests in the traditional leftist concerns with redistribution of income and representing the interests of the working class, difference theorists to a large extent eschew such concerns. They seek to replace focus on economic domination with attention to cultural forms of oppression and representation of invisible or marginalized social groups.3 What makes both types of theorist pluralists is their critique of the sovereign state and insistence that freedom requires a plethora of types of institution with control over mechanisms of power.

J. Cohen and J. Rogers, Associations and Democracy (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 9–11. 2 C. Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005). 3 The substance of Young’s critique of Cohen and Rogers’s associationist project is precisely that it focuses on economic domination rather than cultural oppression. See I.€ Young, “Social Groups in Associative Democracy,” in Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, pp. 207–213. 1

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Contexts

In this section, we outline the early twentieth-century developments that led to the emergence of Althusserian Marxism and the New Left. We then show how dilemmas within those traditions are the appropriate backdrop for a consideration of the emergence of both associationism and difference theory. A series of dilemmas that faced leftists of both stripes encouraged radicals to recover pluralist ideas, primarily by promoting suspicion about using appeals for action by the central state as the fulcrum of attempts to promote equality.

From pluralism to corporatism

Prior to the 1930s, many prominent anglophone radicals were pluralists. After World War II, radical pluralism became much less visible, but it did not disappear. The reason for its decline in visibility is that, during the 1930s, many radicals began to emphasize planning. Sometimes, they were overtly inspired by a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union. On other occasions, they deliberately emphasized democracy. For example, Sidney and Beatrice Webb€– who constantly captured the intellectual fashions among young British socialists only to be met by the scorn of those younger socialists€– turned from their Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, with its pluralist touches, to their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, which only belatedly got a question mark added to its title.4 Keynesianism also became increasingly popular, though less among socialists than among the disgruntled liberal intellectuals who migrated to the British Labour Party and promoted the New Deal.5 Central planning gained further impetus from the experience of government during World War II. The British state created an extensive planning apparatus covering troop movements and much of the domestic economy, including vast amounts of physical labor.6 The Labour government elected in 1945 was initially committed to extensive physical planning. When the trade unions made it clear that they would not accept such planning, the government did not retreat to pluralism, but to Keynesianism. They were committed to a centralized state governed S. Webb and B. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, edited by S. Beer (Cambridge University Press, 1975); and S. Webb and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1935). 5 G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 126–149. 6 S. Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965). 4

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by a planned economy, albeit focusing on redistribution and aggregate demand more than on industry and the supply side. Indeed, the Labour Party continued to use forms of industrial planning until the 1980s. The pluralism of the left was replaced by corporatism€– the involvement of organized interests in planning processes.

Dilemmas of corporatism

In the 1950s and 1960s, radicals believed in the forward march of labor. History was on the side of their cause, which was labor. Today, radicalism is very different. Out have gone faith in historical progress and the modes of governance associated with planning, Keynesianism, and corporatism, and the focus on labor and on redistribution has lessened. In their place, we find suspicion of utopias, focus on difference and recognition, and modes of governance involving civil society participating in partnerships with the state. There has been a revival of pluralism. Why? The main dilemmas that prompted radicals to return to pluralism were the critique of Stalinism, the rise of social movements based on identities other than class, and the neoliberalism of the Reagan and Thatcher governments. In the United States, most radicals responded to these dilemmas against the backdrop of the New Left. In Britain and Europe, socialists often responded to neoliberalism and new social movements against the background of an Althusserian Marxism that had saturated if not supplanted the humanism and culturalism of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and the rest of the British New Left. The new social movements became one of the principal triggers of difference theory, because they made radicals aware that accommodating differences of gender, race, and ethnicity is as important as class concerns. Neoliberalism prompted the development of associationism, both because associationists took neoliberal attacks on the trade union movement to be an attack on freedom, and because fostering associations could reduce reliance on the central state. The electoral success of neoliberalism made it essential for radicals to find non-statist means to promote redistribution and enhanced political activism. The moral critique of Stalinism provided the background to much radical thinking in the 1970s and 1980s. On the one hand, the New Left reacted to Stalinism by rejecting economism and determinism in favor of the importance of studying culture and ideology and promoting democratic values. On the other, socialists who rejected the humanism of the New Left sometimes tried to reassert the scientific credentials of Marxism by allying it with structuralism in a manner pioneered by Louis Althusser.

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In the United States, these dilemmas were added to by the experiences of the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s. The New Left prospered during a brief period of intense political activism, only to retreat rapidly after 1968.7 That decline in political activism was followed, a few years later, by the emergence of neoliberalism and an aggressive New Right. The political optimism of the 1960s quickly soured, as left-wing activism was replaced by right-wing rhetoric. Radicals thus had to find explanations of the failure of the New Left to become a lasting source of mass political activism and respond to the critique of the achievements of the postwar consensus propounded by the New Right. Furthermore, during the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left and Althusserian Marxists confronted a focus on identities other than class. These took various forms, including the civil rights and race relations movements in the United States, the women’s movement on both sides of the Atlantic, and the mass immigration to the United States that made cultural and racial difference ever more salient. Each of these experiences led many radicals to believe that the economic focus of corporatism was misplaced. Egalitarians could no longer straightforwardly equate organized labor and the working class with the subjects of radical concern. Segregation and the lack of civil rights for African-Americans showed that racial inequality had to be tackled in ways that extended beyond redistribution. Women’s oppression was by no means defined by their exclusion from positions of economic power. It encompassed such issues as sexual violence, sexuality, and gender norms. The Vietnam War raised awareness of the brutality of American foreign policy and was a trigger of the new wave of immigration to the United States from non-white countries, particularly from Asia and Latin America. In this context, the injustices that the white, male working-class faced did not encapsulate the inequalities of capitalism. The dilemmas that these issues raised led some radicals€– though by no means all€– to promote forms of pluralism defined by associationism and difference.

The United States

In the United States, the background for the development of contemporary radical pluralism was the New Left and its response to the new social movements that forced their way into public consciousness during the On the experience of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, see M. Walzer, Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 109–195. 7

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civil rights movement and the campaigns against the Vietnam War. For example, Iris Marion Young’s engagement with the women’s movement motivated her adoption of pluralism. Later on, the rise of neoliberalism during the Reagan administration and the collapse of communism raised further dilemmas. We see this in Cohen and Rogers’ critique of the Reagan government and Young’s emphasis on civil society following the demise of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe after 1991. The weakness of the labor movement in the United States is reflected in the pluralism of the figures we discuss. Walzer, Young, and Cohen and Rogers base their pluralism not on labor but on a democratic ethos. The emphasis is on inclusion in the political arena, not on industrial democracy or working conditions. This does not mean that American pluralists are not concerned with those things: they are. However, because pluralism in the United States emerged out of the new social movements, American pluralists are mostly concerned with accommodating difference and ensuring inclusion. Feminism, multiculturalism, and the civil rights movement all pushed pluralists in that direction. Even the associationism of Cohen and Rogers is motivated by their conviction that associations can help put in place a democracy governed by an ethos of equality. American associationism sees trade unions as just one type of association among many. The history of racism€– both the slavery of the nineteenth century and the segregation of the twentieth€– has impacted on American pluralism in important ways. Along with the wave of immigration to the United States from Asia and Latin America since the 1960s, it has increased awareness of cultural difference and its impact upon inclusion in the political process.

Associationism: Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers

Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers moved toward pluralism because of a perceived decline in American public life resulting from the rise of neoliberalism and the tenure of the Reagan government. They later became associationists because they believed that associational activity was a means of promoting democratic inclusion and fostering political egalitarianism. Cohen and Rogers argued that associations can “make substantial contributions to egalitarian-democratic order”8 in four principal ways. First, they can allow policy to be better informed about the wishes of the public. Second, they can help to make representation more equal Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, p. 42. 8

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by promoting a more egalitarian distribution of resources through the pooling of resources of the less privileged. Third, they can encourage citizens to be better educated about the political process. Finally, they provide distinctive, non-state-based forms of governance.9 The last point suggests that, for Cohen and Rogers, associationism arises out of the same dilemma as their earlier pluralism: the success of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism had discredited reliance on the state, so associations became an important alternative source of radical aspirations. Throughout their long history of co-publications, Cohen and Rogers have advocated the ideal of equal citizenship within a democratic order. The first book that they wrote together, On Democracy, ends with the argument that Americans (and other nations) must choose to reject capitalist democracy and replace it with a “democratic conception of politics”10 that justifies itself according to the “principle of democratic legitimacy … [which] requires that individuals be free and equal in determining the conditions of their own association.”11 For Cohen and Rogers what would ground a pluralist society is equal inclusion in the political order, not equal ownership of the means of production or equal income. For this reason, Cohen and Rogers always focus on democratic inclusion and are widely seen as being deliberative democrats.12 In the mid 1990s, Cohen and Rogers began to focus heavily on associations in their work, publishing Associations and Democracy and a number of articles on the theme of associative democracy. Cohen and Rogers argue that secondary associations, such as trade unions, workers’ councils, neighborhood associations, and parent-teacher organizations, must be strengthened if the democratic state that they advocated in On Democracy can replace the capitalist democracy under which we live. The publication of Associations and Democracy indicated that American pluralists retain an interest in the labor movement and in trade unions. In Associations and Democracy, Cohen and Rogers noted that whereas political theorists have long been wary of the danger that “faction” might introduce distortions into the democratic process, students of

9 Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, pp. 42–44. 10 J. Cohen and J. Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 147. 11 Cohen and Rogers, On Democracy, p. 149. 12 See J. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by R. Goodin and P. Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 143–155; and J. Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Changing Boundaries of the Political, edited by S. Benhabib (Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 95–119.

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comparative politics had discovered that “certain forms of group organization play a central role in resolving problems of central governance, not in causing them.”13 Cohen and Rogers had come to believe that secondary associations were a key part of ensuring democratic inclusivity. Only in the presence of a “dense social infrastructure of secondary association and coordination” can alternatives to capitalist production be successful.14 Secondary associations provide a basis for cooperation among and between different levels of the social hierarchy that is not possible in the atomized world of capitalist industry. In other words, trade unions, workers’ guilds, and the like enable fairer negotiation between workers and employers than is possible if workers have to negotiate individually. Furthermore, an economy in which trade unions play a major part is one in which firms, workers, and government can decide upon issues of work organization, technology, and research in a more productive manner. Cohen and Rogers assert that associations are especially important in the context of late capitalism, in which there is “a need for new structures of citizen involvement in decision making.” Associations enable information to be disseminated among citizens more effectively and can help to enlist private actors in a regulatory capacity.15 The role of associations should be threefold and at three different levels of democratic governance. Associations help to formulate policy, to administer it, and to coordinate economic activity. Moreover, they can do this at the local, national, and regional levels.16 The latter fact is the important one for consideration of Cohen and Rogers, because it demonstrates that one of the virtues of associations for them is that it turns the attention of pluralists away from the central state and toward alternative means of redistributing power and resources. Their associationism also draws on similar themes to that of Young in that, by reducing the scope of the central state, it serves also to increase the possibility of citizen involvement in political and economic decision-making processes. So, in their work on associations, Cohen and Rogers combine traditional leftist concerns with those of contemporary radical pluralists. First, they draw on the history of the labor movement to uphold the importance of trade unions in ensuring fair negotiations between 13 See Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, p. 8; J. Cohen and J. Rogers, “Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance,” Politics and Society, 20 (1992), 394; and J. Cohen and J. Rogers, “Democracy and Associations,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 10 (1993), 282–312. 14 Cohen and Rogers, “Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance,” 395. 15 Ibid., 434. 16 Ibid., 434.

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workers and employers. Second, they emphasize the importance of including different voices in decision-making procedure and the fact that associations are a key means of doing just that. Third, they suggest that it is possible “to forge an egalitarian-democratic order without an oppressive state.”17 Young also advocated strengthening secondary associations, but the distinction between her work and that of Cohen and Rogers is not merely one of emphasis, because Cohen and Rogers focus on the traditional leftist concern with economic equality. For example, in On Democracy, one of the central differences between “capitalist democracy” and their political conception of democracy was that, in the former, political rights were “formal or procedural, and not substantive” because they “do not take into account in their own form and application the inequalities in the distribution of resources, characteristic of capitalism, which decisively affect the exercise of political rights.”18 On Democracy opens with a chapter detailing the “symptoms” of the American political malaise. The first three of the symptoms are “Economy,” “Standard of Living,” and “Wealth and Income Distribution.”19 Political symptoms are detailed later. In other words, for Cohen and Rogers, achieving a democracy in which citizens are included as free and equal members is about redistributing resources as well as accommodating difference. The combination of traditional leftist concern with equality and neopluralist accommodation of difference recurs in a number of volumes that Cohen and Rogers have co-edited for the New Democracy Forum, most strikingly in The New Inequality.20 In their preface to that book, Cohen and Rogers note that “the most pressing problem of domestic politics” is the growing economic inequality in the United States.21 The reason that inequality matters so much is that the economy is supposed to be a “fair system … It shouldn’t be a talent contest … we are not worried about all inequalities … but about those that are unfair.”22 Cohen and Rogers object to inequality on grounds that appear to have much in common with liberals such as John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin. Theirs is a form of luck egalitarianism. It is also one grounded on the democratic ethos that they share with Young. Economic inequality matters because it conflicts with the vision of the economy held by contemporary 17 Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, p. 90. 18 Cohen and Rogers, On Democracy, p. 50. 19 Ibid., pp. 20–32. 20 R. Freeman, The New Inequality: Creating Solutions for Poor America, edited by J.€Cohen and J. Rogers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 21 Freeman, The New Inequality, p. xv. 22 Ibid.

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Americans. We see a similar point in the preface to A Way Out, in which Cohen and Rogers write that the “United States … is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” They go on to argue that the state has an obligation to intervene in the inequalities that the ghetto makes manifest because it “is not an innocent bystander” in the creation of those inequalities.23 Cohen and Rogers are concerned about inequality because it violates the democratic ethos of the United States. The electoral success of the New Right prompted Cohen and Rogers to write two pamphlets attacking the policy of the Reagan administration in Central America.24 Our insistence that their concern with inequality is grounded on a democratic ethos should not be taken to imply that concern for justice stops at the territorial boundaries of the demos. Rather, the point of each pamphlet is to suggest that the features of US foreign policy to which radical pluralists are opposed have their roots in the domestic political order. Cohen and Rogers argue that, “if the basic structure of American politics did not fragment and discourage popular politics, public policies would be better. In addition to being a more democratic country, featuring wider participation and debate, the US would also be a saner and more humane one.”25 The drive toward changing US foreign policy is motivated by a combination of simple humanitarianism and despair at what that foreign policy says about the United States as a polity. That is why it is significant for them that “there is substantial public opposition in the US to both the foreign and domestic policies of the Reagan administration.”26 Cohen and Rogers do not object to US foreign policy because Central Americans are unequal with American citizens. Rather, they oppose US foreign policy because it reflects the fact that the United States is not governed by an inclusive and egalitarian democratic ethos and because, as a result of that failure of inclusivity, it is inhumane. So, for Cohen and Rogers, the United States ought to become a democracy rather than a capitalist democracy and ground its polity on the principle of democratic legitimacy such that all citizens are seen as free and equal members. Cohen and Rogers take it to be an important part 23 O. Fiss, A Way Out: America’s Ghettos and the Legacy of Racism, edited by J. Cohen, J.€Decker, and J. Rogers (Princeton University Press, 2003), p. ix. 24 J. Cohen and J. Rogers, Rules of the Game: American Politics and the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1986); and J. Cohen and J. Rogers, Inequity and Intervention: The Federal Budget and Central America (Boston: South End Press, 1986). 25 Cohen and Rogers, Rules of the Game, p. 3. 26 Cohen and Rogers, Inequity and Intervention, p. 3.

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of achieving that ethos that the citizens be more equal than they are in a capitalist democracy. For example, Cohen and Rogers insist that “the costs of group political activity should be publicly assumed.”27 This is to ensure that the principle of equal membership is made manifest in democratic institutions. That acknowledgment of the importance of fostering group activity in order to make it clear that all members are deemed equal is the closest that Cohen and Rogers get in On Democracy to their later associationism. By the early 1990s, their attention had shifted, because the lengthy period of Republican rule in the United States had exacerbated the exclusionary tendencies of American politics. This shows that the pluralism of Cohen and Rogers was shaped by the influence of neoliberalism on the American political landscape.

Difference theory: Iris Marion Young

The driving force behind Iris Marion Young’s adoption of a pluralist approach to radical politics was her involvement in the women’s movement and its debates on “the importance and difficulty of acknowledging differences of class, race, sexuality, age, ability, and culture among women.”28 For Young, the existence of structural differences in social position between social groups means that justice requires attending to group differences so as “to undermine oppression.”29 Developing a theme common to contemporary feminist literature, Young argued that blindness to group difference, starting with gender, but including race, sexuality, etc. does not result in the adoption of an impartial standpoint. Rather, the claims of “traditional ethics” to “universality and impartiality” masks the valorization of a set of activities dominated by (white, heterosexual, middle-class, middle-aged) men, such as “contract making” and “statecraft.”30 Most models of political communication privilege argument over modes of discourse more characteristic of excluded groups, such as rhetoric, narrative, and public address.31 27 Cohen and Rogers, On Democracy, p. 154. 28 I. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 13, 256–291. 29 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 3. See also I. Young, “Together in Difference: Transforming the Logic of Group Political Conflict,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, edited by W. Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 155–177. 30 P. DiQuinzio and I. Young, eds., Feminist Ethics and Social Policy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. vii; and I. Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory,” in Feminism as Critique, edited by S. Benhabib and D. Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 56–76. 31 I. Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2002) pp.€52–80.

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Young’s drive toward recognition of a plurality of modes of expression and structures of justice was further fueled by her adoption of the methods of critical theory,32 and by her commitment to the principles of deliberative democracy, with its emphasis on inclusion.33 These traditions of thought led Young away from a focus on distribution toward concern with oppression,34 structural injustice, political (as opposed to legal) responsibility,35 and democratic inclusivity and made her more concerned with the lived experience of equality than with the philosophical concept. Many of her works start with anecdotes about her own political activism: she begins Inclusion and Democracy by discussing her involvement in attempts to establish a Police Civilian Review Board in Pittsburgh and she begins “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice” with an account of the plight of a single mother attempting to find housing.36 This interest led Young to focus on the particulars of an equal society, such as urban living and civil society, and to insist that some form of global democracy that did not override cultural difference was a requirement of justice.37 In each case, Young demonstrates the altered nature of the concerns of difference theorists€– to ensure inclusion, not to promote redistribution of resources. Young argued that accounts of social justice that focus on distribution are of only limited use for radical demands because in conceptualizing rights and opportunities as distributable, they downplay the “institutional and social bases of these values.”38 Such theories tend to be overly individualistic or atomistic and thus cannot account for power relations, because “power is a relation rather than a thing.”39 Individual people do not possess power as they possess money. Rather, certain social practices tend to establish relationships in which groups of people are relatively empowered and others disempowered. Young’s involvement in feminist politics made the importance of this insight

32 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 10–11; and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 5–7. 33 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 11–14. 34 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 15–65. 35 I. Young, Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice, The Lindley Lecture (Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 2003). 36 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 1–3. See also the discussion of the housing problem facing single mothers in Young, Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice, pp. 1–3. 37 On urban democracy see Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 226–256 and Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 196–235. On global justice, see Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 236–276. 38 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 30. 39 Ibid., p. 31.

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paramount to her in two ways. First, the movement for women’s equality vis-à-vis men was not centrally concerned with the distribution of resources. Second, as noted earlier, the relationship among the women in the women’s movement was defined by social characteristics such as sexuality or race that the “distributive paradigm” did not address. The difference between Young’s difference theory and the pluralism of Cohen and Rogers is made particularly clear in her response to Associations and Democracy. Although sympathetic to Cohen and Rogers, Young argued that a “serious weakness” of their view is that they “do not seek to build on and deepen existing social forms in the United States.”40 Cohen and Rogers do not do so because they are looking for class-based associations, such as unions, which are not the dominant type of association extant in the United States. This “failure is symptomatic of a more general bias of omission … Their model assumes economic class as the primary social group division.”41 Young argues that Cohen and Rogers all but ignore “non-economic issues of cultural meaning or social relations,” even though the organization of institutions in such a way that “social groups can deliberate about the policy conditions for promoting sexual, cultural, and social freedom and respect for difference” is equally important for social justice.42 Where Cohen and Rogers, as associationists, continue to rely on the economic redistribution that trade unions can help to effect, difference theorists such as Young replace concern with redistribution with accommodation of differences between social groups. Her response to Cohen and Rogers is thus emblematic of her thought, because it relies upon her rejection of the distributive paradigm. Young developed two key theoretical responses to the rejection of the distributive paradigm. First, in Justice and the Politics of Difference, she developed the notion of oppression to highlight the injustices of contemporary American society and to bring out the importance of “an enabling conception of justice” that would combat oppression.43 On this account, justice can be done only if members of excluded groups are capable both individually and collectively of developing their capacities and getting involved in democratic processes. In later work, the conception of justice as enabling lies behind the insistence on the importance of acknowledging all modes of discourse and not simply

40 Young, “Social Groups in Associative Democracy,” in Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy, p. 208. 41 Young, “Social Groups,” p. 208. 42 Ibid., pp. 212–213. 43 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 39.

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argument.44 Injustice and oppression are not just economic but structural matters: “oppression refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions … We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws.”45 The second response highlights the fact of structural injustice. These are “harms that come to people as a result of structural processes in which many people participate … [Often] it is not possible to trace the specific causal relation between … particular actions and some particular part of the outcome.”46 Injustices are structural when they are not caused by specific actions, and the legalistic model of responsibility, which assigns liability for particular faults, cannot be applied. In such cases, we must collectively assume political responsibility for the injustice. The cure for structural injustice is to adopt a form of justice that is enabling, because only when everyone is included in the political process and is capable of developing their capacities will structural processes of exclusion be successfully combated. According to Young, the process of ensuring inclusion goes far beyond changing the rules of engagement. Her approach to inclusion mirrors her objection to the distributive paradigm. As she points out, a frequent criticism of “actually existing democracies” that satisfy basic conditions of inclusivity such as holding free elections is that they are “dominated by groups of elites that have unequal influence over decisions.”47 It is to combat the problem of formal inclusion masking the reality of exclusion that Young focuses on the importance of styles of discourse. In doing so, she develops an account of inclusivity that uses a twofold categorization: namely, she distinguishes between “external” and “internal” exclusion. People are excluded externally if they are “purposely or inadvertently left out of … discussion and decision-making.”48 They are subjected to internal exclusion when their modes of discourse are such that dominant groups do not take them seriously.49 Exclusion came to Young’s attention because of the way in which group differences operate so as to systematically ensure that certain groups of people are disregarded or demeaned when they attempt to participate in I. Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). See, in particular, chapter 3, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” pp. 60–74. 45 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 41. 46 Young, Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice, p. 7. 47 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 11, 133–141. 48 Ibid., pp. 53–54. 49 Ibid., p. 55. 44

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politics. She pointed out that certain models of deliberative democracy “tend to restrict their conception of proper political communication to arguments, the making of assertions and propositions, and providing reasons for them that they claim ought to be acceptable to others.”50 These models systematically exclude certain groups from decisionÂ�making procedures because they do not make speeches in modes consonant with the model’s conception of appropriate political argumentation. In particular, speakers may use rhetorical devices or display emotion. To combat this form of exclusion, Young argues that inclusive modes of political discourse must expand their conception of political communication to include greetings, rhetorical devices, and narratives. Only then can participants to the discussion have sufficient understanding of each other’s lives for discussion to proceed inclusively. Young’s self-definition as someone working in the tradition of critical theory, repeated in both Justice and the Politics of Difference and Inclusion and Democracy, accentuated her attention to difference. As she puts it, “critical theory is a normative reflection that is historically and socially contextualized. [It] rejects as illusory the effort to construct a universal normative system.”51 In Inclusion and Democracy, she takes critical theory to be “historically situated normative analysis and argument. Inclusion and Democracy … defends principles which I argue best express ideals of a democratic politics in which citizens try to solve shared problems justly.”52 Young’s theorizing aimed to reflect the particularities of the society within which it was developed and to defend democratic ideals that foster inclusion and participation in politics. Young’s account of normative, critical theory leaves space for difference between societies. She sees political theorists as engaged critics and not detached moralists. However, Young also argued that pluralism between societies is limited by a thin sense of the requirements of international justice. This is alluded to briefly in Justice and the Politics of Difference,53 one of her early books (published in 1990), developed at greater length in Inclusion and Democracy,54 a decade later, and becomes the central theme of Global Challenges, which was published posthumously in 2007.55 This is because, as Young noted, the theme of international justice was new to political theory at the time that Justice and 50 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 56. 51 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 5. 52 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 10. 53 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 257–260. 54 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 236–276. 55 I. Young, Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination, and Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

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the Politics of Difference was published,56 whereas by the time of her death it was one of the discipline’s hot topics. It also reflects a dilemma facing pluralists following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasing globalization of the world economy. Young’s argument, which is in its essence that the nation-state system is itself a form of exclusion and that given global interdependence “obligations of justice extend globally,”57 is a response to the dilemma of how to accommodate difference while combating oppression. Young did not embrace cosmopolitan governance,58 but put her demands in terms of enhancing institutional involvement and inclusion. Thus Young’s emphasis on bringing a variety of voices to the democratic table is preserved in the international arena. Young straddles the divide between difference theory and associationism. She regarded the associations of civil society as institutions that are “crucial for democracy.”59 Associations are a means of fostering civic virtue. Engagement in local associations enhances citizens’ ability to become the enabled beings that Young wishes us to be: “Civil associations deepen democracy and promote self-development because they are relatively autonomous from both state and economy.”60 The ideals of deliberative democracy are central tenets of Young’s thought, although she rejects accounts of deliberative democracy that privilege argument. Her commitment to deliberative democracy stems primarily from the role that she sees it playing in promoting the ideals of self-development and self-determination.61 Deliberative democracy is an enabling conception of democratic government suited to combating structural injustice. Involvement in the secondary associations of civil society serves to make it more enabling, which is why Young joins other American pluralists in advocating enhanced involvement in such associations. Young was a difference theorist, but her pluralism was more institutionally focused than that of Mouffe, as shown by this nod toward associationism.

Blurring the line: Michael Walzer

As we saw in the discussion of Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, and again in the account of Iris Marion Young, American pluralists tend to adopt 56 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 257: “Normative theorizing about international justice is in its infancy … The literature on international justice that has emerged so far, however, tends to fall within the distributive paradigm.” 57 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 236. 58 Ibid., p. 260. 59 Ibid., pp. 188–195. 60 Ibid., p. 189. 61 Ibid., pp. 31–33.

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strands of both associationism and difference theory. In the case of Michael Walzer, the strands are so intermingled that it is impossible to state definitively which category he should be placed in. It might make sense to talk of an early Walzer, up to about 1990, who was an associationist, and a later Walzer whose engagement with multiculturalism and the “politics of difference” moved him into the difference theory camp, but this account would by no means remove all the ambiguities in an analysis of his work. Walzer combines focus on the secondary associations of civil society with attention to the problems raised by ethnic and cultural difference. Michael Walzer’s pluralism must be understood as the result of two dilemmas facing the American Left at different points in time. The first, which we shall argue was primarily influential in the development of Walzer’s acknowledgment of the importance of associations (but also led him to recognize the importance of accommodating difference), was the dilemma that the American Left faced in the 1970s, when the demise in movement politics was almost immediately followed by the rise of the New Right and of Reaganomics. The second was the fall of the Iron Curtain, which was influential in leading Walzer to a new line of research that focused on the politics of difference (as well as on both civil society and its secondary associations).62 We take Walzer to be an important pluralist both because of the theoretical moves that he makes in his political theory, and because of the influence on him of (and his role within) the magazine Dissent, which we situate within the tradition of American radical democracy.63 Walzer, now the editor of that magazine, has worked on it since the 1950s.64 To see why the primary influence in the development of Walzer’s pluralism, and in particular of its associative aspects, was the dilemma that the American Left faced in the 1970s given the rise of the New Right and Reaganomics, let us consider briefly Walzer’s application of his argument about the spheres of justice to the case of medical treatment in the United States.65 According to Walzer, universal healthcare 62 In a sense, Walzer’s position on civil society was anticipated in his 1983 book Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), in which Walzer argued that society ought to provide institutional channels for the expression of difference (p. 313). 63 On American radical democracy, see M. Stears, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton University Press, 2010). 64 It is also worth noting that Walzer is also a contributing editor to the New Republic and that his work on that magazine is almost as long-standing as is his involvement with Dissent. 65 This is an argument that he repeated, in different forms, in Spheres of Justice and in “The Long-Term Perspective,” in Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (January–February 1986), 8–14.

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is one of the requirements of justice in the contemporary United States. That is to say, on what he takes to be the most convincing interpretation of the shared understandings of our society, long life is a good sufficiently important to American citizens so as to demand that the state do what it can to provide for it or ensure that secondary associations do so. Walzer argues that justice requires attending to the shared understandings of particular communities, so as universal provision of health care is in accord with our shared understandings, justice requires such provision. In medieval Europe, on the other hand, states would have been under no obligation to provide medical treatment, because longevity did not have the importance in medieval Europe that it has today, but they would have been required to ensure social provision of religious instruction, because of the importance of eternal life to the Europeans of the day. According to Walzer, what is unjust about leaving medical provision to the market is that doing so misunderstands the type of good that healthcare is in today’s society. It is not something that “money can buy” because, on our understanding of it, healthcare is something that should be available to the sick and not to the wealthy. Allowing financial resources to determine who receives treatment is, therefore, to allow an illegitimate boundary crossing between the sphere of commodities and that of welfare. Once we consider the type of good that medicine is, Walzer argues, we will realize that its provision should be socially guaranteed. Walzer’s argument about healthcare is an example of what we might call his “internal” pluralism€ – the idea that societies must be internally differentiated€ – because it stipulates that different social sectors should be governed by different principles of distribution. It also appears as the key example of how Walzer’s pluralism developed in response to the dilemma he faced as a leftist in the era of Reaganomics. He states this directly in “The Long-Term Perspective.”66 In the 1980s, a challenge to neoliberalism on its own turf€– namely, economics€– did not seem fruitful, so Walzer turned instead to counter market economics by arguing that it overreached itself. Market principles are appropriate in the market, but not everywhere. Walzer’s argument about healthcare is a defense of equality but not just of equality. In defending equality, Walzer also has to 66 It is important, “in these days of Reaganomics, when we seem so far away from anything like [a national health service], to continue to suggest it as an appropriate model, to keep alive some coherent idea of what it might mean for the government to attend to the medical interests … of its citizens.” See Walzer, “The Long-Term Perspective,” 11.

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defend pluralism. He moves from opposing “monopoly” of particular goods to opposing “dominance” on the part of those who have a (perhaps legitimate) monopoly of goods such as money or political power.67 The move toward pluralism allows Walzer to espouse many key radical causes without having to adopt a form of Keynesian economics or rely on a form of statism. For this reason, Walzer argues that although American shared understandings mandate universal healthcare, secondary associations such as religious organizations should provide much of that healthcare. The argument of Spheres of Justice looks somewhat like an associationist one: the market must be constrained by the secondary associations of civil society if we are to ensure internal pluralism. The fall of the Soviet Union was influential in leading Walzer to a new line of research that focused more closely on civil society, while the simultaneous wave of immigration to the United States brought to his attention the politics of difference. In a sense, such an argument was already anticipated in Spheres of Justice, in which Walzer argued that if there were no shared understandings then justice requires “that the society be faithful to the disagreements, providing institutional channels for their expression, adjudicative mechanisms, and alternative distributions.”68 What this argument, and its later development in such works as What It Means to be an American69 show is that Walzer is far from being unaware of the existence of social difference and disagreement. Rather, he believes that differences do not mean that we cannot live together and that disagreement usually operates within the framework of a set of shared understandings, because the shared understandings may be interpreted in myriad different ways.70 In his account of difference, Walzer’s pluralism takes an “external” form as well as the previously noted “internal” one. Walzer is an external pluralist in the sense that he insists that liberal and neoliberal attempts to find “objective truths, ‘true meaning,’ ‘right answers,’ ‘the 67 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 10–13. 68 Ibid., p. 313. 69 M. Walzer, What It Means to be an American (New York: Marsilio, 1992). 70 On this, see M. Walzer, “Shared Meanings in a Poly-Ethnic Democratic Setting: A Response,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 22(2) (1994), 401–405. The second chapter of M. Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) is devoted to making a similar argument, albeit without the focus on ethnic difference. In it, Walzer argues that any set of shared understandings will contain within it the tools needed for a radical critique, because each ruling class will have to justify itself using principles that imply that its interests are in the interests of everyone. Thus, ruling classes can easily be exposed as hypocrites when they do not live up to the principles that they claim to be guided by.

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philosopher’s stone,’” and the like are misguided.71 According to Walzer, “philosophers have no special rights in the political community”72 and egalitarian philosophers should take their role to be not to legislate but to “provide a persuasive interpretation of democratic citizenship” to citizens, “who rightly have the authoritative … word.”73 Justice is not determined by philosophical proof but by democratic argument that relies upon particular traditions within different communities. The implication is that political structures are rightly different in different social settings. What is right for one polity at one time may not be for others (or for its own descendants). Walzer argues that justice consists in an interpretation of the shared understandings of particular communities. That is why Walzer is an external pluralist.74 More importantly, despite his argument that communities share a set of understandings, Walzer is a pluralist in his analysis of individual societies, and most notably of the United States, which is the focus of much of his work. This is so in several senses. First, in Spheres of Justice, Walzer argues that there can be no single set of distributive principles, because different goods have different meanings owing to the different sectors€– or spheres€– of society to which they belong. Given his further argument that goods must be distributed for reasons internal to their sphere, it follows that different goods must be distributed according to different distributive principles. Furthermore, what makes for a just distribution changes over time, as the shared understandings that determine justice in distribution are themselves continually being transformed.75 Like Young, Walzer focuses on the lived experience of equality and not the abstract entity. This is made manifest by his methodological writings, in which he argues that political theorists should interpret the understandings of the community to which they belong rather than 71 M. Walzer, “Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory, 9 (1981), 379. “Philosophy and Democracy” is reproduced in M. Walzer, Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory, edited by David Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1–21. 72 Walzer, “Philosophy and Democracy,” 399. 73 M. Walzer, “Justice Here and Now,” in Thinking Politically, p. 80. 74 It is worth noting that, starting in the late 1980s, Walzer began to advance a series of arguments that set limits to this pluralism. Most notably, in Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), he argued that a thin set of moral principles was universally understandable and applicable, albeit alongside a much thicker set of moral injunctions that depend on the particular understandings of different communities. Thick and Thin is also worth noting because, prior to being published in book form, Walzer delivered it as a series of lectures at the University of Paris and that he was invited to do so by none other than Chantal Mouffe. 75 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 7–10 and passim.

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seeking to invent or discover new moral principles.76 As each community will have a different set of shared understandings, the task of political theorists will in each society be a different one. Related to this point is an argument made by Walzer that, again, closely shadows Young. Both Walzer and Young argue that standard liberal accounts of political debate mistakenly assume that deliberation or argument is the crucial means by which democratic decisions are reached and thus downplay the importance of such things as passion, rhetoric, and narrative.77 Thus Walzer is an internal pluralist for the additional reason that he maintains that a plethora of forms of persuasion are appropriate to democratic discussion and decision-making, rather than simply the disembodied and dispassionate styles of argumentation focused on by liberalism. Walzer argues that there are two major alternatives for countries seeking to manage ethnic and religious difference. The first is what he calls “the new tribalism” and is appropriate to countries that were traditionally nation-states, while the second is “multiculturalism” and fitting to immigrant societies such as the United States.78 (Walzer also cites Canada, Brazil, and New Zealand as immigrant societies.)79 In the former, it is likely that immigrant groups will be incorporated as a minority; in the latter, they will probably become territorially dispersed.80 Walzer argues that political identification with the state will be stronger in the former nation-states and that, as a result, individuals will have a more direct relationship with state apparatus. The problem for such states is to ensure that minority rights are protected. In multicultural societies, however, citizenship is “not very robust,”81 which means that the secondary organizations of civil society will have to play a greater role in the lives of the state’s citizens. In Walzer’s view, then, the welfare state must allow for provision by religious and other voluntary groups rather than relying entirely on state provision.82 Internal 76 This is the argument of both Interpretation and Social Criticism and The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 77 M. Walzer, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and “Deliberation, and What Else?” in Thinking Politically, pp. 134–146. Cf. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 52–80. 78 Walzer, What It Means to be an American, p. 4. 79 Ibid., p. 9. 80 Ibid., pp. 9–12. 81 Ibid., p. 10. 82 This is an argument that Walzer has made on various occasions in his career. Perhaps the most succinct and yet thorough accounts of his position are in M. Walzer, “Toward a Theory of Social Assignments,” in American Society: Public and Private Responsibilities, edited by Winthrop Knowlton and Richard Zechhauser (Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 79–96 and in M. Walzer, “Socializing the Welfare State,”

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pluralism will follow, as, for example, different neighborhood organizations offer welfare services along different lines because of the shifting local majorities in each area. So, Walzer’s adoption of a type of pluralism in his writings on civil society is, in part, the product of dilemmas raised for the left by the decline of the Soviet Union and a marked fear of overly statist positions.83 Walzer’s difference theory also arises from the same dilemma that led him toward a form of associationism: namely, the strength of the New Right and the concomitant weakness of the left. In On Toleration, Walzer reiterates the claim made in What It Means to be an American, that there is no one correct approach to the question of cultural accommodation: “we can never be consistent defenders of multiculturalism or individualism; we can never be simply communitarians or liberals, or modernists or postmodernists, but must be now one, now the other, as the balance requires.”84 According to Walzer, the reason that multiculturalism seems so problematic in the contemporary world is “because of the weakness of social democracy (in this country, left liberalism).”85 Walzer moves toward a pluralist approach to the question of culture€– one that leaves open space for the associations of civil society, as well as for government regulation, and that fosters different approaches to cultural accommodation in both different countries and different regions€– in part because of the political weakness of the left and the strength of neoliberalism. More than any of the other pluralists, Walzer is both a difference theorist and an associationist. That is largely because his pluralism emerged out of two markedly different dilemmas. The rise of neoliberalism led him primarily toward associationism, because that offered a means of enabling social provision of welfare without reliance on the central state. The decline of the Soviet Union pushed him toward difference theory because it made him consider how different states might handle questions of cultural and ethnic accommodation.

in Democracy and the Welfare State, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 13–26. In his words, the welfare state must sit alongside the “welfare society.” 83 As Richard Arneson points out in “Against ‘Complex’ Equality,” in Pluralism, Justice, and Equality, edited by D. Miller and M. Walzer (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 226–252, Walzer has long been wary of “statism,” partly (perhaps) because of his close friendship with the libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick (p. 229). 84 M. Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 112. 85 Walzer, On Toleration, p. 112.

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Britain

In this section, we discuss Paul Hirst’s associationism and Chantal Mouffe’s defense of agonistic democracy. Hirst drew on pluralist socialism because of the dilemma posed by the collapse of Soviet communism and the success of neoliberalism. Responding to the same dilemmas, Mouffe draws on a tradition much closer to the American democratic ethos. Like the Americans, her primary concern is with recognizing diversity and ensuring that members of different groups not be oppressed. Where she differs from American difference theory is in her belief that agonism is an inevitable part of contemporary political life. In two senses, British pluralists are part of a tradition particular to their country. First, unlike American pluralists, the British operate within a tradition in which labor is the principal cause of political radicals. That is why the collapse of Soviet communism is for them more significant than the “pastoral retreat” of the New Left. Second, when they move to recognition, British pluralists do so with greater awareness of what they are abandoning. That is why Mouffe argues that the rise of neoliberalism means that, rather than seeking to develop more institutions to empower workers and associations at the expense of the state, the left ought to focus simply on preventing further dismantling of existing institutions.

Associationism: Paul Q. Hirst

Paul Hirst was one of the main social scientists to champion Althusser in Britain. His early work in collaboration with Barry Hindess drew on Althusser to defend an anti-empiricist, anti-teleological, and antifunctionalist form of Marxism. Yet over time he began to move from the structural determinism of Althusser to a view of social and political processes as specific and contingent.86 Hindess and Hirst drew on earlier critiques of Stalinism, especially the rejection of economism, to defend a form of causal pluralism. “What we are challenging is not merely the economic monist causality of Marxism, but the very pertinence of all such general categories of causality.”87 By the early 1980s, their Althusserianism had not only more or less collapsed on itself, it had come to seem irrelevant to the struggle with neoliberalism. Hirst 86 The shift is from B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975) to A. Cutler, B. Hindess, P. Hirst, and A. Hussain, Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1977–1978). 87 Cutler et al., Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, vol. 1, p. 128.

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rediscovered the British pluralists as inspiration to challenge neoliberalism, rethinking socialist historiography, and defending associationism. In 1989 Hirst published a collection of the pluralist works of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis, and Harold Laski.88 The pluralists were of particular relevance at a time when the Conservative government was centralizing state power and eroding democracy. Pluralism offered a pertinent critique of the sovereign state. The historic concept of the sovereign state violates freedom, requiring the people to hand over full control of the mechanisms of power. The rise of liberal democracy did not establish political freedom. It merely transferred absolute power from the monarch to the majority. The majority can become a tyrant limiting the freedom of individuals and associations. Freedom requires not a sovereign state but pluralism. Hirst illustrates the pluralists’ arguments by relating them to Thatcher’s Britain.89 The Conservative government’s attacks on the trade unions violate freedom. Trade unions are a leading example of a corporate life that rises from freedom of association. The members of a union enter it freely. Freedom depends on self-governance in such associations. Freedom is undermined if any association has to submit to the external rule of another. State regulation of trade unions undermines freedom by denying one association the right to self-rule, that is, by making one association dependent on another. State regulation of unions is a form of tyranny in which the majority imposes its will on an unwilling minority, curtailing their freedom. The neoliberal attack on the labor movement inspired Hirst to rediscover pluralism. The Thatcher government described the power of the trade unions as a threat to the sovereignty of the British state. Trade unions were not only obstacles to free market economics; they were a special interest opposing the general will. The Conservative government thus had political as well as economic reasons to restrict the power of the unions. The government passed legislation to ban secondary picketing and to require unions to hold secret ballots before striking. Then the government planned for and forcefully pressed a confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers by mobilizing police and restricting the welfare rights of striking workers and their dependents.90 Hirst responded by opposing sovereignty and asserting the rights of associations such as trade unions. 88 P. Hirst, ed., The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis, and H. J. Laski (New York: Routledge, 1989). 89 It is telling that he turned to pluralism immediately after writing a diagnosis of Thatcherism. See P. Hirst, After Thatcher (London: Collins, 1989). 90 S. Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 1994).

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Neoliberalism undermined the dominant socialist historiography in both its laborist and Marxist forms.91 Socialist historiography narrated the rise of labor in reaction to the innate properties of capitalism. Initial resistance to capitalism was naïve Luddism. Thereafter labor became conscious of itself as a class, formed unions and political parties, captured state power, pursued redistributive policies, and built the welfare state. The historical narrative was of linear progress. The key topics were class, production, the labor movement, and the state as an agent of socio-economic transformation. However, as the Thatcher government attacked the unions and promoted free markets, so, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s famous phrase, “the forward march of labor” was “halted.”92 Hirst drew on the pluralists, therefore, not only to defend trade unions but also to rework socialist historiography. In the 1990s he presented pluralism as a historical response to the rise of neoliberalism and the collapse of communism.93 Hirst followed earlier socialists in arguing that capitalism produces exploitation and poverty and also runs up against its own limits. Capitalism leads to gross inequalities, especially on a global scale, and it tends to result in the boom-bust cycles and stagnation that beset developed liberal states. According to Hirst, the grand ideologies and state formations of the twentieth century had been attempts to deal with the inherent problems of capitalism. Communism tried to do so through collective control of production and state planning. Liberalism did so through representative democracy and the market. However, Hirst believed that both communism and liberalism failed to cure capitalism’s ills. The failure of communism appeared in the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the inability of intellectuals to define a true socialism. The failure of liberalism became clear as globalization undermined Keynesianism and revealed the implausibility of liberal assumptions about the state.94 After World War II, liberal attempts to ameliorate the ills of capitalism relied on Keynesianism to prevent unemployment and to promote 91 For Hirst’s early engagement with historiographical issues see P. Hirst, Marxism and Historical Writing (London: Routledge, 1985). On the history of socialist historiography see M. Bevir and F. Trentmann, “Critique with Capitalism: Historiographical Problems, Theoretical Perspectives,” in Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America, edited by M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp.€1–25. 92 E. Hobsbawm, M. Jacques, and F. Mulhern, The Forward March of Labour Halted (London: New Left Books, 1981). 93 P. Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); and P. Hirst, From Statism to Pluralism: Democracy, Civil Society, and Global Politics (London: UCL Press, 1997). 94 Hirst later wrote critical studies of globalization. See P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

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the growth necessary to fund welfare services and redistributive policies. Hirst argues that globalization makes Keynesianism nigh on impossible. The state can no longer exercise effective control over the economy. State policies are at the mercy of global finance capital. As capital becomes increasingly mobile, so aggregate demand increasingly depends on factors beyond a state’s territory. Liberal states have ceased to try to manage demand, concentrating instead on ensuring their economy is attractive to international investors. Related considerations preclude liberals addressing global inequalities. Redistribution and aid to impoverished states become increasingly problematic, because donor states fear a large boost in aid will not only be unpopular among their domestic publics but also produce inflationary effects in their domestic economies. Hirst argues that liberalism has also failed politically. The liberal state rests on assumptions that no longer hold true. Globalization and new forms of governance reveal the limitations of the liberal state. For a start, liberalism assumes the state is sovereign in that it controls activities in its territory. Liberalism depends on politicians being able to legislate effectively for a given territory in order, for example, to ameliorate the effects of poverty and inequality. But Hirst argues that states are increasingly unable to exercise effective control over activities within their borders. The proliferation of sub-state, non-state, and supra-state agents siphons away power from the center. Transnational flows and offshore activities are difficult to regulate. In addition, liberalism assumes that a representative democracy can express the will and embody the freedom of citizens. But Hirst argues that this assumption too is now untenable. Representative democracy simply is not representative.95 Policy is made and implemented by large hierarchical bureaucracies as much as by representative assemblies. These bureaucracies are not representative, and indeed are often unresponsive or only minimally responsive to representative assemblies. Besides, even if representative assemblies did exercise effective control over policy formation and implementation, they would not protect the freedom of citizens. Here Hirst repeats the general point behind his analysis of the fate of trade unions under Thatcher’s government. Representative assemblies enable majorities to control the entire apparatus of government, silencing and ruling over the rest of the population, preventing them from ruling themselves, and eroding freedom. So, for Hirst, communism and liberalism arose as responses to ills of capitalism, but they failed to cure those ills. Hirst also argues that 95 Compare P. Hirst, Representative Democracy and its Limits (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

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the grand questions posed by capitalism are no longer the only ones we need to address. Poverty and inequality remain important. Yet citizens are also worried about racism, gender issues, the environment, and lifestyles. Pluralism appears, therefore, as a way of tackling long-standing concerns about poverty and freedom and the concerns brought to the fore by new social movements. Hirst’s pluralism responds to the historic concerns of socialists with capitalism and poverty while allowing for both the failure of communism and the rise on the Left of new social movements. His associationism emphasizes an individual’s right to free association and the right of associations to self-government provided only that they do not interfere with the right of other associations to exist.96 The state should restrict the power of associations only to preserve the freedom of individuals and associations. While Hirst clearly draws on earlier pluralists, he selects from their ideas and amends them in ways that reflect his revised socialist historiography. So, he considers and rejects several pluralist claims. He dismisses as irrelevant the argument that people have a natural propensity for groups: just because something is natural does not make it desirable. He rejects the claim that associations can demand more of their members than can states: freedom requires that all associations have open entry and exit. He rejects the claim that the state is just like any other organization: the state is above organizations, regulating their affairs and enforcing peaceful relations among them. He also rejects metaphysical accounts of associations as possessing real corporeal identities: associations are not entities in themselves; they consist of the relationships among their members. So, for Hirst, associationism is less about metaphysics than the historic socialist aim of meeting human needs while defending freedom. Associationism is meant to meet human needs in a way communism and liberalism failed to do. Hirst’s main claim is simply that society will prosper if voluntary associations perform its main functions. Individuals can satisfy their needs and develop themselves only in associations. Tellingly, Hirst gives the example of workers who get good wages and treatment only by joining trade unions. Associationism is also meant here to preserve freedom against the kinds of attacks the Conservative government launched on the trade unions. Hirst’s claim here is, as we saw earlier, that a central state with full control over force and law can arbitrarily limit the rights of individuals including their right to free association. The freedom of self-rule in association 96 Hirst, Associative Democracy.

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depends on the existence of a pluralist system that limits the power of any single group. Associational democracy meets human needs and protects freedom by empowering voluntary groups, limiting authority, and enhancing communication. Hirst wants to empower voluntary associations so that they gradually become the primary mechanism for the distribution of economic and social goods. The central state should cede functions to voluntary associations and foster mechanisms by which these associations might raise funds. The central state should also withdraw from its role as a primary association. We should move from a system in which the state is primary in that it allows other organizations, to a system in which other organizations are primary and the state simply funds and promote these organizations. Hirst wants to limit authority by restricting the geographical range and bureaucratic size of the central state. As the attitudes of citizens vary with their locality, so the organs of government should limit themselves to such localities. Besides, dividing the central state into small local units helps to prevent the anti-democratic effects of a centralized bureaucracy. Local governments foster responsiveness and liberty. Finally, Hirst wants to enhance communication as an alternative to representation as a basis for democratic decision-making. Democracy depends not only on elections but, at least as importantly, on a continuous flow of information. Democracy needs the interested parties both to inform decision-making and to be informed about decisions. The central state would shrink in an associational democracy, but it would not disappear. The state should still provide the legal framework in which associations function and the legal framework should embody certain principles. For a start, individuals should be free to join and leave associations. No association may prevent people from joining or compel people to stay. An association can establish conditions of membership, but these conditions will be legitimate only if they are matters of choice. So, the Catholic Church can make membership conditional on accepting the principles of the Church, but a group cannot be exclusively white, since race is not a choice. Another principle covers the education and protection of children. Until a certain age, children cannot make sensible choices by themselves. Children need to be protected until they can make such choices. The final principle rules out associations whose goals involve “abrogating human rights or subverting the constitution.”97 The existence of a state to enforce these legal principles requires that it also be empowered to raise funds through taxes. 97 Hirst, Associative Democracy, p. 58.

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Hirst clearly describes associational democracy with certain types of groups in mind. He draws his inspiration from the kinds of groups that had long inspired British radicals: churches, guilds, trade unions, and friendly societies. Whig pluralists such as Figgis drew on a romantic medievalism to present the church and guilds as part of a kind of idyll that pre-dated the rise of capitalism.98 Socialists such as the Webbs presented the trade unions, friendly societies, and consumer cooperatives as seedbeds for the flowering of socialist ideas and practices.99 Hirst drew on these traditions. Churches illustrate the crucial role of membership in individual lives. Praying alone is not as comforting or uplifting as praying with others and churches generally respond to social problems by, for example, feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. The guilds protected their individual members in a way that the individuals could not do on their own. The guild system thereby shaped the social order, providing a non-statist response to socio-economic problems. Trade unions create benefits for their members since collective bargaining is far better than individual negotiation when it comes to improving wages and working conditions. Finally, the friendly societies illustrate how voluntary associations may take on functions now associated with the welfare state. Groups of workers might contribute voluntarily to collective insurance funds against unemployment and disability.

Difference theory: Chantal Mouffe

Socialists such as Hirst drew on traditions of pluralist socialism to respond to the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberalism. They presented guilds, unions, and cooperatives as vital for freedom and material well-being. Other socialists responded to much the same dilemmas by turning to a different tradition€– a tradition that had more to do with a democratic ethos than institutional arrangements and voluntary associations. Chantal Mouffe exemplifies this other strand in the revival of radical pluralism. Mouffe studied at the University of Louvain before going to Paris where she took a seminar with Althusser. Like many socialists of the time, she oscillated between Althusser and Gramsci as sources of inspiration in avoiding the determinism and economism of the classical Marxism tarred by the moral bankruptcy of Stalinism. Her first major publication was an edited volume on Gramsci and Marxist Theory.100 Mouffe 98 E.g. J. Figgis, Churches and the Modern State (London: Longmans, 1913). 99 E.g. S. Webb and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, 1920). 100 C. Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge, 1979).

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distinguishes there between two aspects of economism. One issue is the relation of structure to superstructure. Mouffe praises Gramsci for his refusal to see ideology as merely epiphenomenal. The second aspect of economism is, according to Mouffe, the claim that superstructures are determined by the position of subjects. Here Mouffe turns not to Gramsci’s humanism but to Althusserian themes such as conjunctures, the overdetermination of contradictions, and the role of ideologies in the production of subjects. She endorses the structuralist claim that social agents are not the source of consciousness but mere passive supports of structures. The result is a non-reductionist theory of ideology. Today Mouffe is best known for her work with Ernesto Laclau, notably Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Their post-Marxism uses Gramscian terms while apparently replacing the historicist and humanist content that Gramsci gave to these terms with content indebted to structuralist themes that echoed on in post-structuralism. Mouffe’s democratic pluralism is an attempt to give post-Marxism a normative agenda. Laclau and Mouffe were relative latecomers to the world of dissociating Marxism from foundationalism and essentialism. Like the New Left, like Althusserians such as Hindess and Hirst, and like cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, they reject Marxist theories that privilege the economic (rather than the ideological) and social class (rather than made identities). The novelty of Laclau and Mouffe’s work arguably consists, therefore, in their analyzing discourses in terms of the quasistructural properties of signs, and especially in the way they trace the relations and properties of signs and discourses not to class or other social conflicts but to a quasi-structural psychology associated with Jacques Lacan. In doing so, they redefine hegemony to evoke a submerged strand of left-wing thought that resists essentialism. Gramsci used hegemony to refer to class domination through ideology: a class could establish an ideological hegemony such that its dominance rested on moral consensus. Gramsci implied that bourgeois hegemony explains why the workers consent to capitalism and so why there has not been a revolution. Laclau and Mouffe, in contrast, use the concept of hegemony less to think about the role of ideologies in a capitalist system defined by means and relations of production than actively to dismiss social theories based on economic and class analysis. Once Laclau and Mouffe empty Gramsci’s concept of hegemony of its Marxist content, they can suggest that it has acted as what Jacques Derrida calls a supplement. Hegemony has acted as a concept with which to deal with evidence that does not accord with a privileging of the economic base over the ideological superstructure, that is, cases in which the identity of a class does not correspond to its objective

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social location. Echoing Derrida’s strategy of conceptual inversion, Laclau and Mouffe define their project as one of making their concept of hegemony central rather than marginal. Laclau and Mouffe hope that, by rethinking Marxist theory, they will redefine the strategy of the left. They argue that the reduction of ideology to class consciousness and thus objective social facts inspires a totalitarianism associated with the belief that Marxist parties can act as a vanguard of the workers. Leninism legitimates an authoritarian Party or state by suggesting that the Party or state purses the objective class interests of the workers. The post-Marxist concept of hegemony is meant to draw attention to the need to provide “intellectual and moral” leadership to construct subject positions, identities, and discourses. Laclau and Mouffe write, “political subjects are not€ – strictly speaking€– classes, but complex ‘collective wills.’”101 They conclude that the Left should renounce Leninist vanguardism in favor of historically specific, grassroots struggles. The post-Marxists’ downgrading of class and emphasis on diverse grassroots struggles is not only part of the widespread socialist reaction to Stalinism but also an accommodation of new social movements. Current social struggles are not always about class divisions€– contrary to Mouffe’s earlier arguments. Rather, social life involves various exclusions, all of which are products of ideology and political power. Mouffe has thus claimed that Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was an attempt to expand the socialist project at a time when the new movements were demanding more democracy.102 She hoped to provide a new vocabulary with which people could articulate these movements for a more radical democracy. After Laclau and Mouffe wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau concentrated on redefining their approach in dialogue with other forms of discourse analysis, while Mouffe tried to link their approach to a normative theory of agonistic democracy. Mouffe’s pluralism is the normative extension of their attempt to forge a socialist theory with which to repudiate Stalinism and accommodate new social movements. Her socialist background suggested that class conflict was inherent in capitalist society. Her rejection of economism and accommodation of other identities led her to the more general stance that conflicts of all

101 E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, Verso, 1985), p.€67. 102 N. Carpentier and B. Cammaerts, “Hegemony, Democracy, Agonism, and Journalism: An Interview with Chantal Mouffe,” Journalism Studies, 7 (2006), 964–975.

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kinds were inherent in society. Her democratic pluralism is a normative theory of how to deal with these conflicts. Once Mouffe rejected the privileging of class, she turned to thinkers such as Carl Schmitt to understand the necessity of conflict in human relations.103 She takes from Schmitt the idea that the political is constituted by conflicts that divide people into an “us” and a “them,” into friends and enemies. She also takes from Schmitt the idea that these conflicts can emerge out of all sorts of social relations, including economic ones but also religious, moral, racial, and other ones. All identities are relational, depending on a contrast between “we” and “them,” and any contrast between an “us” and a “them” may lead to a political struggle. However, whereas Schmitt believed that political struggles were inherently antagonistic with a “them” threatening the very existence of “us,” Mouffe argues conflicts need not be antagonistic. Thus, where Schmitt calls for a strong sovereign state to ward off the dangers of an antagonistic pluralism, Mouffe wants a democratic state that can cope with pluralism and conflict by preventing them becoming antagonistic. Mouffe distinguishes the political from politics.104 The political refers to the conflict that is inherent in human relations. Politics refers to the practices, discourses, and institutions that try to create order and enable people to live together. These practices necessarily include conflicts due to the antagonistic nature of human relations. Politics may try to alleviate antagonism, but as we cannot eliminate the political any consensus involves exclusion. Politics can create unity only in a context of conflict and diversity; any “we” is created only in the context of a “them.” Politics cannot overcome the opposition between us and them. Mouffe concludes that instead of seeking false unity, political activity should remake the opposition between us and them. Agonistic pluralism thus challenges the celebrations of consensus that Mouffe thinks are replacing adversarial left and right politics. Agonistic pluralism keeps struggle and conflict at the forefront of radical politics. The task is not to resolve such conflicts but to find a way of combining them. Mouffe suggests that radical movements might combine in chains of equivalence that instead of placing them in hierarchical relations would recognize the specificity of their several demands. Tellingly Mouffe appeals here to the ways in which feminist and anti-racist movements work together without reaching neutralization. A chain of equivalence might prevent democratic struggles becoming dissociated 103 C. Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 104 C. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 101.

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from one another while recognizing they are different. The historic left and the new social movements can remain connected without any one group subsuming the demands of the others.105 Agonism thus rests on the idea that conflict is inherent to the political but that conflict need not be antagonistic. This agonism inspires Mouffe’s democratic theory. On the one hand, democracy cannot eliminate conflict, so theories of democracy that aim at rational consensus or a general good are inherently flawed. There cannot be a politics that reconciles all the different views in society. Any such politics would be a masquerade€ – a hegemony presenting itself as universal or rational when it actually relies on power and exclusion. Mouffe chides deliberative democrats for their imagining they can overcome conflict. When deliberation ends, the resulting decision necessarily excludes other possibilities on grounds that others might not recognize. On the other hand, while democracy cannot end conflict, it can strive to ensure that conflict remains agonistic rather than antagonistic. The aim of democracy should be not to deny the existence of conflict but to foster an ethos and institutions that allow conflicts to remain adversarial. Mouffe introduces pluralism here as an ethos€– and to a lesser extent a set of institutions€ – that foster adversarial not antagonist relations. Antagonism is a conflict between enemies. Agonism is one between adversaries. Mouffe explores the distinction between the two by appealing to a liberal concept of tolerance. We should challenge our opponents’ ideas while respecting their right to defend these ideas; we should not seek to destroy them. Tolerance does not consist of condoning ideas with which we disagree; nor does it involve indifference among different ideas; it requires us to recognize our opponents as legitimate adversaries. Recognition of adversaries allows for antagonism while Â�forging some common ground based on a shared commitment to ethics of a liberal democracy. The antagonism means there can be no rational resolution to the conflict. The common ground means there can be temporary compromises. According to Mouffe, democratic politics seeks to transform antagonism into agonism. It provides outlets for political identifications of “us” and “them,” while making the “them” an adversary not an enemy. In this view, democracy does not seek to reach a rational consensus. Indeed, a rational consensus is impossible given the antagonistic nature of the political; any apparent consensus is just a provisional hegemony based on power and involving exclusion. Mouffe argues instead that 105 Carpentier and Cammaertes, “Interview,” 8.

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democracy embodies an ethos in which plural positions are all recognized as legitimate adversaries in a continuing conflict. Mouffe’s pluralism consists principally of a democratic recognition of legitimate diversity. Her vision might appear surprisingly tame, especially when compared with Hirst’s associationism. Agonistic pluralism appears to be about an ethos, a form of conduct, or even an abstract theory of democracy, rather than concrete institutions taking power away from the central state. It may seem to leave liberal representative democracy and the bureaucratic state largely untouched. Mouffe herself might agree that her vision is, in these respects, a tame defense of existing democratic institutions: she has said that whereas Hegemony and Socialist Strategy tried to radicalize democracy, the rise of neoliberalism has created a world in which the left has to struggle merely to prevent the dismantling of existing democratic institutions.106

Conclusion

In concluding, we consider what it is that differentiates the two branches of pluralism€– associationism and difference theory€– from each other and what makes them forms of pluralism. We also consider the differences between British and American pluralism. The most important difference concerns the relationship between the theory and the older traditions out of which it emerged. Associationism, particularly in Hirst’s work, retains much greater concern with the traditional leftist cause of redistribution of wealth than does difference theory. We saw proof of this in Young’s critique of the associationism of Cohen and Rogers, which was that their theory was too concerned with matters of economics and ignored questions of difference. It can also be seen in her rejection of the “distributive paradigm,” and in Mouffe’s agonism. Both focus primarily upon a democratic ethos of equality, not on redistribution. Even Cohen and Rogers ground their associationism on the fact that it will help to foster that ethos and are not concerned with all economic inequalities. Yet they come closer than do the difference theorists to the traditional leftist concern with redistribution. Mouffe is the furthest away because, unlike both Walzer and Young, she is straightforwardly a difference theorist and does not theorize a role for secondary associations in civil society. Where associationism retains concern with economic questions, difference theory replaces those questions with ones of culture. Young, in particular, focuses on how different ethnic, cultural, and racial groups can live together. 106 Carpentier and Cammaertes, “Interview,” 7.

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Mouffe is also concerned with such questions, but differs from Young, as from Walzer, in her belief that difference can never be accommodated. Young and Walzer provide arguments about how states might make arrangements to accommodate cultural difference. If associationism focuses on traditional economic concerns, while difference theory is concerned with accommodating difference, in what sense are they both forms of pluralism? The answer is that the theories share a commitment to take power away from the sovereign state. They are both responses to the moral critique of Stalinism and to the rise of neoliberalism, each of which raised dilemmas for the left that could be solved only by adopting non-statist approaches. Associationism seeks to reduce the role of the state by putting some of its power in the hands of secondary associations such as trade unions, religious groups, and neighborhood organizations. Difference theory hopes to foster participation on the part of new social movements. In each case, the end result would be that the central state played a lesser role in planning processes than in the heyday of corporatism. Finally, what of the relationship between British and American pluralism? They draw on different traditions, the former concerned predominantly to uphold the cause of labor and the latter to inculcate a democratic ethos of equality. Yet, as we have seen, British pluralists such as Mouffe draw upon the democratic ethos, while all of our American pluralists are concerned that secondary associations play an active role in political life. This is especially true of Cohen and Rogers, but applies to Walzer, and even to Young, also. This is because the intellectual traditions of which the pluralists are a part are transnational. Thus, although an influence on each of our pluralists is the shape of popular radicalism in the country in which they work, all of them are familiar with debates elsewhere and participate in those debates. Ultimately, the most noteworthy difference between the two countries appears to be that, in the United States, radical pluralists are less likely to be clearly identifiable as difference theorists or associationists than they are in the UK. Walzer is both an associationist and a difference theorist, while Young, like Cohen and Rogers, straddles both sides of the fence, whereas neither Hirst nor Mouffe do so.

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Beyond pluralism? Corporatism, globalization, and the dilemmas of democratic governance Robert Adcock and Mark Vail



Introduction

“Pluralism” was thoroughly Americanized in the course of its diffusion into empirical political science.1 As Marc Stears explores in Chapter€3, the concept had initially referred to the varied arguments of British socialist intellectuals who called up visions of a lost past, or a hopedfor future, in order to criticize statist British politics after World War I. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, it came, however, to denote the arguments of American political scientists who refashioned democratic theory to accommodate the existing realities of American politics. For this new breed of pluralists, analysis of the activity of groups in American politics was the key starting point for developing an empirical theory of how the conflicting interests of a modern society can be represented and conciliated within a stable democratic political system. This period of evolution was succeeded, however, by a half-century of stasis. Among political scientists in the United States and Britain, the meaning of “pluralism” got stuck as denoting the liberal interest-group pluralism of the 1950s to 1960s. It remains to this day primarily associated with American scholarship of the post-World War II decades, especially works by David Truman, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond. This inertial association offers a ripe target for historical revisionism. John Gunnell shows in his chapter and elsewhere that pluralism first crystallized as an empirical theory of democracy among American political scientists in the decades after World War I, rather than after World War€II.2 Our thanks to Mark Bevir, Henry Farrell, Harvey Feigenbaum, Llewelyn Hughes, Ben Jackson, and Martyn Thompson for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and to Tristan Volpe for research assistance. 2 John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); John G. Gunnell, “The Real Revolution in Political Science,” PS: Political Science & Politics 1

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Our historical efforts move in the other direction. Looking forward from the era of Truman, Dahl, and Almond, we ask what happened to pluralism in political science during the remainder of the twentieth century. Has pluralism become a superseded moment in the discipline’s past? To be sure, many empirical political scientists think of pluralism in these terms, and narratives of advancing “beyond pluralism” have been commonplace since the 1970s. Our stance toward these narratives is one of moderate revisionism. We do not reject them outright but aim instead to temper their more self-aggrandizing simplifications. There can be no doubting the tendency among political scientists trained in the 1960s and 1970s to forge their intellectual agendas in the form of critiques of pluralism. But to examine such agendas judiciously, we should compare them to a portrait rather than a caricature of what they claim to supersede. Accordingly, we survey post-World War II interest-group pluralism in our first section, with special attention to the works of Truman and Almond.3 We then follow political science’s conversation about corporatism from its genesis in reaction to 1960s pluralism up into the mid-1980s, by which time it had secured disciplinary prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. Neo-corporatists saw themselves as revitalizing the study of political economy, drawing on Marxist or social democratic conceptions of the imperatives and dynamics of “advanced capitalism” to make sense of both past and present economic crises and offer fresh insights into securing social stability and economic growth in ways that “pluralists” could not. This intellectual self-narrative required a tightening of the concept of “pluralism” to refer to a specifically liberal mode of group “interest intermediation” rather than the basic premise – which neo-corporatists carried forward from the interest-group pluralists whom they criticized – that such intermediation is central to successful democratic governance. This conceptual move was, we argue, promoted by the dissatisfaction among scholars influenced by socialist traditions with the liberal ideal of groups as a fluid multiplicity of self-constituting autonomous actors with roughly equal potential access to political influence, rather than a product of structurally given interests mediated by power relationships such that only class-conscious organization could secure influence for the interests of subordinate classes. 37, no. 1 (2004), 47–50. Gunnell’s timing of pluralism fits well with Howard Brick’s recent re-chronologizing of twentieth-century American thought more broadly. Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), introduction. 3 For the arguments of the third major post-World War II figure, Robert Dahl, we refer readers to Chapter 7, this volume.

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Our third section surveys studies about the role of groups in the dynamics of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. We situate contributions by political scientists in broad debates of this period – about civil society and social capital, globalization and neoliberal economic reform, and we analyze these debates in light of competing claims for pre-eminence by American neoliberalism, the European model of socially embedded political economies and generous welfare states, and New Labour’s search for a “Third Way” between them. In doing so, we highlight how older liberal pluralist arguments valorizing collective actors autonomous of the state were revitalized during the 1990s, but applied to a reconfigured cast of actors in which voluntary associations and firms came to occupy center stage, a place that mid-century pluralism had reserved for interest groups. Finally, to conclude, we take a step back from our detailed narrative of how intellectual responses to political and economic dilemmas explain the ebb-and-flow and evolving content of the pluralist tradition in empirical political science.4 We do so to undertake two tasks. First, to sum up the overarching trajectory of our narrative, and second, to speculate about reasons for the striking resilience of pluralism that this trajectory highlights.

Pluralism in political science: assumptions and arguments of an American tradition

The pluralist tradition in American political science built on empirical studies of the roles played by groups in American politics. But not all such studies were pluralist. What set pluralists apart was their belief that the activities of groups could be, as Gunnell puts it in concluding his chapter, a “foundation” rather than “pathology” of democracy. In seeing democratic potential in group activities, the earliest politicalscience pluralists made three assumptions: (1) democracy involves the representation of interests; (2) interests are constituted and articulated primarily at the level of groups; (3) political actions by groups, such as lobbying, thus supplement, rather than undermine, the democratic mechanisms of elections

4 The logic of this form of explanation is concisely articulated in Mark Bevir, “How Narratives Explain,” in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds.), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe), pp. 281–90.

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and parties by providing another avenue via which interests are represented. This web of assumptions first crystallized among American political scientists in the 1920s. But the interest-group pluralist theory of democracy was never without critics. The crisis of democratic governance in the 1930s spurred anxious reflection, with pluralists pushed to respond to the charge that group activities undermine democratic stability, as appeared to have been the case in Weimar Germany. Pluralists were also challenged by the persistent charge that organized interest groups increase the influence of small segments of the population at the expense of others, thereby making the political process as a whole less representative and thus less democratic. The lines of argument most characteristic of pluralists in post-World War II American political science can best be explained as adaptations of the existing interest-group pluralist tradition to respond to these mid-century challenges about stability and representation. The germinal formulations of Truman’s 1951 The Governmental Process were a starting point for a generation of work elaborating liberal pluralist theories of democratic stability and interest representation. Truman set up his conclusion as a defense of “the pursuits of organized interest groups” from critics who saw these groups as threatening “representative government and its values.” One of his lines of argument addressed worries about stability. The problem is not, he insisted, the existence of “a multiplicity of groups.” Rather what is critical for stability are more detailed empirical issues concerning how organized groups relate to one another and to widespread unorganized societal interests. An especially key factor is the extent of “overlapping memberships” between groups. Organized groups, Truman held, tend to be more restrained when some of their members are also members of other groups with interests at stake.5 The idea that overlapping memberships promote a stable politics of interest conciliation was later extended by Dahl and others in research linking social cleavage structures to the character and severity of political conflicts in different nations.6 Truman’s second central idea was the “potential group.” He proposed that group theory extend beyond organized groups and their interests 5 David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 503, 508–10. See also ch. 6 for the overlapping membership argument with illustrations from American politics. 6 For cleavages-conflict analysis applied to the United States and Europe, see respectively: Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967); Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967).

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to address interests that, while not currently represented by an organized group, could become a focus for organization and activity if they were disturbed. These were thus the interests of “potential groups.” By making this theoretical move Truman sought to address anti-pluralist concerns about representation by shedding light on a subtle but significant dynamic constraining the power of organized groups: The interests of the potential groups … serve to limit in a general way the behavior of the more apparent participants in politics. The unacknowledged power of such unorganized interests lies in the possibility that, if these wide, weak interests are too flagrantly ignored, they may be stimulated to organize for aggressive counteraction. Thus, although organization is presumptive evidence of strength in the short run, in the long run, especially in a society permitting wide freedom of association, access to power is not confined to the organized groups in the population.7

Truman’s most nuanced response to anti-pluralists, however, came in his conclusion, where he synthesized his ideas of potential groups and overlapping memberships. Here, he argued that the interests of a potential group better restrain an organized group’s activities if the memberships of the groups overlap. Pressure for restraint is then exerted, not only by prospective opposition from outside an organized group, but also from potential group members within that group. With such arguments, Truman strove to persuade readers that “interests that are widely held in the society may be reflected in government without their being organized in groups.” While desirable, such reflection was, however, a possibility, not a necessity. Truman saw the representativeness of the political process as empirically contingent, like its stability, upon the memberships of organized groups overlapping, both with one another and with “potential groups based upon interests held widely throughout the society.” He ended his book warning that, without both kinds of overlap, the “group process” could indeed lead to “disaster.”8 Truman’s analysis of groups was embedded within a meta-theory of historical change that presented the “group process” as inherent to politics in all modern societies. His view of how economic, technological, and other changes produce complex societies with high levels of specialization and interdependence echoes the claims of what would later

Truman, Governmental Process, p. 114. 8 Ibid., pp. 511–16, 506, 535. Truman also reinterpreted the older stability argument about “rules of the game” in light of his ideas about potential groups and their overlap with organized groups. For another pluralist reinterpretation of this argument, see Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), ch. 28. 7

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come to be known as “modernization” theory.9 Truman linked greater social complexity to: (1) increases in the number and diversity of interest groups, and (2) interest groups, increasingly becoming politically active. Together these explained a “trend toward an increasing diversity of groups functionally attached to the institutions of government,” a trend that was to be recognized, perhaps even celebrated, as “a reflection of the characteristics and needs … of a complex society.”10 For Truman, the United States exemplified this general trend. He drew on the history of American labor organizations, trade associations, agricultural groups, and professions such as medicine to illustrate the “inevitable gravitation toward government” that he held to be part and parcel of a complex society.11 In doing so Truman participated in the mid twentieth-century transatlantic discourse validating the rise of collective bargaining and the welfare state that Ben Jackson explores more fully in Chapter 6 on industrial relations. The meta-historical vision evident in Truman was subsequently elaborated by Almond. There were differences, however: Almond actually used the phrase “modernization” and did so as part of an ambitious effort to frame the analysis, not only of interest groups, but of all aspects of politics. He drew illustrations, moreover, from around the globe, rather than from the United States alone. But the substance of his historical vision remained largely identical to Truman’s, privileging socio-economic change as its core driver. The “specialization of labor” led, among other things, to “the formation of a large number of special interests.” But “the increasing interdependence of the economy” that accompanied specialization also made “individuals, and the society as a whole, more susceptible to fluctuations and depression.” Faced with the increased scale and intensity of the disruptions associated with a modern economy, interest groups looked to government to stabilize conditions or to help them to adjust to economic shifts. Socio-economic modernization thus had “the general effect of greatly increasing both (a) the need for coordinated social action in order to solve new problems, and (b) the likelihood of increased political participation and political demands from members of the society.”12

9 For a cross-disciplinary history of modernization theory, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 10 Truman, Governmental Process, p. 52. 11 Ibid., ch. 4. 12 Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 91–7. Original italics.

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Almond’s ambitious effort to craft a universal framework for the study of politics brought modernization theory together with systems theory and functionalism. In so doing he restated the questions that political science pluralists respond to in more abstract terms. How can the political system “efficiently process raw demand inputs from the society into outputs responsive to the claims and demands of that society”? What political “structures” and “style” best fulfill the “functions” of “interest articulation” and “interest aggregation” in a modern society?13 His terminology was, however, more novel than his answers.14 As political science interest-group pluralists had done for decades, Almond took the United States to be an exemplar of how complex interests can be represented and conciliated in a stable democracy. While elevating Britain to equal standing with the United States by presenting his claims as characterizations of “the AngloAmerican type of political system,” Almond did not break with the Americanization of pluralism, instead interpreting British politics in Americanized terms. The key theme in Almond’s characterizations of the “Anglo-American” system was a liberal paean to the differentiation and autonomy of collective political actors who interact via bargaining. In 1958 he stressed the benefits for stability when, as in the UK and United States: the functions of political parties and interest groups are sharply differentiated. Interest groups articulate demands in the society, seek support for these demands among other groups by advocacy and bargaining, and attempt to transform these demands into authoritative public policy by influencing the choice of public personnel, and the various processes of public policy-making and enforcement. Political parties tend to be free of ideological rigidity, and are aggregative, i.e., seek to form the largest possible interest group coalitions by offering acceptable choices of political personnel and public policy. Both the interest group systems and the party systems are differentiated, Â�bureaucratized, and autonomous. Each unit in the party and interest group systems comes into the “market,” so to speak, with an adjustive bargaining ethos.15 13 Gabriel A. Almond, “A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics,” in Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman (eds.), The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 33–45. 14 Almond’s liberal pluralism predated the full-scale effort to articulate a functionalist framework that he undertook while at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in 1956– 1957. In a paper prepared for a 1955 conference organized by the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics (which he headed at the time), Almond had already presented the “Anglo-American type of political system” in liberal terms as “one in which there is a diffusion of power and influence … resulting from a system of mass communications, mass education, and representation by interest groups.” Gabriel A. Almond, “Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics 18, no. 3 (1956), 400. 15 Gabriel A. Almond, “A Comparative Study of Interest Groups and the Political Process,” American Political Science Review 52, no. 1 (1958), 275.

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By 1966 Almond had adopted an abstract label – “high subsystem autonomy”€– for the political system exemplified by the United States and UK. High subsystem autonomy involved: (1) differentiation between relatively autonomous structures of central decision making, interest aggregation, and interest articulation; and (2) differentiation within the interest articulation subsystem, provided by numerous autonomous “associational interest groups” with both “a full-time professional staff, and orderly procedures for the formulation of interests and demands” and “access to political agencies through a variety of legitimate channels.”16 Such differentiations within differentiations were Almond’s liberal recipe for what made the United States’ and Britain’s political systems stand out above all others for their “relatively versatile and continuous capability … both of adapting to their environments and of shaping them.”17 Almond’s theoretical vocabulary did not age well, but his efforts to organize and promote new agendas of empirical study had a more lasting impact. As the first head of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), Almond pushed the expansion of empirical research on both European and non-Western politics. A leading strand in this extension carried empirical studies of interest groups far beyond their origins in work on American politics. By the mid 1960s, CCP-funding had helped American political scientists write books on interest groups in Britain, continental European countries such as Italy, and beyond the West in countries such as India.18 These CCP efforts were part of a broader wave of research into interest groups outside the United States that also encompassed work under the aegis of the young International Political Science Association, as well as studies by scholars in the new political science associations of Europe, especially those in Britain.19 16 Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, pp. 259–60, 105–12, 73–91. 17 Ibid., pp. 306–14. 18 Samuel H. Beer, British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Knopf, 1965); Joseph LaPalmobara, Interest Groups in Italian Politics (Princeton University Press, 1964); Myron Weiner, The Politics of Scarcity: Public Pressure and Political Response in India (Princeton University Press, 1962). 19 IPSA was founded in 1949, and national associations in France in 1949, Britain in 1950, and West Germany in 1951. Scholars from nine countries wrote about group politics in their own countries for an IPSA volume: Henry W. Ehrmann (ed.), Interest Groups on Four Continents (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958). For the surge of work by British scholars on groups see: W. J. M. Mackenzie, “Pressure Groups in British Government,” British Journal of Sociology 6 (1955), 133–48; Allen Potter, “British Pressure Groups: Characteristics and Effects on Government Policies,” Parliamentary Affairs 9 (1956), 418–30; S. E. Finer, Anonymous Empire: A Study of the Lobby in Great Britain (London: Pall Mall Press, 1958); and J. D. Stewart, British Pressure Groups: Their Role in Relation to the House of Commons (Oxford University Press, 1958).

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It is beyond our present scope to document this whole wave of empirical research and its impact on pluralist theory. But the intellectual puzzles to which it gave rise were already evident to a surprising degree in one of its earliest products: a set of articles published in 1956–1958 by Harvard’s Samuel Beer on the history and contemporary role of groups in British politics. Where Almond’s efforts to forge a unifying theoretical framework presented Britain and the United States as exemplars of a shared type, Beer’s country-specific research stressed contrasts. Beer argued that Britain had a higher “density and concentration” of pressure groups than did the United States. By this, he meant that a smaller number of groups organized a greater percent of potential members in major economic sectors.20 British groups were not only “massive” but also more powerful because they were “far more intimately linked with the apparatus of government, especially of government administration.”21 A first puzzle was how to label the kind of contrast Beer noted. In a 1956 American Political Science Review article, he spoke of Britain’s “system of ‘quasi-corporatism’ which leaves no important organized group without a channel of influence and a real share in the making of decisions.”22 However, the next year in the very same journal, he labeled Britain’s system “administrative pluralism.”23 The switch here illustrates two alternative ways of using “pluralism.” In an older broad usage, the term encompassed a variety of theories – socialist as well as liberal – that ascribe groups a distinctively positive role to play in governance.24 This use required modifying adjectives – such as Beer’s administrative pluralism or Rokkan’s corporate pluralism – to pick out detailed contrasts concerning just how groups are organized and relate to the state.25 But a more recent narrower usage abandons such lexical distinctions and associates “pluralism” specifically with liberal political systems, such as in the United States, in which groups are relatively less concentrated and less fully interwoven with the state’s administrative 20 Samuel H. Beer, “Group Representation in Britain and the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 319 (1958), 133–5. 21 Samuel H. Beer, “Pressure Groups and Parties in Britain,” American Political Science Review 50, no. 1 (1956), 3, 6. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 Samuel H. Beer, “The Representation of Interests in British Government: Historical Background,” American Political Science Review 51, no. 3 (1957), 649. 24 See, for example, the varied pluralisms of the original British debates surveyed in Chapter 3, this volume. 25 In a failed effort to reassert his favored broader usage in the early 1980s Almond emphasizes Rokkan’s 1960s formulation to support the view that “corporatism is a variety of pluralism.” Gabriel A. Almond, “Corporatism, Pluralism, and Professional Memory,” World Politics 35, no. 2 (1983), 250–1.

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apparatus. This use requires another term to describe more concentrated systems, and in the 1970s “corporatism” increasingly took on this role among political scientists. Establishing “pluralism” and “corporatism” as a paired contrast gave both terms a narrower meaning, one at odds, not only with older usage, but also with historians who talk, as Jackson does in Chapter 6, of “pluralist corporatism.” What we should be clear about here is the chronology of these two usages of “pluralism.” It was only after pluralism in its older, broader sense persuaded most empirical political scientists that active groups are, or at least can and should be, a good thing for democracy that the term took on a narrower meaning as the foil framing the corporatist agenda in the discipline of the 1970s and 1980s. A second puzzle evident in Beer’s work, and one that would later be critical for corporatists (or “neo-” or “democratic” corporatists, as they sometimes called themselves), turns the contrast between more differentiated and concentrated systems of groups into a question about their relative efficacy, and situates that question in light of broad politicaleconomic trends. In a 1958 article Beer placed his contrast between Britain and the United States within the context of a sweeping “historical development – the rise of ‘collectivism’” that he saw as involving coordinated changes toward greater concentration of power in both the economy and the polity. This development had “proceeded further in Britain than the United States.” Thus the United States was, contra Truman and Almond, more an exception to than the exemplar of general trends in modern societies. But if the United States was empirically exceptional, was this to its benefit or its cost? Beer did not offer a clear answer, asking instead whether the dispersion of power may simply produce a self-defeating war of all against all in which even the special interests suffer. Centralized power at least creates the possibility of deliberate and orderly solutions.26

A strikingly different note was struck here than in Almond’s paeans to “differentiation” and “subsystem autonomy.” This note was, however, rarely heard in pre-1970s political science.

Challenging liberal pluralism: corporatism and its post-liberal historical visions

If we have to pick a peak moment of the pre-eminence of pluralism in political science, a strong case can be made for the mid-1960s, when 26 Beer, “Group Representation,” pp. 131–2.

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Truman, Almond, and Dahl served successively as American Political Science Association presidents. But this pre-eminence was a doubleedged sword. It helped make pluralism – and more specifically the liberal ideas about groups embedded within post-World War II interest-group pluralism – a tempting target for the next generation. Pluralism thus became the foil of multiple critics as noted by Gunnell with reference to scholars of political theory (Carole Pateman and William Connolly) and American politics (Grant McConnell and Theodore Lowi). It was also, moving closer to our own focus, the target at which Mancur Olson aimed his 1965 Logic of Collective Action and Arend Lijphart his 1968 account of consociationalism. By highlighting difficulties of collective action, Olson’s rational choice analysis challenged the idea about the latent power of “potential groups” that Truman had used to defend the representativeness of interest-group pluralism. Lijphart, in turn, cut against Truman’s other core idea – overlapping memberships – by highlighting the Netherlands as a powerful counter-example to the claim that stability requires cross-cutting cleavages.27 Both the collective-action and consociationalist agendas deserve close attention in any full account of challenges to the liberal pluralism of mid-century political science. Given limited space here, we can, however, narrate only one such challenger in enough detail to explain its rise and internal evolution. The agenda we focus on is the corporatist revival of the 1970s and 1980s. Taking flight shortly after Olson’s and Lijphart’s work, neo-corporatism shared in the broader rejection of liberal ideas about potential groups and cross-cutting cleavages, but stood out for its own distinctive challenge to the meta-historical vision in which Truman, Almond, and others situated interest-group liberalism as the highpoint of modernity. During its revival in the 1970s, neocorporatism promulgated a socialist meta-historical vision in which liberal pluralism was a superseded anachronism in the era of advanced capitalism, or at least a model whose purported superiority was highly contestable. In the 1980s, by contrast, skepticism of any meta-historical vision – liberal, Marxist, or social democratic – came to the fore as neo-corporatists stressed the resilience of cross-national diversity in the political-economic governance of capitalist societies. 27 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Olson’s later intellectual trajectory brought him into a fascinating mid-1980s conversation about groups and political economy with the neocorporatist tradition on which we focus here. See Olson, “A Theory of the Incentives Facing Political Organizations: Neo-corporatism and the Hegemonic State,” International Political Science Review 7, no. 2 (1986), 165–89.

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Schmitter and the revival of corporatism: an alternative model of interest intermediation

In 1974, Philippe Schmitter inaugurated a new conceptualization of “corporatism” and an agenda of research on its institutional structure and potential benefits. Drawing on his field work in Latin America, where authoritarian corporatism had been common, Schmitter saw corporatism as a general mode of political-economic governance found also in continental Europe, and as such, a globally prominent alternative to the liberal American model extolled by interest-group pluralists. His “Still the Century of Corporatism?” laid out, and later work refined, “an explicit alternative to the paradigm of interest politics which has heretofore completely dominated the discipline of North American political science: pluralism.”28 Schmitter famously defines corporatism as [A] system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated groups, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports.29

He then posits two subtypes: “societal” corporatism (said to develop as a functional response to increasing socio-economic complexity) and “state” corporatism (imposed by the state and often at least quasi-authoritarian). While the latter was associated in Europe with interwar fascism, the former reflects a happier potential for societal incorporation and consensus and “appears to be the concomitant, if not ineluctable, component of the postliberal, advanced capitalist, organized democratic welfare state.”30 Schmitter’s chronological, almost teleological language of “postliberal” and “advanced” is no accident: elsewhere, he leaves little doubt about his sense that corporatism represents an evolutionarily subsequent and superior alternative to pluralist interest intermediation.31 28 Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” The Review of Politics 36, no. 1 (1974), 95. Original emphasis. 29 Ibid., pp. 93–4. The conceptual narrowing undertaken here is illustrated by the fact that this definition excludes the “pluralist corporatism” of Jackson’s chapter which endorsed associational autonomy and contests between groups. 30 Ibid., p. 105. 31 Schmitter presents corporatism as “an increasingly likely outcome” of adaptation to the exigencies of advanced capitalism, that “creeps into the polity” via an “osmotic process,” and he predicts the advanced industrial world will increasingly see “the decay of pluralism and its gradual replacement by societal corporatism.” Ibid., pp.€105, 107, 111.

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Schmitter carries forward much from Almond: he groups Britain and the United States together as exemplifying a shared mode of interest intermediation, theorizes that mode within a functionalist framework, and situates it relative to a meta-historical vision of socio-economic modernization in which “growing structural differentiation” makes interest groups central to good governance. Alongside this inheritance from the previous generation in the political science pluralist tradition, Schmitter introduces his corporatism vs. pluralism conceptual innovation to reframe debate about what way of structuring interest groups and giving them political voice best addresses the twin dilemmas of stability and representativeness: “Pluralists place their faith in the shifting balance of mechanically intersecting forces; corporatists appeal to the functional adjustment of an organically interdependent whole.”32 The organicist functionalism invoked here echoes the organicist guild socialism identified by Stears in Chapter 3 as a forerunner of the midcentury corporatists, whom Schmitter read in framing his positive account of corporatism. As Schmitter sees it, corporatism offers opportunities for societal incorporation and consensus in the face of shifting economic challenges by allowing, or even forcing, empowered societal actors to negotiate their differences within organized, legally sanctioned channels, rather than clashing as “mechanically intersecting forces” in a fluid political process open, at least formally, to any new, self-constituted interest group. Lacking Truman’s liberal confidence in the latent power of potential groups and the moderating effect of overlapping memberships, Schmitter presents an organized corporatist structure of differentiated groups as a more effective way to secure the representation of diverse interests, mediate conflicts between those interests, and thereby reconcile economic adjustment with political and social stability. His argument here is heavily indebted to the Marxist and social democratic understanding of society as composed of groups whose members share interests given by their structural position in the political economy, but where the likelihood of given interests’ being actively represented is always mediated by power relations such that only class-conscious organization can secure influence for the interests of subordinate classes. In giving the upper hand to corporatism, Schmitter not only draws on socialist views of groups but also deploys a socialist vocabulary alien to the liberal interest-group pluralists of post-World War II political science. He replaces their talk of socio-economic modernity with 32 Ibid., p. 97.

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“advanced capitalism,” and functional imperatives thus become specifically capitalist imperatives. It is, ultimately, “certain basic imperatives or needs of capitalism to reproduce the conditions for its existence and continually to accumulate further resources” that, in Schmitter’s view, make corporatism more stable. Advanced capitalism involves “processes of concentration of ownership, competition between national economies, expansion of the role of public policy and rationalization of decision-making within the state to associate or incorporate subordinate classes and status groups more closely within the political process.” These processes had not escaped the notice of earlier political scientists. They comprise what Beer had labeled the “rise of ‘collectivism.’â•›”33 But a new voice (and a new generation) is speaking when Schmitter argues that these processes are most consistent with the “imperative necessity for a stable, bourgeois-dominant regime” if managed through a corporatist system of governance.34 Much as Marx claimed that he found the dialectic in Hegel “standing on its head” and turned it “right side up,”35 so here interest-group pluralism is turned on its head. The political structure and style Almond had seen as making the United States exemplify adaptability to modernity’s challenges is recast as an anachronistic hindrance to meeting these challenges. Schmitter’s article was written before the oil shock of 1973 and ensuing stagflationary collapse of the postwar boom. It was, however, those very events that helped his innovations to find a wider audience. If patterns of political-cum-societal organization were to be celebrated, as Andrew Shonfield had argued in the mid 1960s, as supporting the prosperity and relative social peace of the 1950s and 1960s,36 such organization appeared, for some scholars, even more important in the bust of the 1970s and early 1980s, when postwar faith in managed capitalism and Keynesian economic stewardship collapsed. Schmitter’s article offered 33 Truman also believed that “movements toward monopoly and concentration” had “greatly concentrated economic power.” But he viewed such movements through the lens of liberal anxiety about “economic power” being translated into “political power” and heralded a liberal pluralism as hindering this translation, thereby preventing the two types of power from becoming interchangeable. Truman, Governmental Process, pp. 257–62. 34 Ibid., pp. 107–8. 35 Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition,” in Marx, Capital, edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 11. 36 Shonfield’s optimistic tone was consistent with the common conviction during the 1950s and 1960s that Keynesian prescriptions and appropriate faith in political discretion had conquered the business cycle: “It is hard for us to believe that the bleak and squalid system which we knew could, in so short a time, have adapted itself, without some covert process of total destruction and regeneration, to achieve so many desired objectives.” Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 3.

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an attractive conceptual landscape for scholars spurred by Â�economic crises to believe fundamental changes in political-economic governance were needed, and inclined to envision those changes in terms of capitalism becoming more organized.37 The older narrative of transcending laissez-faire that early pluralists used in making groups rather than individuals the center of democratic theory was thus refashioned to new purposes.38 Neo-corporatism offered a meta-historical vision that assimilated unorganized competition between autonomous groups to the same category of atomistic anachronism to which political science pluralists had, in parallel with the institutional economists discussed by Gunnell and Jackson, earlier relegated competition between individuals. For neo-corporatists, the lessons to be learned amid the economic crises of the 1970s were thus the precise opposite of the lessons drawn by neoliberals, whose mid-century origins are traced in Jackson’s chapter and which led into Thatcher and Reagan’s reforms in the 1980s.39 Neoliberals called to revive capitalism by championing entrepreneurial initiative as the engine of economic growth. Society, whose collective existence Thatcher would famously deny,40 was constituted of individuals who should be free to drive innovation and growth without having 37 This is a theme explored more fully in Schmitter’s later work and the contributions of other scholars working in the corporatist tradition. See Philippe C. Schmitter, “Modes of Interest Intermediation and Models of Societal Change in Western Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 10 (1977), 7–38; the contributions in Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends towards Corporatist Intermediation (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979); and Wolfgang Streeck and Philippe C. Schmitter, Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985). As Schmitter later came to note, while Shonfield had been “denied his share of paternal rights” for neo-corporatism, its arguments about organization developed more explicitly and fully ideas he had earlier explored. Schmitter, “Corporatism is Dead! Long Live Corporatism!” Government and Opposition 24, no. 1 (1989), 54. 38 Of course, as Karl Polanyi reminds us, pure laissez-faire was a myth deployed in breaking down barriers to industrialization in the nineteenth century rather than a neutral empirical observation of the structure and dynamics of early nineteenth-century British capitalism. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 [1944]), esp. chs. 12–14. 39 Neoliberal thought about groups is closely explicated through the seminal figure of Hayek in Richard Boyd’s compelling reading of “Hayek’s attempt to navigate the perils of pluralism” as “a central theme of his work,” and especially of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty volumes of the 1970s. Richard Boyd, Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 275. 40 In an interview for Woman’s Own Magazine (October 31, 1987), Thatcher provided a succinct formulation of her atomistic vision of the world: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.”

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to fend off a meddling state or interest groups. Since implementing this neoliberal prescription would, however, require state power to crush the power of interest groups likely to interfere with market forces, this perspective was partially self-contradictory, using the state to expand the scope of the market while vilifying it as a means through which to make allocative decisions and provide security in the face of market fluctuations.41 For neo-corporatists, by contrast, the lesson of economic hard times was the need to transcend the lingering liberal moments in Keynes so the state could better pursue the allocative and security goals that neoliberals rejected.42 While Keynesianism emphasized the importance of managing aggregate demand and sustaining investment in economic downturns, corporatism seemingly offered a less conjunctural strategy – to reconcile capitalist dynamism and democratic stability by managing economic growth and its potentially negative social and political consequences.43 By vesting economic authority in the state, which would then delegate some of its authority to empowered social and economic actors, corporatism could overcome negative economic developments and social and political unrest, even as it laid foundations for growth.

Neo-corporatism in the 1980s: embracing national differences in capitalist governance

During the 1980s, a number of scholars extended Schmitter’s analysis of corporatism, developing investigations of state–society relations under what was now commonly labeled “advanced capitalism,” but in ways that highlighted national variation. This new emphasis marked a shift from Schmitter’s meta-historical vision of global convergence toward corporatism. It arose alongside diverging national political and policy responses to the breakdown of the Keynesian and quasi-socialdemocratic consensus that had lain at the foundation of postwar capitalism. While prescriptions for a corporatist industrial policy found 41 For a cogent formulation of this contradiction at the heart of Thatcherism, see Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994). 42 For Keynes’ assessment of the contours of his own liberalism, see his 1925 essay “Am I a Liberal?” in his Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932). 43 The concerns of neo-corporatists in the 1970s dovetailed with the “crisis of governability” literature. Both perspectives reflected and reinforced apprehensions that poor economic performance was contributing to a wider social and political crisis. See Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York University Press, 1975).

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some support, for example in the US Democratic Party in the early 1980s,44 they were politically defeated in the United States and Britain as Reagan and Thatcher advanced a neoliberal reform agenda. The rise of neoliberalism as both a political and economic philosophy posed a dilemma to which academic admirers of corporatism responded by studying cross-national differences and highlighting the resilience and successes of a political-economic alternative to Anglo-American trends.45 In the early-to-mid-1980s, a series of seminal volumes introduced the new variation-oriented focus of research on corporatism. Suzanne Berger’s Organizing Interests in Western Europe,46 produced under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council’s Joint Committee on Western Europe, treated interest groups as endogenous institutional foundations of national political economies, rather than as common products of basic human proclivities and/or required functions within modern society, pace Truman, Almond, and Schmitter.47 In explaining the genesis and behavior of interest groups, Berger stressed that the essays in her volume “go beyond the partial explanation that socioeconomic structures provide, by analyzing the specificities of national historical experience, the role of the state, and the instabilities inherent in the operation of a representational system.”48 This prioritizing of national differences extended a path which Beer had earlier blazed. But whereas Beer struck a minor note in political science of the 1950s and 1960s, Berger’s volume was part of a broad intellectual movement, a stepping-off point for a tradition of studies of the state and its relation to society that would later be christened and celebrated as “historical institutionalism.”49 Berger’s volume was also foundational for Bruce Bartlett, “America’s New Ideology: ‘Industrial Policy,’” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 44, no. 1 (1985), 1–7. 45 Implicit in this debate were conflicting narratives about whether Europe or the United States offered a future model for stable and prosperous advanced capitalism, with scholars of corporatism confronting an emergent neoliberal view that returned the United States to the position of leader in a meta-historical vision that still translated national differences in interest-group systems into assertions of superiority with respect to the respective models’ adaptive capacity. 46 Suzanne Berger (ed.), Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1981). 47 Berger singled out Schmitter’s contribution to her volume as propounding a “unilinear theory” in contrast to the “main thrust” of the other essays. Suzanne Berger, “Introduction,” in Berger, Organizing Interests, p. 19. 48 Ibid., p. 11. 49 The 1980s witnessed a burgeoning of studies of the state, which drew analytical tools from Marxist and neo-Marxist views of the state as an agent of power with interests of its own. Though space limitations prevent an analysis of this lineage here, influential and illustrative examples include: Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (eds.), The Breakdown 44

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the field of comparative political economy.50 Whereas post-World War II pluralists had analyzed interest groups with dilemmas of political stability and representation on their minds, Berger’s volume added the economic dilemmas on the minds of a new generation of scholars. Her introduction charged liberal pluralism with falling short on both fronts by claiming that it has “a destabilizing effect on politics and the economy.”51 Whereas the pluralists of the prior generation had worried, in Truman’s formulation, that “specialization of organized group interests along class lines” could be “a source of political instability,”52 Berger and her co-contributors argued that class-based interest groups could, when organized appropriately, bridge their divides in pursuit of shared interests in economic growth and social peace. Though written before Reagan’s election and before the implications of Thatcherism had become fully clear, the volume’s suggestion that neo-corporatism remained viable and even constituted a preferable set of political and economic arrangements presaged 1980s debates about the viability of the European social model. Later work in comparative political economy elaborated upon various aspects of interest groups’ political and economic roles and how these differ across national contexts and economic circumstances, in ways that suggested that capitalism’s future did not lie in convergence on a neoliberal model. John Goldthorpe’s 1984 edited volume Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism, also produced under the aegis of the SSRC’s Joint Committee on Western Europe, situated work on of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge University Press, 1979); Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Stephen D. Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 1 (1984), 223–46. On the later retrospective branding of this scholarship as the birth of “historical institutionalism,” see Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon C. Stimson, “Historicizing the New Institutionalism(s),” in Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon C. Stimson (eds.), Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 259–89. 50 The volume’s contributor list reads like a “Who’s Who” of comparative political economy in the 1980s and 1990s: members included Charles Maier, one of the preeminent contemporary historians of Germany; Jürgen Kocka, a prominent German social historian, as well as Schmitter, Charles Sabel, Claus Offe, John T. S. Keeler, and Juan Linz. 51 Berger, “Introduction,” p. 20. The volume’s contributors did not, however, present a uniform view on whether corporatism was better. Berger allowed in her introduction (p. 22) that corporatism could, sometimes, also be destabilizing since it tended to “widen the gap and harden the lines that separate the represented from the excluded.” 52 Truman, Governmental Process, p. 522.

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corporatism within a broad array of studies of institutional variation among advanced political economies and their responses to the dilemmas of economic austerity.53 The volume’s contributions speak directly to the dire economic circumstances of the 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that there are alternative forms of advanced capitalism, some of which provide more structured avenues for bargaining between state and society and are hence, it is contended, potentially both more nimble and stable than Anglo-American liberalism. Running through the volume is an implicit argument against the putative superiority of the American and British models as remade and celebrated by Thatcher and Reagan. Goldthorpe’s conclusion, entitled “The End of Convergence,” argues that institutional variation is inherent to advanced capitalism, thereby aggressively challenging predictions and prescriptions of convergence on a neoliberal model of a limited welfare state, constrained public authorities, and market-based adjustment. These arguments gained traction within comparative political economy during the 1980s, informing such seminal works as Peter Katzenstein’s Small States in World Markets and Peter Gourevitch’s Politics in Hard Times. Both Katzenstein and Gourevitch were concerned with the political response of organized interests to international economic pressures. Katzenstein argues that the democratic corporatist institutions of small European states such as Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland enabled successful compensatory responses to economic adjustment in a context in which small domestic markets meant that isolation from shifts in the international economy was not an option: “For the small European states, economic change is a fact of life. They have not chosen it; it is thrust upon them.”54 Similarly, Gourevitch approached national coalitions among producer groups as subject to politically significant adaptation in the face of economic crises, such as the Great Depression or the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. At such moments, Gourevitch argues, crisis “open[s] the system of relationships, making politics and policy more fluid.”55 This fluidity allows a coalitional realignment and policy shifts toward those favored by the reconfigured alliance among groups and the state. The significance of such works reaches, however, beyond studies of small European states or of policy shifts in response to international crises. Instead, like the 53 John H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 54 Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 24. 55 Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 22.

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work of Berger and Goldthorpe, both exemplify an analytic perspective that highlights alternatives to an Anglo-American recipe of limited states and the hegemony of market-driven growth over concerns about economic equity and social consensus.

Reviving pluralism? Political science and the post-Cold War era

In the 1990s, debates about the role and importance of social and economic groups took on new flavors in reaction to the seismic changes wrought by the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These political transformations accompanied the coeval and equally dramatic trend of economic liberalization in both the developed and developing worlds. In this final section, we situate specific contributions of empirical political science within the broader debates of the post-Cold War era defined by these two sets of developments, looking first at conversations associated with the (then) rising tide of democratization, and second at competing visions of political economy in the age of capitalist globalization.

Democracy and groups: civil society and social capital

As we have seen, democratic corporatism inspired many scholars of comparative politics through much of the 1980s, not least because it offered left-leaning academics on both sides of the Atlantic a way to channel their hostility to Thatcher and Reagan. However, just as the 1989 revolutions that ended communist rule in Eastern Europe surprised and excited British and American political, policy, and academic elites, it also remade the intellectual terrain of political science. The revolutions soon came to be framed, in Owl-of-Minerva style, alongside regime transitions in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia as part of a putatively world-historical trend – famously christened “the Third Wave” of democratization by Samuel Huntington.56 Among comparative-politics scholars, there soon blossomed a series of efforts to explain this wave of democratization and promote its consolidation and further extension. The implication of this shift for the way that political scientists think about and study groups was notably mediated by a revival of the concept of “civil society.” This venerable concept reappeared in 56 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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several settings during the 1980s, but most significantly among Eastern European dissidents such as Vaclav Havel who were mobilizing opposition to communist regimes. The revolutions that swept figures like Havel from opposition into power brought a new prominence to the concept.57 Suddenly, civil society became all the rage in both policy and academic conversations. It was extolled as playing a key role in recent democratic transitions, but also as being central to the relative vitality, or lack thereof, of established democracies. The revived concept was structured by the contrast between “civil society” and “the state”: talk of civil society stressed the conditions for, existence of, and relations among voluntary associations largely autonomous of state power. While honed in criticism of communist efforts to control all group activity, the concept’s critical edge could also carry over to cut against state authorization of groups and structuring of their interactions in corporatist democracies. The anti-corporatist potential of the civil society concept was, however, politically multivalent. As Charles Taylor pointed out in 1995, it could resonate with neoliberal criticisms that “special interests” stifled market forces, but also left-wing criticisms of entrenched structures of group power in the name of new left social movements like the German Greens.58 Engagement with such movements played, as Bevir and Reiner show in Chapter 9, a critical role in spurring the 1990s embrace of “associationism” among academic left political theorists in both Britain and the United States. Whatever their political valences the common thematic of 1990s conversations about civil society was a revived emphasis upon group autonomy from the state. This emphasis recalls Almond’s earlier praise of “high subsystem autonomy,” as well as the tradition of American political science pluralism that he extended in developing such a category. 57 For the state of play with the “civil society” concept prior to the revolutions of 1989, see the writings of Eastern European and other intellectuals in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988) and Keane’s own work Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988). Though the great prominence of “civil society” talk in the 1990s cannot be understood without reference to Eastern European intellectuals and politics, its origins were not restricted to that context alone. For example, Philippe Schmitter had again been conceptually ahead of the curve in using the phrase in the mid 1980s in the context of Latin American and Southern European transitions to democracy. See Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, “Resurrecting Civil Society (and Restructuring Public Space),” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 48–56. 58 Charles Taylor, “Invoking Civil Society,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 204–24. For more on the politically multivocal work done by right and left uses of “civil society” in the 1990s see John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford University Press, 1998).

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It thus comes as no surprise to open a recent Civil Society Reader published in the United States and find selections from Truman and Almond holding prominent positions in the temporal middle ground between canonical selections (from Aristotle to Tocqueville) and works of the 1990s.59 Even as liberal pluralist praise of a sphere of group activity autonomous of the state was rearticulated in civil-society studies, however, the leading actors in that sphere shifted shape. Whereas “interest groups” held center stage in Truman’s pluralism, within civil society theorizing, the spotlight rests instead on “voluntary associations.” Such associations were only minor players in pluralist political science of the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps their fullest treatment came in a single chapter of Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture, which concluded: voluntary associations do play a major role in a democratic political culture … Membership in some association, even if the individual does not consider the membership politically relevant and even if it does not involve his active participation, does lead to a more competent citizenry. Pluralism, even if not explicitly political pluralism, may indeed be one of the most important foundations of political democracy.60

The surge of conversations about civil society and democracy in the 1990s thus called to center stage a minor actor in the pluralist scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s. The same actor was, moreover, pivotal for a key leitmotif of 1990s political science: the concept of “social capital” deployed by Robert Putnam in his effort to explain what makes some communities in Italy more “civic” than others, and thereby makes “democracy work” better.61 Here again the leading actors are voluntary associations. The differences from interest-group analysis are evident as Putnam turns to labor unions – a classic focus of earlier pluralists and neo-corporatists. For Putnam, labor unions do not automatically contribute to social capital, since, under closed-shop conditions, “union membership is essentially involuntary, and thus has little civic 59 Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Michael M. Foley (eds.), The Civil Society Reader (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2003). 60 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), p. 265. 61 Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993). In summarizing an interview with Putnam, Richard Merelman contends that “Putnam considers his concept of ‘social capital’ an affirmation of Yale pluralism” and then quotes Putnam as saying of the concept: “It doesn’t quite say Dahl was right, although it certainly does not say Dahl was wrong … It actually does say Almond and Verba were right.” Richard E. Merelman, Pluralism at Yale: The Culture of Political Science in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 196.

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significance.”62 It is only when unions remain voluntary associations that they help make “democracy work.” By contrast, “sports clubs” and other “cultural and leisure” associations, such as “a choral society or a bird-watching club,” as clearly voluntary associations, are for Putnam unproblematic contributors to social capital and thus, if indirectly, to good democratic governance, though precisely how they do so remains somewhat murky.63 We are a far cry here from Truman’s defense of interest groups as an essential aspect of “modern” society, compatible with and, under the right conditions, beneficial for democracy. In Putnam, by contrast, the less an association resembles a group advancing an “interest,” the better it seems to be for democracy. However, despite the shift in the type of group at the center of his arguments, Putnam in effect recreated Truman’s key claim about overlapping memberships as he later elaborated his own views. Responding to critics who noted that social capital could involve exclusive identities bonding members of a group in hostility to others in society, Putnam began to distinguish “bonding” from “bridging” forms of social capital. It was, he now specified, the bridging form – involving “networks that are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages”€– that supports the “generalized reciprocity” that he identified in his Italian study as critical for democratic governance.64 In their efforts to explain and advance democratization and good democratic governance, political scientists of the 1990s sang from, and indeed helped write, a liberal hymn book they shared with AngloAmerican political and policy elites. This convergence reached a symbolic apogee when Putnam became an international intellectual celebrity advising both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair about “social capital.”65 It is important to emphasize, however, that such convergence was limited in its extent. A contrasting image of political science’s stance relative to elite discourses arises if we shift attention from the spread of democracy to the spread of capitalism in the 1990s. 62 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, p. 106. 63 Ibid., pp. 89–91. A critical re-analysis of Putnam’s empirical data informed by a Gramscian rather than liberal theory of civil society led Margaret Kohn, for example, to conclude that a strong “red subculture” of communist affiliated mass based organizations provides a far stronger explanation of good governance in Italian regions than Putnam’s “apolitical associationalism.” See Margaret Kohn, “Civic Republicanism versus Social Struggle: A Gramscian Approach to Associationalism in Italy,” Political Power and Social Theory 13 (1999), 201–35. 64 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 22–4. 65 Tristam Hunt, “The NS Profile – Robert Putnam,” The New Statesman, March 12 (2001), 18–19.

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Globalization and neoliberal reform: visions of post-Cold War political economy

The challenge of interpreting the contemporary dynamics and future possibilities of what came to be known in the 1990s as “globalization” gave rise to three alternative political economic visions, each with distinctive ontological and normative premises. Among Anglo-American elites debate was largely confined to contained contention between, on the one hand, a neoliberal perspective presaging an inexorable wave of market-based reforms and sharp limitations on state authority and, on the other, the more pluralist ideas that helped inform New Labour. Both visions evinced a preference for, even championing of, a liberal conception of self-forming autonomous groups. Political scientists were not entirely absent from the articulation of either vision, but nor were they central to them. Scholars of comparative political economy were, instead, predominantly invested in a third vision more in tune with elites on the European continent. The most prominent new development in the field was the “Varieties-of-Capitalism” framework that, as we discuss below, suggested the continuing attractiveness and viability of neo-corporatist-like coordinating arrangements in the face of globalization. Neo-liberalism had understood itself in the 1980s as an heroic effort, embodied in the controversial reforms of Thatcher and Reagan, to turn the tide of history away from both social-democratic assumptions about the primacy of group interests and the long-run trend toward expanding government that post-World War II pluralists and corporatists had each celebrated in their own way. During the 1990s, neoliberalism took on a new, more triumphalist tone, as economic reforms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere seductively suggested that the grand sweep of history was now on its side. This meta-historical reframing of neoliberalism was perhaps most famously formulated in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which proclaimed a supposedly emerging telos of democratic politics and liberal, market-based economic organization.66 This epochal self-consciousness dovetailed with the rise of neoliberal narratives of globalization, which declared that global unleashing and integration of market forces was inexorably undermining non-market arrangements such as collective-bargaining systems and generous welfare states. The adduced reasons ranged from claims that non-market arrangements would not be financially viable in an 66 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

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interconnected global economy to the claim that greater political transparency would expose the purportedly collusive, and for some, corrupt, relationships on which corporatism was predicated. The takehome message involved the prediction (and, perhaps inconsistently, prescription) of convergence of the political economies of (at least) the advanced industrial world on an Anglo-American economic model with a limited welfare state, powerful markets, and a constrained role for public authorities.67 In the mid to late 1990s, such arguments were almost de rigueur in the Anglo-American press and the work of neoclassical economists.68 That said, these premises and predictions of neoliberal globalization took shape largely outside political science and spurred critical responses from scholars of comparative political economy, who Â�contended that rhetoric of transformed domestic economies was disconnected from a reality in which few fundamental changes had occurred. Such disconnects arose in part from the divergence between academic debates in comparative political economy and policy circles.69 At the same time, they reflected normative and paradigmatic commitments among many scholars that ran counter to the lionization of market-based models influential among elites in Britain, the United States, and, since the early 1990s, parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Political scientists argued that, though globalization confronted advanced industrial countries with new economic challenges, national models of capitalism displayed remarkable levels of policy and institutional stability and were likely to continue to do so. Work by Geoffrey Garrett,70 as well as 67 Signal examples of this perspective include Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 68 See, e.g., Andre Sapir, “Globalization and the Reform of European Social Models,” Journal of Common Market Studies 44, no. 2 (2006), 369–90. 69 This divergence was not without exceptions. These included Michel Albert’s Capitalism vs. Capitalism, which extolled the virtues of the “Rhenish,” or German, model and gained some traction in 1990s policy debates about the desirable contours of capitalist development. Also analyses of European (particularly the German) models of health insurance entered into the debate over American health reform under the Clinton administration in the early 1990s. See Albert, Capitalism vs. Capitalism: How America’s Obsession with Individual Achievement and Short-term Profit has Led it to the Brink of Collapse (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) [Translation of Capitalisme vs. Capitalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1991)]. For American discussions of the German health system, see Laurence A. Graig, Health of Nations: An International Perspective on US Health Care Reform, 2nd edn. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1993), ch. 4; and Richard Knox, Germany’s Health System: One Nation United, with Health Care for All (Washington, DC: Faulkner & Gray, 1993). 70 Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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that of Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore,71 sharply criticized claims of ineluctable marketization. They contended for the continued viability of alternative national arrangements in the face of globalization, as well as a continuing, though altered, role for the state. In the mid 1990s, Steven Vogel nicely captured the essence of such arguments in his Freer Markets, More Rules. Vogel stressed that, far from a dismantling of the state, economic liberalization in advanced industrial countries actually involved the reregulation of market economies and the redeployment of the state in the furtherance of that task.72 Probably the best-known formulation of this perspective is the “Varieties-of-Capitalism” approach of Peter Hall and David Soskice. Hall and Soskice define their project as creating “a new framework for understanding the institutional similarities and differences among the developed economies,” and as “a firm-centered political economy that regards companies as the crucial actors in a capitalist economy.” Though they may change in limited respects, Hall and Soskice argue, capitalist political economies are systems of coordination characterized by long-term stability due to “institutional complementarities” and “equilibria in many strategic interactions of the political economy.” 73 By featuring firms rather than traditionally class-based interest groups as their crucial group actors, and introducing a concept of strategic “equilibria” influenced by rational-choice theory, Hall and Soskice make major shifts in approach from the neo-corporatism of the 1980s. But they carry forward much from that work by continuing to stress stability and national variety. This blend of shifting approach, while sustaining older substantive messages, is again evident in work on pathdependence by Paul Pierson and others, who contend that long-term stability in political economies derives from “self-reinforcing or positive feedback processes,” which create a “status quo bias” within political and economic institutions.74 Whereas neoliberal triumphalists saw a dynamic but increasingly homogeneous future for capitalism, political scientists such as Pierson 71 Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore (eds.), National Diversity and Global Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 72 Steven K. Vogel, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). In Vogel’s words, “[I]n most cases of ‘deregulation,’ governments have combined liberalization with reregulation, the reformulation of old rules and the creation of new ones” (p. 3, original italics). 73 Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,” in Hall and Soskice (eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1, 6, 13. 74 Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2004), introduction, esp. pp. 10–11 and 42ff.

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and Hall and Soskice saw a capitalist universe in which globalized economic forces were being filtered and meditated through largely stable, nationally distinctive arrangements. Both comparative political economists and neoliberals captured certain aspects of globalization, but the normative commitments and analytic lenses of policy elites in Britain and the United States embraced the latter perspectives more readily than the former. A third vision that emerged during the late 1990s carved out a middle ground between prophets of neoliberal convergence and adherents of national-models perspectives. New Labour was elected in Britain in 1997 on promises to find a political-economic “Third Way” that would join social-democratic concerns for equity and fairness with neoliberal concerns for promoting economic growth via expanding market forces.75 This stance distanced the party and its Prime Minister Tony Blair equally from both Thatcher’s neoliberalism of the 1980s and the ineffectual quasi-social-democratic policies of Labour Prime Minister Callaghan in the late 1970s.76 As if in delayed response to 1970s’ Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath’s classic question “Who Governs Britain?” (i.e., the government or trade unions), Blair sought to include unions, firms, and other collective actors in decision-making without allowing any group to control or derail the process. Blair’s landslide victory was both cause and consequence of the increasing popularity of such a pluralist perspective. While eloquently formulated and given public gravitas by New Labour advisor Anthony Giddens and Demos (a Labour-affiliated think-tank),77 the intellectual roots of this perspective lay primarily in ideas about “networks” and “embeddedness” developed by scholars of organizational sociology and public administration. The “Third Way” turned to pluralist themes in its effort to find middle ground between socialism and neoliberalism, at least in part in hopes of attenuating conflicts that had raged since Thatcher’s assault on unions in the 1980s. Thatcher’s famous 75 Stuart White, “Interpreting the ‘Third Way’: Not One Road, but Many,” Renewal 6, no. 2 (1998), 17. 76 The traditional explanation for the Winter of Discontent and labor unrest of the 1970s (which Thatcher helped to instill in people’s political consciousness) – i.e., that unions had been too powerful, may get the problem backwards. Some scholars have argued that the problem had not been that the unions were too powerful, but rather that they were too divided and decentralized for union leaders to deliver on promises to employers and the government on behalf of their rank-and-file. See Chris Howell, Trade Unions and the State (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 143–4. 77 For Giddens’ statement of the premises of the Third Way and its role in British politics, see his Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

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quip that “there is no such thing as society” reflected neoliberalism’s anti-pluralist view of groups as, at best, incidental to the ideal political universe and, at worst, parochial and corrupt obstacles to economic growth and social progress. New Labour, by contrast, rehabilitated the pluralist view of groups as fundamental actors in modern society, who could engage in healthy competition, and, ultimately, forge a degree of societal consensus. This view also broke with “Old Labour” by portraying groups as healthy parts of the political-economic order only so long as they did not become too closely connected to the state (pace the relation between unions and Labour government of the 1960s and 1970s), and hence the state retained freedom to arbitrate among interests rather than being captive to any particular group. Though New Labour viewed groups as central to a healthy political order, its vision also displayed tensions and inconsistencies with respect to relations between groups and the state. On the one hand, it drew from new institutionalism and the literature on organizational sociology78 in emphasizing networks, “joined-up governance,” and public–private partnerships, all of which were to be fostered by (and equally, to benefit through sharing the burdens of governance) an “enabling” rather than a praetorian state.79 At the same time, however, there was a significant discrepancy between New Labour’s rhetorical championing of groups and their relatively top-down style of political management. In a sense, therefore, groups were important to New Labour only insofar as they would be cooperative with the party’s policy priorities – largely consistent with market-based adjustment – and alleviate some burdens of 78 This extensive literature rejected neoliberalism’s overly narrow conception of efficiency and demonization of group interests to instead envision groups, as the midcentury pluralists had, as ineluctable components of a realistic understanding of political-economic governance. Influential examples include Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985), 481–510; and Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction,” in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. Dimaggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 1–40. Such perspectives were also echoed in a strand of comparative political economy from the 1980s to the present that explores cooperation among subnational groups and firms. See, e.g., Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Wolfgang Streeck, “On Institutional Conditions of Diversified Quality Production,” in Egon Matzner and Wolfgang Streeck (eds.), Beyond Keynesianism: The Socio-economics of Production and Full Employment (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991), pp. 21–61; and Henry Farrell, The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests, and Inter-firm Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 79 For a detailed analysis of the relationship between New Labour’s intellectual heritage and their policy priorities, see Mark Bevir, New Labour: A Critique (London: Routledge, 2005), esp. pp. 41–53.

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governance that traditionally fell to the state. In this way, New Labour implicitly rejected key premises of democratic corporatism, particularly the emphasis upon class-based action. New Labour’s distancing from corporatism could also be seen in their approach to economic redistribution, which was to be carried out through the systems of taxation and benefits rather than through collective bargaining.80 New Labour thus came both to bury the social democratic and corporatist championing of class-based group interests and to praise the role of organically evolving, voluntary associations and the selfÂ�organizing networks that such groups underlie. Though New Labour differed from American political science pluralists of the 1950s and 1960s in downplaying older interest group language in favor of newer network and associationist concepts, they, like the latter, embraced the notion of democratic politics as a fluid arena of negotiations among a complex array of ever-evolving groups. As we have emphasized here, however, the party’s positions with respect to groups and their roles in the polity displayed many of the ambiguities characteristic of the party as a whole. New Labour’s rhetoric suggested a return to pluralism’s roots in British socialism, but its practice brought with it a return to some ambiguities in the early pluralists’ policy goals and conception of the relationship between state and society, evident in the varied views Stears explicates in his chapter on the guild socialists (Chapter 3). To neo-corporatists, who, like their social-democratic cousins, tended to see class-based groups as essential building blocks of political consensus and stable economic adjustment, adherents of the Third Way seemed to be market individualists using vague language about reconciliation to mask essentially neoliberal policies championing markets at the expense of equity and social cohesion. For neoliberals, by contrast, Blairites were socialists in denial, using the marketizing language of Thatcher without adopting her more hard-nosed view of the economy and society or making the difficult economic choices from which she had not shied away. Though the ambiguities of the Third Way thus drew criticism from both Left and Right, it was this very ambiguity that perhaps enabled New Labour to be successful politically. In a sense, everyone could see in the party what they wanted to see: for liberals, New Labour had distanced itself sufficiently from the “loony Left” of the 1980s to become a trusted party of government. For social democrats, Blair and his acolytes were preferable to the hard-edged market fundamentalism of Margaret Thatcher, an acceptable (if far from ideal) political second 80 We are indebted to Ben Jackson for this formulation. For Jackson’s perspective on British social democracy and New Labour, see Chapter 6, this volume.

Beyond pluralism?

243

best.81 New Labour’s popularity also reflected a similar logic to the pluralist resurgence of the 1990s in political science. Neo-pluralists under another name, New Labour shared many of the same commitments as political scientists like Putnam, most notably their view of associations as organic to social order and as essential helpmates to a democratic state whose authority and power had become constrained by globalization.

Conclusion

As we have shown, both the pluralist tradition in Anglo-American political science and the reactions to it have been dynamic and multivalent. By first identifying specific assumptions and arguments associated with the liberal interest-group pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s, we set ourselves up to ask which of them critics did (and did not) attack. In centering our subsequent history first upon the rise of neo-corporatism, we singled out one subset of the assaults on liberal pluralism charted by scholars trained in the 1960s and 1970s. By focusing attention in this way, we sought to explore disciplinary history at a level of detail sufficient to interrogate legitimating narratives about moving beyond “pluralism.” Doing so enabled us to show how, while anti-pluralist in its self-narrative, neo-corporatism was indebted to pluralism in important respects. Neo-corporatists turned on their head post-World War II liberal pluralist arguments about the relation between socio-economic modernization and the desirability of differentiating political power across a large number of relatively autonomous self-constituting collective actors. But, in so doing, they carried forward assumptions about democracy, representation, and the group-level character of interests whose crystallization in the 1920s had given shape to the pluralist tradition in political science. To sum up by analogy: neo-corporatism stood in regard to interest-group pluralism roughly as Marx stood in regard to Hegel. Neo-corporatism may thus be plausibly seen as a 1970s–1980s moment in the evolution of a broader pluralist tradition within political science, but one that stands out for privileging assumptions about groups and structurally unequal access to power that bear the legacies of socialist critiques of liberalism.

81 In this respect, the mutual affinity and political cross-pollination between New Labour and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats was no accident – they both successfully adopted ambiguous economic philosophies that enlarged their respective political tents even as they stepped back from sharp definition of the state’s desired role in the economy.

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Neo-corporatism was, however, a moment which, with the recurrent churn of intellectual generations and external events, would in turn lose its once fresh-faced charm. A critical turning point here came, we believe, with the revolutions of 1989. What the 1990s subsequently saw was a revival of perspectives more akin to the pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s in their liberal emphasis on autonomy from the state. But these perspectives departed from that earlier pluralism and neo-corporatism alike in shifting focus from interest groups directed toward influencing state power to voluntary associations, which were either indifferent or hostile to state power. Even within the political-economic domain that is the home ground of interest-group analysis, the actors shifted in the 1990s. Thus, for example, while Hall and Soskice inherited strands from neo-corporatism in emphasizing the potential benefits of robust roles for interest groups in “coordinated market economies” like Germany and Austria, they also put the firm rather than interest groups at the core of their analysis. In part by relegating class-based groups such as unions to a secondary role, they also tended to portray capitalist economies as frameworks of coordination rather than conflict. And finally, in intellectual circles surrounding New Labour, talk of associations, firms, “joined-up governance,” and networks predominated over the old language of interest groups and the primacy of social class central to neo-corporatism. Narratives relegating pluralism to the dustbin of the political science past obfuscate more than they reveal. Intellectual agendas since the 1970s have shared as much with the pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s as they have left behind. Stepping back in conclusion, we can capture the dynamics and comparisons explored in our chapter’s narrative in terms of two dimensions: an autonomy dimension, on the one hand, and an actors dimension, on the other. Neo-corporatists debated pluralists of the 1950s and 1960s along the first dimension by questioning the viability and desirability of autonomy from the state for non-state collective actors. But on the dimension of actors they inherited post-World War II pluralism’s focus on interest groups; partially as a result, they found themselves at odds with the rising neoliberal tide in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, which rejected both social-democratic and pluralist assumptions about groups. When we turn to political science of the 1990s, however, we see a shifting of the spotlight from interest groups to other types (or conceptualizations) of non-state collective actors: voluntary associations, firms, or networks of either. On the autonomy dimension, by contrast, a prominent aspect of 1990s scholarship is its assertion of the positive valuation of the autonomy of nonstate collective actors that had been a major theme of political science

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pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, amid the twists and turns of political science research regarding the role of groups in the governance of capitalist democracies, our analysis identifies a broad cycling through agendas that continue or revive one or another dimension of the pluralism of the immediate post-World War II decades. Pluralism is far from a relic that lost its steam half a century ago. If political science has thus never fully moved beyond pluralism, what then explains this resilience? We must distinguish here between pluralism in the broad sense used in this volume’s title – the view that alongside individuals, parties, and the state, groups have distinctive, positive, and even essential roles to play in modern democracies – and the Â�narrower use prevalent among empirical political scientists since the 1970s, which equates pluralism with specifically liberal views about groups. Pluralism in its broader sense persists in political science because the power of groups in capitalist democracies is both a widespread empirical phenomenon and a recurrent intellectual puzzle: sometimes undermining, but at other times underwriting, political stability, democratic representativeness, economic growth, and social equity. Political scientists have, to their credit, mostly been too empirically minded, especially since mid-century, to accept democratic theories that refuse to see, or see only to condemn, the political power of groups. As this volume demonstrates, however, democratic theories that are attentive to groups come in a wide range of ideological flavors; so why, the question becomes, have political scientists favored distinctively liberal theories to the extent that “pluralism” in the discipline has come to connote such theories in particular? We would like, in closing, to suggest two possible directions in which to seek answers for the endurance of liberal pluralism in political science. First, since the discipline was born, and continues to have its center of gravity, in the American academy, we might expect it to reflect persistent traits of American political culture. One such trait is a pronounced American affinity for liberal notions of autonomy and an accompanying analogy between the political arena and a market ideally driven by free competition and rational bargaining between autonomous and relatively well-informed actors. This analogy can flexibly encompass individual or group actors, but in either case politics appears as an arena of free self-expression and choice rather than structural constraints. Socialist views of markets and politics as driven by unequal power and constraint are inimical to this persistent American viewpoint. Approaching political science as the academic expression of persistent assumptions and analogies in American political culture, however,

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can only take us so far. It cannot explain why, while liberal pluralism has recurrently flourished in the discipline, it hit a low ebb in the heyday of neo-corporatism. An alternative approach could take its starting point from our opening observation that, during its reception into empirical political science, “pluralism” became almost indelibly imprinted with the United States as its exemplar, and its most productive laboratory. From this perspective, we could then interpret the status of pluralism among political scientists as a product of their relationship with the American present. When comfortable with the leading currents of American domestic and international politics, they have tended to preach liberal pluralist lessons. But when out of sorts with domestic politics and concerned that the United States is falling behind other powers, they have looked to Europe and drawn lessons from it that are more consistent with corporatist and social democratic conceptions of groups and the role of the state. Our historical periodization of the ebb and flow between liberal pluralism and neo-corporatism thus, we would stress, closely tracked the vagaries of shifting social, economic, and political realities on both sides of the Atlantic as interpreted from the center-left of the American political arena.

Index

actions, 9, 10 Acton, Lord, 26, 27–33, 38, 39, 121 Essays on the History of Freedom, 28 ‘On Nationality’, 27 Adams, Henry Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 138 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 132, 133 advanced capitalism, 229, 232 agonism, 201, 209–12 Almond, Gabriel, 214, 215, 219–21, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 234, 235 Civic Culture, The, 152 Althusius, Johannes, 29 Althusser, Louis, 180, 207–8 Althusserian Marxism, 179, 181, 182, 183, 201 American Enterprise Association, 120 American Federation of Labor, 110 American Political Science Association, 136, 137, 224 American Political Science Review, 60 Aquinas, Thomas, 30 ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’ (Kukathas), 162 Aristotle, 85, 97 Aron, Raymond, 90 assimilation, 75 associationism, 179–81, 182, 184–87, 191, 194–200, 201–7, 212–13, 234, 242 associations. See€groups and associations Associations and Democracy (Cohen and Rogers), 185, 191 associative democracy, 58 Austin, John, 21, 26, 133 Authority in the Modern State (Laski), 22 Baldwin, J.M. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 71 Bancroft, George, 132

Barker, Ernest, 22, 137, 150 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 139–40, 143 Barry, Brian, 154, 175–77 Culture and Equality, 175 Beard, Charles, 133 Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An, 136 Beer, Samuel, 222–23, 227, 230 behavioralism, 150–53 beliefs, 9, 10 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 21, 26 Bentley, Arthur, 5, 61–63, 64, 65, 79, 134–36, 139, 143, 146, 151, 152 Process of Government, The, 61 Berelson, Bernard, 130, 149 Berger, Suzanne, 233, 239 Organizing Interests in Western Europe, 230–31 Berlin, Isaiah, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88–93, 95, 97, 98–99, 100–1, 102 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 89 Bildung, 37, 38 Blackstone, William, 26 Blair, Tony, 236, 240, 242 Blue Labour, 58 Boas, Franz, 76, 138 Bodin, Jean, 2, 25 British Combination Acts, 123, 125 Brown, Ivor, 47, 56 Brownson, Orestes, 132 Bryce, James, 132 Burgess, John W., 133, 134, 135 Burke, Edmund, 26 Calhoun, John C., 131 Callaghan, James, 240 capitalism, 203, 204, 205 varieties of, 237, 239–40 Catlin, C.E.G., 137, 142 Chicago School of economics, 122 children protection of, 206

247

248

Index

churches, 207 Churches in the Modern State (Figgis), 22, 28, 37, 38–39, 51 Civic Culture, The (Almond and Verba), 152 civil rights movement, 183 civil society, 51, 180, 184, 194, 216, 233–35 Civil Society Reader, 235 class, 179, 182, 183 Clegg, Hugh, 105, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116 New Approach to Industrial Democracy, A, 118 Clinton, Bill, 236 Cohen, Joshua, 179, 184–89, 191, 212, 213 Associations and Democracy, 185, 191 New Inequality, The, 187 On Democracy, 185, 187 Way Out, A, 188 Coker, Francis, 60, 140 Cold War liberalism, 84, 85 Cole, G.D.H., 7, 21, 22, 23, 40, 45, 47, 52–56, 57, 58, 64, 66, 67, 70, 82, 107, 108, 115, 118, 127, 137, 180, 202 Self-Government in Industry, 118 Cole, Margaret, 82 collective bargaining, 114–15, 119, 124–26, 219, 237, 242 collectivism, 223, 227 Commons, J.R., 107, 112 communalism, 52 communism, 6, 89, 90, 92, 204, See€also€totalitarianism collapse of, 203, 205, 233, See€also€Soviet Union: collapse of Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 6 communitarianism, 57, 159 community, 42, 47, 52, 55, 75, 76–77 compromises, 103, 148 Comte, Auguste, 63 conciliarism, 29, 30 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 110, 115 Connolly, William, 224 conservatism, 102 Considerations on Representative Government (Mill), 27 consociationalism, 224 Constant, Benjamin, 26 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 122, 124 constitutionalism, 24, 26, 29

contractarianism, 24 Cooley, C.H., 136 cooperatives, 207 corporatism, 23, 57, 182–83, 215, 222–23, 242 neocorporatism, 23, 215, 224–33, 239, 242, 243–44, 246 trade unions and, 107–28 Corwin, Edwin, 144 creativity, 68–69 critical theory, 190, 193 Croly, Herbert, 136 Crosland, Anthony, 112, 117, 118 Crowder, George, 85, 102 Culture and Equality (Barry), 175 Dahl, Robert, 79, 107, 110, 116, 150–52, 153, 214, 217, 224 Politics, Economics, and Welfare, 150 Preface to Democratic Theory, A, 151 Who Governs?, 152 Darwin, Charles, 71 decentralization, 109 Defence of the Realm Act, 45 Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (Adams), 138 deliberative democracy, 185, 190, 193, 194, 211 democracy agonism and, 201, 209–12 associationism and, 184–87 associative, 58 community and, 76–77 deliberative, 185, 190, 193, 194, 211 democratic theory, 129–53 groups and associations and, 136, 139–45, 184, 216–17, 245 guild socialism and, 54–55 industrial, 109–20, 127–28 multiculturalism and, 137 representative, 204 trade unions and, 180 democratization, 233–34 Demos, 240 Derrida, Jacques, 208, 209 developmental historicism, 63, 71 Dewey, John, 22, 64, 70–78, 79, 129, 132–33, 136, 137, 141–42 Human Nature and Conduct, 57 Public and Its Problems, The, 72, 76, 77 Reconstruction in Philosophy, 57 Dicey, A.V., 26 Dickinson, John, 143, 144–45, 147, 152

Index Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (Baldwin), 71 difference. See€also€multiculturalism difference theory, 179–81, 182, 189–200, 207–13 difference-blindness, 158, 177 groups and associations and, 68–69, 75–76 differentiation, 220–21, 223 dilemmas, 8, 9–10, 179, 181, 182–83, 184, 185, 195, 213, 216, 230 Director, Aaron, 122 Dissent, 195 distribution, 198 distributive paradigm, rejection of, 191–92, 212 diversity, 2, 137, See€also€multiculturalism Dore, Ronald, 239 Du Bois, William, 77 Duguit, Leon, 138 Dunlop, John, 112 Dworkin, Ronald, 81, 101, 187 Easton, David, 153 Political System, 150 Eckstein, Harry Theory of Stable Democracy, A, 152 Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An (Beard), 136 economism, 208, 209 Einstein, Albert, 62, 64 Eisenberg, Avigail Reconstructing Political Pluralism, 23 Elliott, W.Y., 60, 129, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147 Ellis, E. D., 60, 140 Ely, Richard, 132, 136 embeddedness, 240 End of History, The (Fukuyama), 237 Engels, Friedrich Communist Manifesto, The, 6 enlightenment liberalism, 177 Essays on the History of Freedom (Acton), 28 essentialism, 208 evolution, 63–64, 67, 78 exclusion, 192–93 Fabianism, 6, 41–44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 107 Faith, Reason, and Civilization (Laski), 82 fascism, 84, 89, 92, 95–96, 98, See€also€totalitarianism

249 federalism, 28–29, 30, 68, 106 Federalist Papers, 129, 130, 131 Figgis, J.N., 4, 5, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28–29, 32, 45, 47, 50–52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 70, 202, 207 Churches in the Modern State, 22, 28, 37, 38–39, 51 Gospel and Human Needs, The, 51 Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 28 Will to Freedom, The, 51 Flanders, Allan, 112 Follett, Mary Parker, 138 New State, The, 57 Ford, Henry Jones, 139 foundationalism, 208 Foundations of Sovereignty, The (Laski), 22 Free Church of Scotland, 45 Free Kirk of Scotland case, 37–38 freedom, 155 of association, 22 of groups and associations, 39, 108–9, 202, 205 of the individual, 42–43, 44, 49–50, 52, 68, 69–70, 79–80, 117, 155, 160, 162 of religion, 24, 29, 30, 38–39 sovereignty and, 202 Freeman, Samuel, 25, 30 Freer Markets, More Rules (Vogel), 239 Friedrich, Carl, 147 friendly societies, 207 Fukuyama, Francis End of History, The, 237 function, 44, 47–50, 51, 55–56 functionalism, 220, 226 Galbraith, J.K., 114 Galston, William, 102 Garrett, Geoffrey, 238 gender equality, 154, 167–75, 183, 184, 189 General Strike (1926), 108, 110 Giddens, Anthony, 240 Giddings, Franklin, 139 Gierke, Otto von, 4, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 39, 65–66 Political Theories of the Middle Ages, 22, 31 Gladstone, William, 27 Glasman, Maurice, 58 Global Challenges (Young), 193 globalization, 204, 216, 237–39, 243

250

Index

Goldthorpe, John, 233 Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism, 231–32 Goodnow, Frank, 137 Gospel and Human Needs, The (Figgis), 51 Gourevitch, Peter, 232–33 Politics in Hard Times, 232 governance, 1, 17, 19 Governmental Process, The (Truman), 149, 217 Gramsci and Marxist Theory (Mouffe), 207 Gramsci, Antonio, 83, 207–8 grassroots struggles, 209 Gray, John, 85, 99–100, 102, 103 Green, T.H., 132 Group Representation Before Congress (Herring), 143 groups and associations, 4–5, See€also€trade unions creativity and, 68–69 democracy and, 136, 139–45, 184–87, 216–17, 245 difference and, 68–69, 75–76 freedom of, 22, 39, 108–9, 202, 205 freedom of exit from, 165–66, 173–75, 206 group identity, 50–52 groups vs. associations, 34–35 harmony/disharmony and, 67–68, 74 individuals and, 60–61, 62–65, 67, 69–70, 73–74, 79–80, 119–20, 176, 205 law and, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 45 neoliberalism and, 241 New Labour and, 240–42 overlapping memberships, 217–18, 226, 236 potential, 217–18, 224, 226 power and, 164–65, 169–75 real group personality, 26–27, 33–38, 60, 63, 65–67, 68, 70 religious and cultural, 23 rights of, 159–62, 163, 164–65, 167–75, 176 state and, 60–61, 72–73, 135, 205 voluntary, 234, 235–36, 244 voluntary vs. coercive, 120–21 guild socialism, 23, 40–59, 99, 106, 109, 115, 118, 119, 121, 179, 226, 242 beginnings of, 45–46 democracy and, 54–55 group identity, 50–52 individualism and, 52–56 legacies of, 56–59 organicism and, 47–50 value pluralism and, 82

guilds, 36, 207 Gunnell, John, 62 Habermas, Jurgen, 153 habit, 94–95 Hall, Peter, 239–40, 244 Hall, Stuart, 117, 208 Hampshire, Stuart, 84, 85, 95–99, 100, 103 Innocence and Experience, 96 Morality and Conflict, 97 Harrison, Royden, 118–19 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 134 Hart, H.L.A., 21 Havel, Vaclav, 234 Hayek, Friedrich, 30, 84, 95, 121, 122, 123, 124–25 Constitution of Liberty, The, 122, 124 health care, 197 Heath, Edward, 240 Hegel, G.W.F., 4, 5, 6, 63, 71, 243 hegemony, 208–9 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 208, 209, 212 Herder, J.G., 85 Herring, Pendleton, 78, 146, 148–49, 152 Group Representation Before Congress, 143 Politics of Democracy, 147 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 30 Hindess, Barry, 201, 208 Hirst, Paul, 23, 58, 180, 201–7, 208, 213 Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality, A (Maitland), 24 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 21, 24–26, 33, 96 Hobhouse, L.T., 42, 67 Hobsbawm, Eric, 103, 203 Hobson, J.A., 42 Hobson, S.G., 40, 45, 47, 49 Hodges, Frank, 46 Holmes, Stephen, 25 Passions and Constraints, 25 Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey), 57 Huntington, Samuel, 233 Hutt, W.H., 121–23, 125 Theory of Collective Bargaining, The, 121 Huxley, Aldous, 71 idealism, 5 identity, 157–58, 176, 177, 180, 182, 183 Ignatieff, Michael, 101 immigration, 75, 77, 78, 137, 161, 183, 184, 199

Index inclusion, 192 Inclusion and Democracy (Young), 190, 193 Independent Labour Party, 42 individual freedom, 42–43, 44, 49–50, 52, 68, 69–70, 79–80, 117, 155, 160, 162 individualism, 24, 33, 52–56, 57, 147 individuals groups and associations and, 60–61, 62–65, 67, 69–70, 73–74, 79–80, 119–20, 176, 205 industrial democracy, 109–20, 127–28 Industrial Workers of the World, 110 inequality, economic, 187–88 Innocence and Experience (Hampshire), 96 Institute of Economic Affairs, 120, 121, 122 interest-groups, 57, 79, 143, 148, 149, 151, 152–53, 215, 217–27, 230–33, 235, 236, 242, 243, 244 International Political Science Association, 221 ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ (Okin), 167 James, William, 71, 73, 77, 81 Pluralistic Universe, A, 136 joined-up governance, 241, 244 justice, 96, 97, 99, 154, 155–56, 190, 192, 193–94, 196, 198 Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young), 191, 193 Kallen, Horace, 77, 137 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 96 Kant, Immanuel, 24 Katzenstein, Peter, 232 Small States in World Markets, 232 Kekes, John, 85, 102 Kerr, Clark, 112 Keynesianism, 181, 203, 229 Kirchheimer, Otto, 83 Knight, Frank, 122 Kolakowski, Leszek, 95 Krabbe, Hugo, 137 Kukathas, Chandran, 154, 162–66, 168, 170, 173, 175, 176 ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’, 162 Kymlicka, Will, 154, 159–62, 163, 165, 166, 167–68, 169, 171, 172–73, 175 Liberalism, Community and Culture, 159, 167 Multicultural Citizenship, 160

251 Laboratory School, Chicago, 75 Laclau, Ernesto, 208–9 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 208, 209, 212 Lamprecht, Sterling, 81, 82, 86–88, 90, 92 Larmore, Charles, 101 Laski, Harold, 6, 7, 21, 22–23, 24, 27, 44, 60, 64, 66–67, 68–70, 75, 79–80, 107, 108, 115, 127, 137, 138, 142, 146, 150, 180, 202 Authority in the Modern State, 22 Faith, Reason, and Civilization, 82 Foundations of Sovereignty, 22 Liberty in the Modern State, 108 Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 22, 29 Lasswell, Harold, 137, 146 Latham, Earl, 149, 151 Latham, Oliver, 47 Laurence, R.V., 32 League of Nations, 87, 88 legal formalism, 78 Leninism, 209 Lester, Richard, 112 liberal radicalism, 4 liberalism and Hobbes, 24–26 new and old, 23–24 of fear, 98–99, 103 Liberalism, Community and Culture (Kymlicka), 159, 167 libertarianism, 25 Liberty in the Modern State (Laski), 108 Lieber, Francis, 131–32, 134, 138 Lijphart, Arend, 224 Lindblom, Charles, 152, 153 Politics, Economics, and Welfare, 150 Lindsay, A.D., 137, 143–44, 147 Lippmann, Walter, 137, 138–39, 140–41, 142, 143 Phantom Public, The, 57 Public Opinion, 57 Lipset, Seymour Martin Political Man, 152 Locke, Alain, 77 Locke, John, 24, 26 Logic of Collective Action (Olson), 224 ‘Long-Term Perspective, The’ (Walzer), 196 Lowell, Lawrence A., 136 Lowi, Theodore, 153, 224 Lukes, Steven, 91 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 42, 44 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 85, 97

252

Index

MacPherson, C.B., 25 Madison, James, 26, 150, 151 Maeztu, R. de, 40, 45, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 55, 56, 57 Maine, Henry, 133 Maitland, F.W., 4, 5, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33, 35, 36, 38 Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality, A, 24 Moral Personality and Legal Personality, 33–34 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 71 Margalit, Avishai, 103 Marquand, David, 83 Marx, Karl, 6, 63, 71, 243 Communist Manifesto, The, 6 Marxism, 208 Marxism, Althusserian, 179, 181, 182, 183, 201 McConnell, Grant, 152, 224 medievalism, 25–26, 29–32 Merriam, Charles, 64, 133, 137, 139, 140, 153 Mill, James, 21, 24 Mill, John Stuart, 21, 24, 30, 38–39, 69 Considerations on Representative Government, 27 On Liberty, 38 Mills, C. Wright, 151 New Men of Power, The, 118 Milne-Bailey, Walter, 108–10, 112, 115 Trade Unions and the State, 108 Miners’ Federation, 46 ‘Mistresses of their Own Destiny’ (Okin), 173 modernity, 25 modernization theory, 219, 220 monism, 82, 84, 89, 90, 93, 95, 98, 146 Mont Pèlerin Society, 121 Montesquieu, Baron de, 26 Moral Personality and Legal Personality (Maitland), 33 morality, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104 Morality and Conflict (Hampshire), 97 Moses, Bernard, 132 Mouffe, Chantal, 180, 194, 201, 207–13 Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 207 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 208, 209, 212 Mulford, Elisha, 132 Multicultural Citizenship (Kymlicka), 160 multiculturalism, 17, 19, See€also€difference democracy and, 137 gender equality and, 167–75

liberalism and, 154, 167–75 politics of recognition, 156–59 value pluralism and, 84–85, 103–04 Munitions Act, 45 Murray, Philip, 110–11 Nation, 53 National Guilds League (NGL), 45 National Mineworkers Union, 202 Nazism, 92, 95–96, 98 neocorporatism, 23, 215, 224–33, 239, 242, 243–44, 246 neoliberalism, 216, 228–29, 237–38 associationism and, 182 dilemma of, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 195, 196, 200, 213, 230 groups and associations and, 241 New Labour and, 242 state and, 106, 120–21 trade unions and, 107, 120–26, 128, 202–3 networks, 240, 241, 242, 244 New Age, 45, 47, 53, 55 New Approach to Industrial Democracy, A (Clegg), 118 New Deal liberalism, 146 New Democracy Forum, 187 New Inequality, The (Cohen and Rogers), 187 new institutionalism, 241 New Labour, 216, 237, 243, 244 New Left, 57, 117, 118–20, 127, 179, 182–83, 201, 208 New Left Review, 118 New Men of Power, The (Mills), 118 New State, The (Follett), 57 Nicholls, David Pluralist State, The, 29 Oakeshott, Michael, 93–95, 101 objective pluralism, 100 Odegard, Peter, 78, 143, 146, 149 Pressure Politics, 143 Okin, Susan Moller, 154, 165, 167–75 ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, 167 ‘Mistresses of their Own Destiny’, 173 Olson, Mancur, 124, 224 Logic of Collective Action, 224 On Democracy (Cohen and Rogers), 185, 187 On Liberty (Mill), 38 ‘On Nationality’ (Acton), 27 On Toleration (Walzer), 200 Orage, A.R., 45

Index Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Goldthorpe), 231–32 organicism, 47–50, 63, 65, 67, 78, 226 Organizing Interests in Western Europe (Berger), 230–31 Osborne, W.V., 45 Parekh, Bhikhu, 156, 177–78 Parsons, Talcott, 83 Passions and Constraints (Holmes), 25 Pateman, Carole, 152, 224 Patten, Alan, 157 Pettit, Philip, 25 Phantom Public, The (Lippmann), 57 Philosophical Review, The, 60 physical sciences, 64 Pierson, Paul, 240 planning, 181–82 pluralism definition of, 2 empirical tradition of, 6, 18, 60–80, 129–53, 243–46 external, 197–98 historicizing, 8–11 internal, 196, 199, 200 liberal tradition of, 5, 18, 21–39, 81–104, 154–78 socialist tradition of, 7, 18, 40–59, 105–28, 179–213 state and, 2–8 Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Runciman), 29 Pluralist State, The (Nicholls), 29 Pluralistic Universe, A (James), 136 Political Man (Lipset), 152 ‘Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice’ (Young), 190 Political System (Easton), 150 Political Theories of the Middle Ages (Gierke), 22, 31 Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (Figgis), 28 Politics and Vision (Wolin), 152 Politics in Hard Times (Gourevitch), 232 Politics of Democracy (Herring), 147 Politics, Economics, and Welfare (Dahl and Lindblom), 150 polyarchy, 150, 151 Popper, Karl, 84, 90, 95 power relations, 190 practices, 9, 10 pragmatism, 64, 70–72, 74–78 Preface to Democratic Theory, A (Dahl), 151 Pressure Politics (Odegard), 143

253 Process of Government, The (Bentley), 61 psychology, 64 public, 72–73 Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 72, 76, 77 public opinion, 138, 143, 148 Public Opinion (Lippmann), 57 public–private partnerships, 241 Putnam, Robert, 235–36, 243 racism, 184, See€also€civil rights movement radical historicism, 8–11 Radin, Paul, 76 Railway Servants Union, 45 Randall, A.E., 47, 49 rational choice theory, 239 rationality, 96 Rawls, John, 30, 99, 100, 101, 102, 153, 154, 155–56, 157, 162, 163, 164, 177, 187 Theory of Justice, A, 177 Raz, Joseph, 21 Reagan, Ronald, 182, 184, 228, 230, 232, 233, 237 Reckitt, M., 40, 45, 49 Reckitt, R., 47 recognition, politics of, 156–59 Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Eisenberg), 23 Reconstruction in Philosophy (Dewey), 57 redistribution, 179, 191, 212, 242 relativism, 84, 88, 91, 92, 100 relativity, theory of, 62, 64 religious freedom, 24, 29, 30, 38–39 representative democracy, 204 republicanism, 131 Reuther, Walter, 111, 115 Rogers, Joel, 179, 184–89, 191, 212, 213 Associations and Democracy, 185, 191 New Inequality, The, 187 On Democracy, 185, 187 Way Out, A, 188 Rokkan, Stein, 222 Roosevelt, F.D., 146 Rorty, Richard, 100–1 Ross, E.A., 137 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 5, 38, 89 Runciman, David, 38 Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 29 Russell, Bertrand, 49

254

Index

Sabine, George, 147 Schattschneider, E.E., 148, 152 Schiller, Reuel, 119 Schmitt, Carl, 210 Schmitter, Philippe, 225–28, 229, 230 ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’, 225 Schumpeter, Joseph, 90, 95, 100, 107, 110, 116, 149 Self-Government in Industry (Cole), 118 Shepard, Walter J., 147 Shklar, Judith, 98 Shonfield, Andrew, 227 Shubert, Glendon, 152 Sidney, Algernon, 24 signs, 208 Simons, Henry, 122–23 ‘Some Reflections on Syndicalism’, 122 Slichter, Sumner, 112 Small States in World Markets (Katzenstein), 232 Small, Albion, 139 Smilie, Robert, 46 Smith, Adam, 24 Smith, T.V., 78, 147 social capital, 216, 235–36 social science, 18 Social Science Research Council Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), 221 Joint Committee on Western Europe, 230 social services, 93 Socialism (von Mises), 121 socialist historiography, 202, 203, 205 ‘Some Reflections on Syndicalism’ (Simons), 122 Soskice, David, 239–40, 244 sovereignty, 21–22, 25, 26, 64, 65, 67, 132–34, 135, 138, 141, 143, 146, 147, 180, 202, See€also€state Soviet Union collapse of, 194, 195, 200, 201, 203, See€also€communism: collapse of Spencer, Herbert, 24, 71 Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 197, 198 Stalinism, 179, 182, 201, 207, 209, 213 state, 21–22, 64, See€also€sovereignty centrism, 41–44, 46, 48, 52, 57, 106 groups and associations and the, 60–61, 72–73, 135, 205 pluralism and the, 2–8 theory of, 2–4, 131–34, 138, 141–42, 147

Stephen, James Fitzjames, 85 ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’ (Schmitter), 225 Storrington Document, 45 Strauss, Leo, 25, 84, 99, 150 structuralism, 179 Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (Laski), 22, 29 Sunwise Turn, The, 46 syndicalism, 23, 106, 115, 119, 179 systems theory, 220 Taff Vale case, 66 Talmon, Jacob, 89 Tawney, R.H., 47, 53, 56, 58, 83 Taylor, Charles, 154, 156–59, 166, 234 Thatcher, Margaret, 180, 182, 202, 204, 228, 230, 232, 233, 237, 240, 242 Theory of Collective Bargaining, The (Hutt), 121 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 177 Theory of Stable Democracy, A (Eckstein), 152 Third Way, 216, 240, 242 Thompson, E.P., 117, 182 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 26, 121, 130, 149 tolerance, 211 torture, 102 totalitarianism, 84, 85, 89–90, 92, 142, 146, 150, 151, 209 Trade Disputes Act, 123 Trade Union Act, 45 trade unions, 23 associationism and, 179, 184, 207 law and, 45 collective bargaining, 114–15, 119, 124–26 corporatism and, 107–28 democracy and, 180 effectiveness of, 186 growth of, 106–7 individual freedom and, 69–70 industrial democracy and, 109–20 neoliberalism and, 107, 120–26, 128, 202–3, 204 social capital and, 235–36 Taff Vale case, 66 Trade Unions and the State (Milne-Bailey), 108 traditions, 8–11 transnational exchanges, 10–11 Truman, David, 79, 149, 151, 214, 215, 217–19, 223, 224, 226, 230, 235, 236 Governmental Process, The, 149, 217

Index ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (Berlin), 89 US foreign policy, 188 United Automobile Workers, 111 United Presbyterians, 45 utilitarianism, 4, 21–22 value pluralism, 81–104, 138 varieties of capitalism, 237, 239–40 Verba, Sidney, 235 Civic Culture, The, 152 Vico, Giambattista, 85 Vietnam War, 183, 184 Voegelin, Eric, 84, 150 Vogel, Steven Freer Markets, More Rules, 239 von Mises, Ludwig Socialism, 121 Wagner Act, 123 Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions, 150 Wallas, Graham, 5, 64, 137 Walzer, Michael, 180, 184, 194–200, 212, 213 ‘Long-Term Perspective, The’, 196 On Toleration, 200 Spheres of Justice, 197, 198 What It Means to be an American, 197, 200 Way Out, A (Cohen and Rogers), 188 Webb, Beatrice, 42, 50, 107, 181, 207

255 Webb, Sidney, 42–43, 44, 50, 107, 181, 207 Weber, Max, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90 Weimar Republic, 84, 114, 120, 145, 147, 217 welfare economics, 22 welfare states, 199, 216, 219, 237 What It Means to be an American (Walzer), 197, 200 Who Governs? (Dahl), 152 Will to Freedom, The (Figgis), 51 Williams, Bernard, 93, 98, 102 Williams, Raymond, 118, 182 Willoughby, W.W., 133, 134, 137, 141 Wilson, Francis G., 145 Wilson, Woodrow, 133, 134, 137, 139, 146 Wolff, Robert Paul, 153 Wolin, Sheldon, 152 Politics and Vision, 152 Woolsey, Theodore, 132 working class culture, 118 World War I, 137 Young, Iris Marion, 180, 184, 186, 187, 189–94, 198–99, 212–13 Global Challenges, 193 Inclusion and Democracy, 190, 193 Justice and the Politics of Difference, 191, 193 ‘Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice’, 190