Social and Political Bonds: A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence 9780773580756

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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BONDS

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis 2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press 3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain 5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt 6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn 7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding 9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W. F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris

10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn 12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe 16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300–c.1650 Arthur P. Monahan

18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer

28 Enlightenment and Community Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland Anne Skoczylas 32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 Martin S. Staum

37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz 40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard

44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn 47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto 48 Media, Memory, and the First World War David Williams

41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle

49 An Aristotelian Account of Induction Creating Something from Nothing Louis Groarke

42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan

50 Social and Political Bonds A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence F.M. Barnard

43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762 (Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BONDS A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence

F.M. Barnard

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca G

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010 isbn 978-0-7735-3647-0 Legal deposit first quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Barnard, F. M. (Frederick M.) Social and political bonds : a mosaic of contrast and convergence / F.M. Barnard. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 50) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3647-0 1. Mediation. 2. Public relations and politics. 3. Political participation. 4. Civics. 5. Democracy. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas 50 ja76.b358 2010

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Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in New Baskerville 10/12

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Contents

Preface

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1 Introductory Perspectives

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2 Status Identification: Class and Social Mobility

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3 Social Interaction: Conflict, Cooperation and Culture 4 Political Development: Dynamics and Contexts 5 Power and Political Authorization

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6 Electoral Choices: Parties and Governments 7 Democracy: Scripts and Players

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8 Hidden Powers and Odd Allies: Lobbyists and Bureaucrats 9 Political Mediation: Parts and Wholes (An Overview) 10 Bridging and Belonging: Concluding Reflections Index

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186 217

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Preface

the following pages are a revised and extended version of lectures I have given in political studies’ departments in England and Canada. The varied backgrounds and interests (notably in history, sociology, economics, and public administration, in addition to my own specialty in political theory) of those attending them, induced me to adopt an essentially interdisciplinary approach, with emphasis on the history of ideas. I was encouraged to proceed in this direction, when deciding to turn the lectures into a book, by Philip Cercone, editor of McGill-Queen’s University Press Series on the History of Ideas, and fortunate in having the patient collaboration of his editorial staff throughout a number of major revisions. I am also indebted to my daughter Yvonne, who helpfully provided assistance with electronic communications and bibliographical data. Finally, I value the contributions of the Press’s two (anonymous) readers. Aside from their generous comments and critically useful suggestions, I greatly appreciated their understanding of the complexity and the challenges that spanning disciplinary boundaries involves.

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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BONDS

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1

Introductory Perspectives A series of causes act together, reciprocally and in succession; one wheel interlocks with the other, one spring acts upon the other. J.G. Herder (Fragmente, 176)

fact and science while the possibility of complete indeterminacy, as suggested by modern physics, cannot be ruled out, the human mind boggles at the thought that the world of human creations should be viewed as a realm of wholly random phenomena devoid of continuity or purpose. Instead, it seeks to carve out of the bewildering multiplicity of causes and events a structured whole whose parts bear some recognizably linked relationship. At the same time, notably in the sphere of political actions, humans have come to recognize that the structured whole they are able to create is not like a coherent substance, such as natural creations, but rather what Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished as accidental wholes. Thus, although we often hear the state spoken of as a “body politic,” it is in truth no body at all, but more like an ensemble of relations, in which the parts are not strictly “parts” in the sense of mechanical components of an artefact or biological limbs of a living being; rather they are “entities” in their own right, coming into relation with others on a contingent basis, and doing so by only potentially attaining inner coherence or structural unity. It may not be wrong, therefore, to regard political creations as constituting wholes sui generis, forming a reality all of their own and thus knowable in a way in which no other creations within non-human reality are.1 Possibly, the rest of reality is fundamentally unknowable in any 1 Among writers of modernity, Giambattista Vico is best known for having advanced this thesis as the conceptual bedrock of history as the “new science.”

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intelligibly causal sense, as Hume and Kant insisted. But, be that as it may, all causal knowledge, such as it is, is the work of a mediating process, guided by referential aids that are at once subjective and objective in origin, comprising the operation of an active and selective mind as well as the influence of a given physical and cultural environment. In any case, there are limits to the degree of certainty and accuracy with which human understanding can appropriate the world as it really is, in view of the seemingly unavoidable element of arbitrariness in the observation and marshalling of experiential data. As one commentator aptly put it, “we are never really describing facts, but observations of these presumed facts.”2 Still, it cannot be gainsaid that some facts are more factual than others. The step from the objective material to its subjective ordering into a causally intelligible account is clearly an exceedingly subtle process. But, even if, by its very nature, it almost precludes absolute certainty and objectivity, this does not rule out the need for a measure of impersonal detachment, to achieve levels of shared understandings about conditions and standards of verification and falsification in the course of establishing acceptable facts. This is true of all scientific activity, which, therefore, amounts to a continual reappraisal in the social as much as in the natural sciences, and, consequently, in both instances, clearly discloses the tentative character of factual descriptions and causal explanations.3 Yet, surprisingly perhaps, only since the European Enlightenment has a broadly prevailing temper of thought become skeptical of the factuality of widely accepted, and frequently highly impressive, theories. With this emergence of widespread skepticism, or possibly preceding it, came a sharpened awareness of the ease with which generalizations can come about on the basis of ill-established or erroneous facts, and of deeply ingrained pre-emptoriness in all its forms. Thus, while science and the problems it tries to come to grips with existed before the Enlightenment, the relentless challenging of established facts, together with the problem-consciousness characterizing the fact-finding and fact-debunking of modernity, are very much the product of the Age of Reason. 2 Carl J. Friedrich, “Political Philosophy and the Science of Politics,” in Roland Young, ed., Approaches to the Study of Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1958) , 177. 3 See Robert K. Merton, “Notes on Problem-Finding in Sociology,” in Merton, Broom, and Cottrell, eds., Sociology Today (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965) vol. i, xiii.

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natural science and social science To acknowledge that traits of critical thinking are shared by enquiries into politics and society and those into physics and the world of plants is one thing. To deduce that therefore the methods of approach to fact-finding and problem-solving are or ought to be analogous is quite another. The strikingly significant achievements of the physical and natural sciences no doubt encouraged social and political thinkers to believe that by emulating their methods and by adopting their vocabulary comparable results could be obtained in the social and political realms. This optimistic belief has given way, however, to disenchantment and not a little cynicism, which have led people to question the relevance of science to the problems of society, and to deride those who deluded themselves and others by their faith in the techniques and conceptual categories of the physical and biological sciences. Humans, not being particles of physical mass, they argue, but possessors of ideas and ideals, are not susceptible to quantitative measurement or aggregation. Actions, consequently, are guided by diverse motives and purposes that cannot readily be predicted. Much of the zeal for science, accordingly, these critics charge, amounts to no more than a feverish preoccupation with minute trivia that contribute little to what is worth knowing. And, whatever abstract models they construct recall in their pedantry the most arid features of medieval scholasticism. The comment such charges prompt is not that they lack substance but rather that they are not altogether fair to leading practitioners in social science research, many of whom themselves acknowledge the dangers of triviality and pomposity. Max Weber, for example, whose researches and insights had a sizable impact on social and political thinking, was among the most outspoken critics of attempts to transfer directly methods from the natural sciences to the social sciences. He focused attention on precisely those factors that typify the crucial difference between them, such as religious beliefs, traditional values, economic interests, rational and non-rational elements (distinguishably or indistinguishably fused), which give to human actions their inner meaning and their teleological orientation.4 Does recognition of these distinctive features necessarily preclude, however, the tracing of uniformities in patterns of

4 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons, ed., (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 89–123,

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interpersonal relations or the possibility of predicting human behaviour under certain conditions? Weber thought not. To be sure, humans as individuals, with all their idiosyncracies and foibles, are not susceptible to generalizing treatment; yet as members of diverse entities and as participants in different activities they play roles that have become sufficiently stabilized to permit the observer to formulate generalizing hypotheses and even to make some predictions about future conduct. Recent refinements in computer science have assisted further in this development and encouraged expectations of continuous progress. Nonetheless, variables are often so bewilderingly multifarious that the reliability of theories and forecasts is still greatly impaired. Being so closely bound up with contextual-intellectual histories within a variety of descriptive and analytical concerns, definitional boundaries may sooner mislead than assist attempts to grapple with the intertwined issues that are involved. Nietzsche captures this predicament rather well, when (in Zur Genealogie der Moral) he observes that only what has no history can be adequately defined – such as triangles.5 Yet, defined or undefined, certain concerns loom more prominently than others in what is to follow, dealing as they do with processes, organizations, and associations, and their every-changing interpenetrations. And however factual, or even inevitable, they seem in retrospect, such appearances are liable to conceal the degree of deliberation and choice that enters into their coming about that markedly affect the normative texture of purposive strivings. “Happenings,” in other words, contain, at least in part, expressions of human thought and human intentionality. Also, if we view players in public life not simply as actors following a given script, but equally as authors and co-authors in writing it, their actions surely entail a measure of accountability, if not moral responsibility, so that praise or blame, as well as legal sanctions, should be assignable to them. To say this is not the same, however, as to opt for value-loaded approaches. Instead, what is urged is the recognition of multiple (and often conflicting) choices and also the existence of highly contestable judgments, coupled with emotionally charged opinions and convictions, each involving dauntingly causal dimensions. Thus, to press into service an evaluative-critical approach is by no means to underrate what 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, therefore, in view of the historically shifting meanings in politics, suggested Genealogy in place of general definitions.

Introductory Perspectives

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is involved, let alone to deny the even greater need for even-handed objectivity and personal detachment. In essence, or ultimately, what matters is to take little for granted, as well as to acknowledge that human thought and judgment in acting, notably as regards reciprocity, or the difference between rule-governed legitimacy in bureaucratic contexts as opposed to political contexts, is undeniably closer to a normative enterprise than to the attempt of grasping phenomena in the natural sciences. But even if this is granted, the contrast drawn is not to suggest vistas of lush meadows to emerge in the course of normative approaches, as distinct from those of arid wastelands, in the wake of empirical fact-findings. Unfortunately, some pseudo-scientific-sociological claims almost provoke such invidious juxtapositions. Thus it has been stated that the difference between institutional and sociological approaches lies in the former dealing with surface phenomena, whereas the latter penetrates to their inner “grass roots” – an antinomy that suggests the contrast between merely seeing the tip of an iceberg and probing the murky waters surrounding it, in which real causal sources are to be found. Admittedly, the contrast drawn is not exactly novel. Without going back further, it has been closely associated quite commonly with the names of Hegel and Marx. Hegel distinguished between civil society and the state, identifying the former with essentially economic activity and the latter with political authority, one characterized by plural and conflictual interests, the other by a transcendingly unifying force. Building largely on Kant, the objectified state was portrayed as the impartial Rechtsstaat, towering over the competing egoisms of individuals and groups, with their abject subjectivity and petty materialism. Although this distinction between two opposite realms of social existence has been ridiculed before Marx, by writers such as Thomas More and James Harrington, Marx is most widely known for having depicted the Rechtsstaat as a phantom, the ideological creation of the most powerful class interests, a superstructure without an infrastructure. The relation of the state to civil society, Marx remarked, was just as spiritual as was heaven in relation to earth; and its members were entirely imaginary, unlike those of civil society, the realm of social and economic life – an edifice floating above this life, bereft of any foundation or inner substance. There is, to be sure, no lack of economic and sociological insight in Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, overlaid though it is with Comtean positivist scientism. For he saw correctly that Kant’s idea

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of the lawful, republican Rechtsstaat, or Hegel’s notion of it as the embodiment of true reality and transcendent rationality, did not stop Frederick ii’s successors from turning both these visions of the state into a bogus legalism of the most debased variant of organized brutality (rivalled only by Stalinist “followers” of Marx) and doing so out of an almost unprecedented sense of doctrinal self-righteousness. However, the real point of adducing Hegel’s and Marx’s distinction between state and society – which, incidentally, is not unrelated to typically liberal ideas, going back to Hobbes, Locke, Ferguson, and Adam Smith – lies elsewhere. It is to illustrate the thesis that sociological approaches to politics have their historical roots. This thesis, I know, is little more than a truism. Still, it bears stating, if only to counter the impression that every new terminology is tantamount to the birth of new ideas. Besides, adducing historical antecedents or precedents does not diminish the importance claimed for what is presented as entirely novel. Rather, all it may do is to assist its just assessment. Perhaps a couple of examples may make this clearer. The first example, illustrating an older realization that acts of discriminatory legality could be the work of societal power elites, is offered by Plato’s story (in the Republic) about Thrasymachus, who knew only too well about the shifting source of superior power, by tracing it to its “might-is-right” origins. The second example refers to self-fulfilling prophecies, justly acclaimed as an important contribution to the sociology of politics. However, it hardly diminishes its importance to recall that the Hebrew prophets already had a pretty good idea that to prophesy events may promote or prevent their occurrence. Similarly, Kant’s “political moralists” are portrayed as having known equally well that by engaging in “predictive history” they could influence the course of developments that best served their own interests. That such predictive history can backfire is, of course, possible, but either way the self-fulfilling as much as the self-denying idea is here strikingly prefigured.

the self-fulfilling prophecy To a considerable extent, the lack of reliability of theories and forecasts in the social sciences is said to be attributable to the “law” or operation of self-fulfilling (or self-denying) prophecies. Humans, unlike plants, minerals, or animals, respond to what is said about or expected from them. Hence, any generalization or prediction not only describes or forecasts events, it also influences or even deter-

Introductory Perspectives

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mines the shape of their continued occurrence or non-occurrence. Once again, therefore, the question is forced on us whether generalizations or predictions in the social sciences, even if theoretically possible, are in any recognizable way of practical significance. A superficial interpretation of the so-called law of self-fulfilling prophecies might prompt the conclusion that generalizations and predictions in the social sphere are accordingly a wholly pointless undertaking, chiefly because their operation denies the very possibility of verification or falsification. Robert K. Merton’s analysis of this phenomenon points, however, to a different conclusion. By drawing attention to the extent to which self-fulfilling prophecies succeed in perpetuating prejudices and false definitions of a situation, Merton demonstrates with a wealth of examples how crucially relevant the recognition of this all too common causal phenomenon is to the diagnosis and treatment of several social ills and to situational analysis in general.6 In particular, the recognition of its importance impinges profoundly on the study of conduct in pursuit of political ends. This is so because political action is not necessarily the outcome of rational or objective assessments of a given situation, but is vitally affected by subjective interpretations and evaluations that, in turn, may be far more influenced by what people want to see, imagine they see, or find expedient to see, than what a hypothetically detached observer actually would see.7 The uncovering of complexities arising from the operation of self-fulfilling prophecies has added a new dimension to the observation of socio-political behaviour. For instance, we no longer insist that prejudices will necessarily succumb to the voice of reason, and hence that all that is needed is to make people see the error of their ways by providing more and better education. We have, that is, come to realize that while some prejudices may be amenable to rational treatment, many are not, with people consciously or subconsciously resisting rational or factual approaches. Even those who are fully cognizant of the fact that their hostility to ethnic or religious minorities rests on very shaky grounds 6 Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 421–36. 7 A political leader may accept advice, the validity of which may cause him less concern than the power, influence, or authority, of the adviser. See Theodore C. Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 54. But, having accepted it, he or she will not only defend the actions resulting from it, but also come to believe in its validity. Indirectly, this is one of the many variants of the operation of self-fulfilling prophecies.

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may fail to drop their hostile posture for one reason or another or for no reason at all. Thus, the Nazi theoretician, Alfred Rosenberg, privately admitted his doubts about the authenticity of the “Protocols of Zion,” but this did not induce him to alter the published anti-Jewish parts, phony though he knew them to be.8 Admittedly, many prejudices are not feigned for self-serving reasons, but are genuine expressions of deeply held beliefs, however inchoate their sources may be. Therefore, to dislodge prejudices as the cause of self-fulfilling prophecies may demand the disentangling of rational and non-rational motives and also the sombre realization that the most effective remedial approach may well be the less direct one, taking the form of psychological therapy rather than one of formal instruction and rational persuasion. A further alternative, it has been thought, was to refine the vocabulary of the social sciences, to bring them closer to the prestige of the natural sciences. No doubt the lack of a precise and clearly intelligible terminology in social research has been for the most part the impelling reason for introducing concepts borrowed from the physical and biological sciences. Such concepts undeniably have their use as methodological aids. They enable us to reduce the baffling complexity of variables within a particular setting to more manageable, since simplified, proportions. It is hard to say what to make of such methodological devices, unless one has experience of natural science research or has enough imaginative insight to form an understanding of what precisely is involved in borrowings of this kind, however plausible or odd they may appear on first sight. Strictly speaking, however, it is of lesser moment how they strike the non-natural or non-physical scientist. At any rate, this is so regarding the point I want to make. Hence, whether such borrowings assume the character of forbidding types of technical jargon or the form of homely metaphors is really beside the point. For my concern is not to suggest that they need to give cause in themselves for alarm, although they may well do so when actually taken for literal descriptions rather than for purely heuristic processes. What is potentially worrying is, once again, their self-prophesying implications. Implications of this nature, I feel, could be especially misleading when the analogy is based on a wittingly or unwittingly distorted notion of the actual analogue chosen. A most common distortion, for example, has been that of a mechanical 8 Kurt G.W. Ludecke, I Knew Hitler (London: The National Book Association, 1938), 433.

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entity, in which the nature of the mechanism was assumed to be that of a “whole which was completely equal to the sum of its parts; which could be run in reverse, and which would behave in exactly identical fashion no matter how often those parts were disassembled and put together again.”9 This, as has been correctly pointed out, was a wholly erroneous notion of a mechanical contrivance, since it implied that its parts were never significantly modified by each other, and that once placed into their appropriate position, with their own individual force, they would stay exactly where they were put, and continue to fulfill their own determined function. This conception of a mechanism underlay a good deal of political theorizing during the last two centuries, as either a support to or a challenge of the model chosen. And very much the same could be said of the use of biological models, often with grotesque, if not calamitous, results.10

social science and human values It is not difficult to envision that, or why, the operation of the self-fulfilling prophecy also markedly bears upon the time-hallowed controversy over the possibility of a so-called value-free science of society and politics. Why and how? Well, as I indicated earlier, the evaluation of a social issue is almost invariably affected by the very fact of focusing attention on that particular issue. Consequently, the social sciences may be unable to achieve the same degree of neutrality as the natural sciences. However, the real bone of contention, as I understand this somewhat befogged controversy, appears to lie elsewhere. For it does not primarily consist of the recognition or non-recognition of values as a factor affecting a researcher’s field of investigation. Instead, the dispute seems to revolve around the question of whether or not researchers could or should eschew their own value judgments while engaged in their investigations and in the presentation of their findings. Two arguments, in response to this question, are typically advanced; one radical, the other more moderate or more qualified. According to 9 Karl W. Deutsch, “Mechanism, Organism and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Sciences,” Philosophy of Science 18 (1951), 234. 10 For a fuller discussion of this point, see my “Metaphors, Laments, and the Organic Community,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32 (1966), 281–301. See also my Democratic Legitimacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), ch. 11. The chief trouble with metaphorical thinking is the difficulty in knowing where metaphors start to mislead.

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the radical view, researchers should not merely analyze or describe, but should also evaluate and prescribe. When it is found, for example, that people generally show little interest in politics, researchers should not only investigate the reasons for such apathy but also make it transparent that political participation, notably voting, is as necessary as it is desirable. In short, it is their function to point the way to the desired change, defend values worth preserving, and attack those that impair the political strivings for the good life. Any attempt, therefore, to remain neutral clearly amounts to dereliction of duty, if not the betrayal of scientific purpose.11 The second argument, associated most closely with Max Weber, may appear to clash with the first; at any rate, it has not infrequently been interpreted as the total opposite to the first argument. This, however, is a misunderstanding. Weber by no means denied that a sense of commitment or engagement is a perfectly proper, perhaps even essential, impulse to scholarly activity. Nor did he find it at all untoward that humans seek not merely to describe the world, but also to change it. What he consistently maintained, though, was that any such reformative aspirations were not a function of scholarly pursuits. In other words, Weber did not urge the abandonment of moral purpose; all he called for was a clarification of intellectual purpose.12 His argument, accordingly, stressed the point that without enquiring first (and as objectively as possible) what beliefs or values are upheld, on what grounds or for what ends, there is no way of assessing their validity. And he felt that nothing but confusion can result from an indiscriminate mixing of analytic description and exhortative prescription; each has its function, but they are different functions. 11 Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy,” The Journal of Politics 19 (1957), 343–68; see also his “Epilogue” in Herbert J. Storing, ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 326; and Carl J. Friedrich, Man and his Government, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), 67: “We are as political scientist cast in the roles of guardians, whether we like it or not.” 12 See especially Weber’s essays “Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitisher Erkenntnis,” “Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologishen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften,” and “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922). The first two have appeared in English as “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” and “The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics,” in Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences, Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, eds. and trans. (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 49–112, and 1–47; and the third as “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56.

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Nonetheless, there are those who feel that the prescriptive function has been appreciably neglected; that, especially since World War ii, a marked waning of sensitivity toward the great moral issues has taken place; issues for which people in the past have been prepared to suffer or, if necessary, to die. Yet, despite the undeniable shifts from “philosophical” to “pragmatic” concerns in politics, particularly in the Englishspeaking part of the world – to cast our net no farther –, they occurred without causing the demise of social and political ideals, as some political theorists seem to have concluded.13 Alfred Cobban’s essay of more than five decades ago is symptomatic of a widely shared mood of protest among political philosophers against these trends – though not exclusively among them. Its catalytic effect has, I believe, been timely and salutary in bringing about a reappraisal of the fact-value dichotomy. But, in granting this, we surely are not committed to the view that political theory must or should exclusively concern itself with the resolution of inherently moral issues. Surely, if this was the objective of Cobban’s argument, he was rather overstating his case.14 For even if the prescriptive dimension of political theory has suffered an eclipse, this alone cannot serve as adequate evidence for its total extinction, especially since at the time of its alleged extinction several new approaches have got under way, bringing neglected aspects to light. Perhaps the most prominent among these has been the redrawing of traditional boundaries. Practitioners with a variety of academic backgrounds had a hand in this development, which promoted a cross-fertilization of methods and ideas unprecedented since the days of the European Enlightenment.15 All the same, communication is still ham13 See, for example, Alfred Cobban, “The Decline of Political Theory,” Political Science Quarterly 68 (1953), 321–37. 14 Ibid., 335. Cf. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). 15 For a fuller account of this development, see S.M. Lipset,” Political Sociology, 1945–55,” in Hans L. Zetterberg, Sociology in the United States of America (New York: Unesco, 1956), 43–62; see also his and Reinhard Bendix, “Political Sociology,” in Current Sociology 6 (1957), 79–169. See further, Rudolf Heberle, Social Movements: An Introduction to Political Sociology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951): Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitath for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review 55 (1961), 763–72; Joseph R. Gusfield, “The Sociology of Politics,” in Joseph B. Gitler, ed., Review of Sociology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), 520–30; Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) and S.M. Lipset, Political

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pered across disciplinary boundaries by virtue of excessively specialized vocabularies that not infrequently have marred rather than augmented basic mutual understandings. As a way of countering this lingering impairment of inter-disciplinary communication, I am suggesting an intensified tracing of interactions through “bridging,” broadly on the twofold lines indicated by the Herder citation at the head of this chapter. For it portrays interactions as an ongoing process taking place in a two-dimensional manner, horizontally and vertically, especially with a view to discovering latent, though often vital, historic or simultaneous overlaps. The horizontal dimension relates to reciprocal influences that agents have upon each other at any given time, while the vertical dimension entails the successive influence of sources acting upon each other with the dynamic of moving toward ends over time. Indirectly, the Herder citation also bears upon the role of historical contextuality in processes of interaction. Take, for example, the plurality of fish in the sea. Its water is clearly utterly vital to their existence, in their diverse identities and continuities. And the Herder citation roughly illustrates the complex pattern of such interaction among contextuality, identity, and continuity at work. The distinction between causal processes at a time and over time is, no doubt, in a sense an arbitrary distinction. Moreover, while it helps to shed light on two principal dimensions of interacting processes, it may obscure the important distinction between purposive and purely functional processes – a point to be visited later on. Nevertheless, of the two (interrelated) dimensions, each is concerned with uncovering causally significant links: horizontally, by seeking explanations in terms of contextual “givens,” operating within the same timeframe of a particular situation; and vertically, by seeking explanations or evaluations in terms of causalities involved within the purposive strivings directed toward the attainment of projected goals. And whereas the horizontal dimension focuses on contextual or originating elements, the vertical dimension focuses on developmental elements by Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), among “classics” on the subject. Going further back still, J.G. Herder wrote a highly polemical essay, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1774), in which he trenchantly castigates methods of social analysis. For a translation, see my Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 179–211; and for some comments, my Herder’s Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. ch 6 and my Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 6–16.

Introductory Perspectives

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means of determinating ends. I am aware that making this distinction does not diminish the difficulty attending the selection of relevant major antecedents or directional purposes. But I believe that differentiating “cause” as a contextual antecedent from “cause” as a directional determinant proves useful in projecting a form of causality that is inherently contingent without being functionally inevitable.

cause as purpose In asserting the possibility of a contingent form of causality, notably as an almost defining characteristic of deliberate action (as typically in politics), we usually take it that the causal determinant constitutes the reason for its occurrence. No doubt, purely bodily movements or wholly accidental “events” affect the choice of causally directional determinants; yet, whatever we regard as deliberate as an outcome could never be thus wholly determined. For, if it were, it would be devoid of purposive ends. We would surely be surprised if someone made the most elaborate preparations to attend a wedding, without having the slightest intention of actually doing so, since it evidently would be an act without apparent reason. Therefore, the less adequately a purpose helps to explain an action, the more pressing becomes the disclosure of antecedent (contextual) circumstances as reasons from which it came about. A classic case that (rather distressingly) illustrates such a situation is the period in Germany immediately preceding World War i and the period following it with the birth of the Weimar Republic. In retrospect it seems incredible that so many people, young and not quite so young, from all walks of life, could be able to infect each other with so severe a bout of war fever, combined with an exceptionally intense yearning for the release from the boredom of their daily lives. Hardly ever before or after have so many been frantically seized by the rage for patriotic self-sacrifice, freely and spontaneously, in their joy of having achieved total oneness in support of the fatherland. But just as rarely have so many been subject to a sense of profound dejection and national humiliation, in train of defeat, amidst the turmoil, revolution, hunger, and disorder, or exposed to the onslaught of politically organized assassinations, most of which the courts condoned, if not actually sanctioned.16 16 For fuller details, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), esp. ch. 1; and Amos Elon, The Pity of It All (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), esp. ch. 9.

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For the most part, however, and in less turbulent times, political interactions consist of more or less rationally motivated ends, whose directionally determinant cause will therefore have a major bearing on cause as a circumstantial or instrumental antecedent. To be sure, if there is a shared resolve for rapid development, such a directional determinant will be disposed to transcend, if not dislodge, traditional sources of societal cohesion, thereby injecting into the situation a highly incalculable element. While still illustrating the workings of a two-dimensional mode of inter-causality, it also reveals vividly enough that this process militates against “interaction” assuming the expression of a smooth, frictionless occurrence. Regardless of times and circumstances, however, any form of interaction almost invariably contains degrees of both purposive and innerfunctional causality, and thereby directly or indirectly suggests theorizing in terms of parts and wholes forming “systems,” on lines made familiar chiefly through the work of Talcott Parsons and, more specifically in politics, that of David Easton. Yet, while these writings, in addition to the pioneering ideas of Robert Merton, have tended to clarify significantly the relations of purposive and functional causalities, it can hardly be denied that they continue to pose formidable problems in attempts to close the gap between conceptual analysis and practical application, notably within politics.17 Nevertheless, although we have found that we have to think of political society as an accidental whole instead of a substantive one, we do generally assume a degree of coherence approximating to a system rather than to a purely random conglomeration. By the same token, we look upon states as entities in which their citizens perform tasks or roles as members of structured wholes, without necessarily thinking of them as analogous to functional components of a strictly coherent system. Not surprisingly, therefore, system analysis applied to political configura17 As regards Parsons, see particularly his Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 237–42; The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951), 536–7; and Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: The Free Press, 1954), 212–27. Concerning Easton, see his The Political System (New York: Knopf, 1953), 266–93; and A System Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), 19–21. For a most striking comment, see Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1997), 42, 61, where Habermas warns that translating theory directly into “political will-formation” cannot but prove “disastrous for political practice.”

Introductory Perspectives

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tions is liable to mislead, unless purposive sources making for coherence are recognized as discrete and potentially divergent constituents, rather than as structurally predetermined functions. Still, it could be objected that functions are as much teleological as purposes, in that they likewise entail ends to be attained in some instrumental sense. The question therefore arises of how to distinguish between them, and all the more so in view of the tendency to use the terms as virtually synonymous. Allowing for possible exceptions, the distinction that is usually made by writers interested in the sociology of politics seems not without relevance. Generally, when speaking of “functions,” they have certain indispensable instrumentalities in mind, such as those designed to preserve existing social or political entities. Although biologists speak similarly of requirements indispensable to the preservation of living organisms, they do not have to worry about instrumentalities that include such varied institutional requirements as law-enforcing agencies, the existence of traffic regulations, or the provision of elected legislatures in parliamentary democracies. Therefore, when writers on society and politics face functional issues, they face somewhat more complex problems. This recognition, while it is doubtless important, cannot but accentuate further the view, maintained in the next section, that the distinction between purpose and function is not merely important, but vital.

purpose and function Despite apparent similarities, then, functional relations call for explanations that are different in kind from those yielding meaning in referential terms within purposive relations.18 It may happen, however, that functions and purposes coincide within particular situations, just as they may clash or widely differ in other contexts; as a result, tensions in functional as much as in purposive forms or expressions need be no strangers to socio-political configurations described as “systems.” Evidently, a certain parallelism seems to be involved here between structural wholes in politics and interactive patterns. Furthermore, there can also be a degree of fluidity that calls for much nuanced thinking, insofar as functions may at times undergo real 18 For a lucid treatment of the distinction between function and purpose, see Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 19–84, and Dorothy Emmet, Function, Purpose and Powers (London: Macmillan, 1958), 46–51, 106–11.

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mutation, if not utter replacement. Consequently, we may have to shed an image of “function” as something fixed and unchanging, let alone unchangeable. Conversely, while individual or group purposes commonly signify heterogeneity or intense variability, they may, if widely accepted as conceptually shareable, become institutionalized to an extent that makes them indistinguishable from established functions. This potential “dialectic” in expression or form undeniably evidences a virtual indeterminacy of change over time. Such a real or merely apparent element of indeterminacy could, however, also be viewed as providing support for the thesis that human actions and goals are matters of choice and self-directed conduct rather than of ineluctable necessity. By the same token, the degree of indeterminacy witnessed enables us to think of contingency as a defining characteristic of human creativity, and, thereby, as a quality that keeps purposive ends and functional requirements worlds apart. To be sure, the growth of a plant in nature is not entirely a question of functional necessity; for a plant does grow differently in different soils and regions or, conceivably, not at all. But this “organic” contingency is clearly different from the contingency of human choice, which consists in opting between alternative ends. Similarly, if not analogously, one could speak of contingencies in occurrences that are attributable to providential intervention or the “cunning of reason” in history. Yet, in all such forms of “cosmic” teleology, we could hardly regard human choice as the source of their coming about, since, not freely chosen, they would render “purpose” in human terms or as typifying human design unintelligible, bereft of any causal moorings.19 This, admittedly, is not to claim that human creations are wholly a matter of purposive choice, or that outcomes must correspond to what was intended. Strictly, purposive intentions may themselves change, even to the point of becoming estranged from themselves, especially in the course of political implementations. Yet, for all that, outcomes of political actions cannot be altogether the work of chance, coincidence, or unintended consequences, if their coming about is to be attributable to that character of human creativity which, guided by envisioned ends, strives consciously toward their particular 19 Admittedly, a “no choice” claim may be highly opportune in politics, especially in extremist and revolutionary rhetoric, but this is something else again. I discuss this point at some length in Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), ch. 4, “Revolutionary Purpose: Rational and Natural Necessity.”

Introductory Perspectives

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political attainment. Instead, they would be mere happenings, devoid of meaningful direction or recognizably cherished aspiration. If, therefore, any purposes were subsequently claimed for them, they would in truth be inauthentic purposes, superimposed on whatever causality had actually generated them. Teleologically, purposes, thus understood and employed, would in reality be bereft of any genuinely causal force or intrinsic meaning. Applied to political projects, they would be sheer window-dressing, promotional phantoms, without self-sustaining existence or explanatory merit – at best artful make-believe, at worst self-serving functions of a dubious venture.20 The principal upshot of this discussion, therefore, is that purposes, conceived as objects of human choice, are simply not reducible to instrumental functions of whatever nature. For, thus reduced, purposes are transformed into mere byproducts of events and, as such, are no longer distinguishable as causalities in their own right. Far from crucially prefiguring alternative options, purposes – or what is left of them – are then pressed into service as a ploy devised to conceal enforced functions and all sorts of manipulations. Clearly, such machinations may prove fatal not only to purposive integrity but to the survival of civic trust altogether. It follows that, while there is much to be said for blurring departmental boundaries in the tracing of significant overlaps or causal interactions, there is, in view of the adduced hazards, no less need for assiduously guarding against conflating inter-disciplinary bridging with inter-conceptual reductionism. Finally, in view of the mounting dissatisfaction on the part of empirical social scientists with speculative generalizations parading as theories, the days of unidimensional theorizing on the grand scale may well become a thing of the past. Admittedly, however, a question posed at times is whether the rising emphasis on maximal “observation” by way of written and oral questionnaires, group discussions, sampling surveys, participating control experiments, and similar minutely detailed observation methods, has proved as rewarding as has widely been expected. 20 Regarding “inauthentic purposes,” see also ibid., 110–12. Clearly, to speak of revolutionary purposes as rational or natural instances of necessity is to render the notion of choice, as a normative option, highly misleading. Moreover, any such discursive machination may prove fatally dangerous not only to upholding the meaning of human choices but also to the preservation of that purposive integrity without which essential conditions of societal and civic trust can hardly survive. See also Allen Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics 112 (2002), 689–719.

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Social and Political Bonds

Such doubts, understandable or not (mainly, perhaps, because of the costs incurred) arguably do not in themselves invalidate the belief that improved techniques of observation and measurement are able to make a difference to the quality of the results obtained, although more knowledge is not always better knowledge. However, the central concern of this study is not with styles and methods as such. Instead, it adopts in the main a history of ideas approach in the conviction that the insights of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Max Weber still speak to our age, inducing us to adjust our lenses to look upon the human world of our day. In general terms, I am suggesting therefore a less compartmentalized mode of thinking, with fewer stop-signs planted along the borders of demarcated periods and individual specialisms. If nothing else, it may encourage blending rather than reductionism – a form of convergence, with minimum loss of contrast. Whatever I said earlier, however, about blurring departmental boundaries should not be construed to warrant mistaking “bridging” for terminological laxity, or methodological eclecticism for unbridled reductionism. Otherwise, I would scarcely have taken pains to put so much emphasis on viewing the conceptual divergences between purposive ends and functional requirements as fundamentally vital differences, if only to avoid falling victim to holding political configurations indistinguishable from “systems,” in which members are either biological parts or mechanical segments. In the main, it seems, such conflations have their source in using the concept of interaction rather loosely. Thus, implicitly, as well as improperly, we tend “interaction” to refer to the interplay between actions as much as between processes (unintended or also hidden), as though they were perfect substitutes. As a pointed alternative, therefore, “mediation” – as a major theme of the book and the central subject of the overview chapter (9) – is closely coupled with demarcating the contours of norms, standards, or commitments, by way of their distinctive contiguity in space or continuity in time. Indeed, precisely by virtue of such combinations, mediation is intended to generate a political association, typified by convergence amidst contrast, in which humans, coming-intorelation, plurally strive toward a measure of unity that is as self-created as it is self-bound – a projected entity all of its own – contextually given and associatively sought after. Once, therefore, distinctive demarcation is virtually neglected, mediated political convergence courts the danger of turning into unmedi-

Introductory Perspectives

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ated conflation, in which “interaction” is seen as though it were the same as “cooperation,” if not intimate friendship. And then, like communal thinking, applied to politics, political mediation would be flawed, by obscuring the distinction between the public and the private, or the civic and the fraternal. In short, there is a serious risk of confusing intimate personal terms with impersonal political terms, in that beneath the former’s benevolent intent there lurks a profound danger to political freedom and the making of divergent claims. Besides, love and friendship cannot be boundlessly extended, let alone formally legislated, without losing their very meaning. A political context, on the other hand, demands (I argue) a recognizably procedural-mediating space for the formation of norms and institutions that citizens readily identify as appropriate political bonds. And such mediated bonds are commonly channelled in ways that, unlike personal relations, are part and parcel of configurations through which the founding basis of association can be defined, challenged, modified, or formally endorsed, and clashes of opinion and interests suitably mediated. Taking this position on the idea of political mediation, the pages to follow maintain that to reduce a political society to the unmediated coming together by way of a “community of communities” borders on a structural absurdity, despite the possible need in an inherently secular culture for non-conflictual bonds and the understandable hankering after social harmony and the oneness of human fellowship. However, in light of the existence of practically built-in limits and impediments to much of the scope and intensity of political activity, any realistic prism, by and large, through and in which political mediation can be viewed, must likewise be kept within balancing limits. Its outcomes, accordingly, can scarcely go much beyond achieving that measure of political dialogue in which the vocabulary of discourse can still be grasped sufficiently to prevent it from being utterly foreign to contestant parties, and from turning fellow-citizens into strangers, if not total enemies. Yet, clearly, such a degree of intelligibility is by no means adequate to mediate general acceptability, notably in politics, as a sustaining unifying force, let alone as an overly promising start.

2

Status Identification: Class and Social Mobility s and Social Mobility

the word “class” typifies perhaps more than any other single term the emergence of modern society. Relatively new, it made its way almost simultaneously into English, French, and German toward the end of the eighteenth century, indicating the shift of focus “from social status to economic criteria.1 But only with Karl Marx’s portrayal of social stratification has “class” assumed a definitive connotation in the analysis of political power as the quintessential characteristic of domination per se. And, since the Marxian analysis has been far from negligible in subsequent discussions of class in this direction, the chapter may as well start with sketching its salient features.

the marxian approach to class Distinctive of the Marxian approach is the polarization of social forces into two opposite camps in the form of a two-class pattern. Interests or groups not identifiable with either of these core divisions are held to have little or no relevance to social-political structuring of a basic nature. Doomed, as a matter of historical inevitability, any such interests or groups are mere fringe phenomena, to be swallowed up by either of the contending giants, and hence destined to disappear. To be sure, Marx was thinking not so much in sociological terms as in politicaleconomic terms. Above all, “class” did not mean for him self-positioning by way of subjective status identifications, but rather the expression of an objective fact, arising out of the interaction between owners and non1 Lewis A. Coser, “Class,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1973), i, 441–9.

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owners in the course of industrial production, and resulting in the most basic cleavages within modern societies. Class, then, is an objective economic location that reflects, as it determines, particular interests, beliefs, and norms of an individual. Negatively put, inequality of social status or personal income does not in itself typify class. Nor does it have anything to do with subjective self-understandings, self-assessments, self-esteem and such like; it is purely a matter of supra-individual determination. Therefore, whether either class or class-consciousness is true or false, as a social reality, depends wholly on the extent to which it agrees with conditions arising from non-personal economic circumstances. A labourer, for example, who considers himself to belong to the middle class is viewed, from this perspective, as a victim of false consciousness – a boon, no doubt, to capitalist interests – but nonetheless totally mistaken. It stands to reason, therefore, that Marx and his followers considered the paramount task of socialist leaders was to counter and dispel such erroneous thinking, and help working folk to recognize their true class belonging. As the avant-garde of the new socialist order, they carried a mission somewhat akin to “manifest destiny,” if not to a new version of credal Messianism. And, as subsequently interpreted by Lenin, such missionary avant-gardism implied a strictly hierarchical system – little different from Plato’s, albeit massively reinforced – and worlds apart from grass-root democracy. The objective class interest of the property-owners lies squarely in maintaining the legal and political status quo, in contrast to the nonowning workers, whose objective interest lies in its destruction, and its replacement by a society without any classes or class distinctions, a classless society, in short. Worth noting, in this vision, is the virtual identification of economic domination by the owners with their political supremacy. Power rooted in economic functions entails, so to speak, political power. Hence, both the source and the outcome of the clash of interests between owners and non-owners are at once economic and political. And the inexorably ensuing battle is such that it can be resolved only by total victory of one class over the other. In addition to this portrayal of militant conflict, Marx postulates an inner contradiction within the owner’s camp, the camp of the capitalists. In view of this internal struggle, industrial capitalists are presented as their own grave-diggers. While the non-owning proletarians are united in their common misery as the exploited, the owning capitalists are locked in strife over capturing markets as well as over their competi-

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tive bidding for resources, including those of the labour-force. This competitive struggle among capitalists can, likewise, be resolved only by the fittest managing to survive. What is imperative, therefore, is that the aggressively strongest, financially, reduce the weaker competitors to the ranks of the proletariat. In train of this process – a process of elimination – more and more capital ends up being concentrated in fewer hands. And, as this course of events keeps swelling the ranks of the proletariat, it simultaneously subjects it to ever more ruthless economic exploitation, thereby feeding the flames of widespread discontent, which, in turn, sows the seed of class revolution – such is the cunning of history. The ever-growing misery and discontent of the proletarians, together with the ever-mounting concentration of capital, leads to a revolutionary situation in the form of a process that Marx likens to an organic process of the ripening of fruit and its eventual harvesting. This image of an organic process is clearly designed to render the path to the revolutionary take-over of governmental power both natural and inevitable. The greater the degradation of the proletariat, the more mature will be the decay among the capitalist class – its mounting success being simultaneously the road to its undoing. Much is to be gained, therefore, by promoting the utmost concentration of industrial capital in fewer and fewer hands. Countries in which the maturation first occurs will accordingly be the first to see the dawn of a new humanity. Logically enough, Marx consequently urged the maximal acceleration of the organic process of ripening among capitalist plants throughout the world.

social stratification and “ranking” At the same time, Marx was by no means unaware of a shift of emphasis from industrial ownership to financial control, as a result of the diffusion of share capital and the introduction of limited business liability. In his Das Kapital he speaks of a “new aristocracy” of finance and of the abolition of the capitalist mode of production “within capitalist production itself,” calling it “a self-destructive contradiction,” leading to “private production without the control of private property.”2 The change in the form of capitalism did not, however, Marx felt, affect the 2 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Charles H. Kerr, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909), iii, 516–22, esp. 519.

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nature of capitalism, in particular its basic characteristic of accumulation and internal annihilation as a “result of gambling at the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the wolves.”3 Nevertheless, Marx was not prepared to go as far as James Burnham, who, in his Managerial Revolution, practically substituted control for ownership, arguing that the very growth and concentration of capitalism has been accompanied by a rapid dispersal of ownership in industrial enterprises through share-holding on a scale that few, including Marx, would have anticipated. According to Burnham’s analysis, the bulk of shareowners have no effective control over a firm’s policy making, let alone its day-to-day decisions, so that real power has passed into the hands of a new class of managers – salaried technocrats, financial experts, and organizational bureaucrats.4 A number of leading political sociologists have, however, questioned the universal applicability of Burnham’s analysis, charging that he has vastly exaggerated the growing role of managers and bureaucrats, as he underplayed the continuing importance of big business owners.5 What is indisputable, however, is the extent of rethinking in industrially developed countries, especially by way of reinterpreting “class” and social stratification in general. Whereas Marx’s concept of class is in essence a monolithic category, derivable solely from the existence or absence of productive ownership, its sociological replacement by “rank” derives from a plural variety of culture patterns that descriptively portray sources of merit and social esteem. Not analytically confined to property, such ranking comprises a host of descriptive characteristics, including life styles, family connections, membership of clubs, diction (especially in England), ethnic origin, religion, residential address, make of car, and similar status symbols. “Class” applied to such manifold forms of ranking could therefore be viewed as an essentially pluralistic category. 3 Ibid., 520–21. 4 James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York: Putnam, 1942), 56–7. 5 See Reinhard Bendix, “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” Public Administration Review 5 (1945), 198, where he writes: “The rising importance of managerial functions is undisputed. But the incidence of economic power is not changed merely because the men who exercise these functions control an enterprise without owning it. The real question is, as Burnham’s critics have been quick to point out, whether (1) men who control the policies of industry … constitute a cohesive group; or (2) the ideas and policies of the so-called managerial group differ in any respect from those of the older type of entrepreneur.

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Social and Political Bonds

Ralf Dahrendorf’s investigation into Marx’s analysis of “class” in his one-time highly influential Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society is of interest against the background of these reinterpretations. Dahrendorf does not deny that property ownership constitutes a form of power; what he does dispute, however, is that all forms of power derive solely from property ownership. In other words, property ownership is not the necessary, let alone sufficient, source of economic power nor, for that matter, the indispensable basis of political power. Yet, while he challenges the Marxian portrayal of class as an economically monolithic basis of political power, he does accept Marx’s differentiation between class stratification and rank stratification. His central point, accordingly, lies in affirming that it is not basically the source of power (such as property) that determines class-rule, but the functional role that a person, group, or institution plays within a system. In particular, he denies that abolishing privately owned productive resources forms a sufficient condition for the emergence of classlessness, at any rate in the sense of the absence of superordination and subordination.6

ambiguity and adaptation This line of argument risks creating terminological confusion, since for Marx, even if differences of ranking exist, such differences do not negate the analytical meaning he has in mind with “classlessness,” so that purely social distinctions would not be the same as class distinctions. To be sure, Dahrendorf is aware of this risk, in that he acknowledges (we noted) the fundamental distinction between analytical and descriptive uses of “class.” He expresses no surprise, therefore, that Marxists insist that classlessness does not call for the absence of income differentiation, or such differences that arise from the award of medals for military accomplishments or other outstanding performances in science, technology, the workplace, party activity, and so on. All the same, whether or not such instances of social ranking justify being singled out as “socialist competition,” “socialist achievement,” or “socialist heroism,” does not alter the fact that abolishing class distinctions of the Marxian variety fails to herald the onset of egalitarianism. Rank, incomes, status symbols, and other forms of social differentiation evidently go on to set apart one person from another in “classless” social6 Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 218.

Status Identification: Class and Social Mobility

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ist settings no less sharply than in bourgeois “class” settings. The source of differentiation may differ, but not its reality. The justifying basis may shift, but the need for elevating some over others remains; the craving for prestige knows no classlessness. An admission of sorts, illustrating this, albeit under semantic disguises, is the pejorative flavour of “levelling” in Communist rhetoric, almost comparable to that of “bourgeois.” While Dahrendorf therefore retains Marx’s category of class in its analytic thrust, and strips classlessness of ranking implications or egalitarian associations, he puts functional relations of subordination and superordination in place of property relations, by turning, so to speak, Marx’s thesis on its head. And, instead of relegating the political to a status where it is merely an adjunct of the economic, he views it as the very foundation of “class” in the two-dimensional manner that Marx postulated, that is, as the separating criterion between those in a position of domination and those in a position of submission. And just as the abolition of private property does not end for Dahrendorf the existence of distinctions of social rank, so it also fails to end tensions and rivalries between individuals and groups. A society, therefore, does not cease to be a tension-ridden competitive society solely by virtue of exchanging its achievement symbols. The intensity of conflict, paradoxically perhaps, may indeed increase in societies based on achievement criteria only. Possibly, this may be so because competitive forces, unhampered by tradition-rooted understandings, tend to create antagonistic pressures and interpersonal resentments that are rarely known in forms of life that lack meritocratic opportunities for universal upward mobility.7 Still, coming back to Marx’s class analysis, most Western commentators, unlike Dahrendorf, reject it as sociologically ill-founded and historically unrelated to contemporary conditions, without denying its measure of plausibility in Marx’s lifetime. Among the chief trends that have belied his theory of class, they list the stubborn resistance of the petite bourgeoisie to proletarization, notably in rural areas; the increase rather that the decline of the middle class; and the hostility to levelling pressures even on the part of the so-called working class. Similarly, they charge that Marx grossly underrated the degree to which “capitalism” would become more widely attractive, if not synonymous with liberal democracy, as a result of affordable stock-exchange securities, the avail-

7 I discuss this point further in the next section.

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ability of consumer credit facilities and of building society mortgages, and similar developments. These trends, coupled with ever-progressive forms of taxation, have undoubtedly ushered in a marked increase in middle-class self-identification, together with a narrowing of social distance between segments of society. All the same, they can hardly be taken to amount to the disappearance of social barriers. Owners of wealth, likewise, may no longer command the social prestige they once did, nor exercise the same degree of control over corporate policies or employment decisions. This has not stopped them, however, from still having a sizable influence in both the economic and the political domain, even if it is more indirect (or hidden) than Marx’s class paradigm suggests. Nevertheless, Western industrialized societies have enjoyed, by and large, an exceptionally prolonged era of economic prosperity, reflected in perceptibly improved material standards among broad sections of their population. The mounting general feeling of affluence has undeniably been enhanced also by most families drawing on the earnings of two breadwinners. These developments, taken together, have arguably helped to blur the lines separating the chronically poor from the chronically rich; yet the increasing ambiguity of class positioning and the seemingly ubiquitous adaptation to “bourgeois” lifestyles must not be viewed as indices of greater economic stability or overall national security. Sporadic warfare, escalating acts of terror, and high rates of unemployment have seen to that. Lessening of social distinctions, in other words, has almost nowhere led to the installation of social harmony.

ascription and achievement In the course of the social changes traced so far, and partly occasioned by them, there has been an unprecedented expansion and proliferation of education. This has not only altered the general texture of social life but has also considerably affected what sociologists call the individual “role-allocation process.” And it is chiefly in connection with this process that they have drawn attention to the difference between “ascriptive” and “achievement” dimensions within personal role assumptions.8 Ascription in this context refers to the initial conditions that individuals start from, or, perhaps, more precisely, find themselves 8 Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, revised edition (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), ch. 15.

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in, insofar as they are conditions not of their own making. Generally they are described as “classificatory” with respect to age and sex, which cannot commonly be changed, any more than the particular families into which individuals are born. And in societies where social mobility is low or non-existent, these ascriptive conditions will in all likelihood determine individual role prospects, since options will be inherently limited. Accordingly, “role allocations” will correspond to a fairly rigid traditional pattern, with sons following fathers in occupation, social esteem, wealth, influence, and, possibly, power as well. Under circumstances such as these, status at birth will be the decisive factor in most cases, setting the scope and the limits of an individual’s place in society. Heredity will make or unmake it. Whatever mobility will occur under these conditions sociologists usually describe as inter-generational mobility, in contrast to intra-generational mobility, that is, the ease or difficulty with which individuals can move during their own life from one level to another, as regards income, profession, or social status. Tocqueville, when studying conditions among the Anglo-Americans, astutely recognized that laws defining the manner of inheritance can appreciably affect the extent to which social immobility and, almost invariably, social inequality, are perpetuated. Referring to them as “laws of descent,” he saw in them an “incredible influence” upon generations yet unborn. “Through their means man acquires a kind of supernatural power over the future lot of his fellow creatures.”9 Thus, when the law of inheritance unites, draws together, and vests property and power in a few hands, its ethos and effect is manifestly aristocratic. When, on the other hand, it divides, distributes, and disperses property, it gradually grinds down “the bulwarks of the influence of wealth … to the shifting sand which is the basis of democracy.”10 The shifting sand, out of which mobility, if not necessarily “democracy” emanates, loosens, or possibly altogether destroys, the traditional pattern of kinship relations, of group loyalty and its distinctive solidarity, as it replaces the social fabric, in which these sentiments are embedded, by an increasingly individualistic achievement orientation. This, at any rate, was the situation that Tocqueville saw emerging in the United States of America. “The last trace of heredity ranks and distinctions is destroyed – the law of partition has reduced all to one level.”11 9 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1969), 51. 10 Ibid., 52.

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Interestingly, Tocqueville by no means sought to imply that the American law of inheritance created conditions of social equality, or that it even promoted an outlook conducive to the creation of such conditions. For he could see that the new achievement ethos promoted instead intense competition in the direction of fostering alternative distinctions based on individual enterprise. Hence, his principal concern was to stress that the new provisions for dividing property were instrumental in bringing about a degree of mobility that made it increasingly rare to find two succeeding generations living in the same manner and the same area, or possessing the same form or amount of income or wealth. The “one level” refers, therefore, to a way of thinking, amounting to a uniform kind of mentality, and not to an equality of condition or to its being an objective worth aspiring to. In part characterizing, in part promoting, this uniformity of achievement thinking, was the virtually even spread of education, however rudimentary. “I do not believe,” Tocqueville writes, “that there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed, and at the same time so few learned individuals.”12 Once again, Tocqueville is proving most perceptive. For, unlike Europe, whose masses were practically illiterate, America in the 1830s could boast a preponderance of people who had received primary schooling of a kind enabling them to attempt to climb the social ladder. Tocqueville’s explanation of this difference is of both historical and sociological interest, for it casts a rather vivid light on contrasting sub-textures of social life and cultural structures that coexisted at one and the same period, yet evidenced the upholding of quite dissimilar sets of fundamental values. In Europe, he writes, wealth is normally associated with leisure and a flair for intellectual pleasures, together with esteem for learned persons and academic excellence. Consequently, social differentiation arises not merely from disparities of material possessions but also, if not predominantly, from cultural attainments and aesthetic bents. In America, on the other hand, “most of the rich men were formerly poor” and therefore “when they might have had a taste for study, they had no time for it, and when time was at their disposal, they no longer had the inclination.” Thus, Tocqueville concludes, labours of intellect are almost everywhere considered of little merit, and a taste for intellectual plea11 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 54. 12 Ibid., 55.

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sures, if not altogether odd, is nonetheless held to have little claim to honour, as compared with most other attainments.13 Tocqueville’s description strikes me as an unusually incisive portrayal of social mobilization in the sense in which it has subsequently been defined and said to apply to people undergoing “modernization.” More precisely, perhaps, those undergoing such a change are said to find the “advanced, non-traditional practices in culture, technology, and economic life” as perfectly normal, and do so “on a considerable scale.”14 And, not only has the non-traditional way of thinking become synonymous with achievement thinking, but, in being accepted as perfectly “normal,” it has simultaneously acquired social respectability, as being eminently proper and deserving of profound recognition. In other words, “modernization” is held up as a value in its own right, to be emulated on a considerable scale by those who want to count as achievers. By the same token, being “progressive” has become the norm, and not merely the fact, of social mobility qua modernization. Before I return to the question raised earlier about mobility and equality, I should add that achievement societies need not be free from ascriptive elements. Clearly, where education or further training can be acquired only at an exorbitant cost, only those whose parents are in a position to foot the bill will be able to take advantage of either. Also, financial circumstances apart, sons or daughters of a doctor, barrister, professor, or high public servant will have a better start in life than those of a manual worker, artisan, or peasant, at any rate in non-communist countries. The stimulus they derive from their background, the better home facilities they have for study, and the greater career prospects possibly as well, will all tend to smooth the path to success or, at least, help to offset deficiencies in innate endowments. Leading political sociologists have drawn attention to such lingering ascriptive remnants in otherwise non-traditional (industrially modernized) societies.15 But, supposing that none of these ascriptive left-overs intrude, does it follow that equality of opportunity can be taken for granted? The answer, it seems, is in the negative, for at least two (no less ascriptive) reasons. One is that of ability, although “ability” is a deplorably vague concept, 13 Ibid., 55–6. 14 Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” in Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, eds, Comparative Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 582. 15 See Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), 273-5.

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insofar as what counts as such depends on the prevailing achievement scale of priorities. Manual dexterity, for example, would probably be highly valued in a society of wood-carvers, but count little by itself as a qualification in places of higher study. The second, and less obvious, ascriptive remnant, but perhaps by far the most significant, is the intensity of an achievement orientation. For only when such ambitions are strong enough is a person likely to undergo the lengthy education and training required to attain a position in the highest pay brackets. Surely, these ascriptive elements are almost as much an accident of birth as being born rich, only their greater randomness and more “natural” origins make them more palatable or less objectionable to the egalitarian-minded. Be that as it may, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the prevalence of achievement criteria yields a maximum equality of opportunity for those aspiring to make a go of things. Nor is there much empirical support for the belief that those failing to make the grade disclose less jaundiced feelings in achievement-oriented societies than in those where achievement criteria are not dominant. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case. “There will be certain tendencies to arrogance on the part of some winners and to resentment or a sour grapes attitude on the part of some losers.”16 It is anybody’s guess, therefore, whether substituting meritocracy for an aristocracy by birth will eradicate envy and a sense of frustration or abolish inequality of status and esteem, as long as there are ascriptive disparities in mental and dexterous skills or attainment motivations. Yet it may well be that in technologically advanced societies – perhaps because of their more diffused level of high consumption patterns – any such differences would not necessarily be reflected in marked social distance between people and their style of living. As a leading French commentator has put it, there would most likely be “less difference between Rockefeller and an American workman than there was between a medieval baron and his serf.17 Comparisons with respect to the correlation between occupational differences and social distance within “capitalist” and “socialist” societies present difficulties, mainly because of incommensurable disparities in historical-cultural terms. Paradoxically or not, however, while both types uphold meritocracy as the proper standard of upward mobility, it has been found that social distance correlates most visibly with occupa16 Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, 330. 17 Maurice Duverger, The Idea of Politics (London: Methuen, 1966), 64.

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tional differences in nominally socialist regimes.18 Anyhow, it would appear that in neither case has social distance become a thing of the past. Hence, although meritocracy proves the most viable and the most preferred social arrangement in both systems, it does not look as though it is likely to translate into an egalitarian order in either.

rethinking “class” Most American sociologists nevertheless feel that, despite survivals of class or rank resentments, the perception of boundless opportunities under capitalism will generally tend to counteract the idea of inexorable rivalry between “capital” and “labour” on the lines that figured prominently in Marxist modes of thinking up to the first half of the twentieth century. For, coupled with the notion of unlimited social mobility, if not identical with it, is the notion of unlimited achievement possibilities, which, together, would ensure that obstacles to a class-free or classless society have ceased to exist. Contrary to such widely held convictions, however, the alleged blunting of impediments to social mobility – or at any rate the perception of such blunting – may be ascribable not so much to burgeoning economic affluence as to greater social diversity and the evolution of more nuanced expressions of rank or class distinctions. If so, we could possible speak of multiple class identifications replacing the traditional tripartite division as well as the Marxian polarization of two classes. Some may also prefer to speak of an essentially subjective source of ranking in place of an objectively determined class location. On the face of it, this may not be an unjustified substitution, although it may not resolve the problem of political positioning, notably during an electoral contest, or that of making reliable predictions as regards people’s self-location; that is, how they place themselves, and whether by means of subjectively or objectively derived ideas of social stratification. Undeniably, there are cross-pressures as well as overlaps of interests and attachments that militate against drawing clear demarcation lines between those above and those below on the social scale, no less than in terms of political alignments. This especially appears to be the case on the North-American continent, where most people fight shy from associating themselves with either the bottom or the top strata of society. Instead, sample inquiries usually suggest that most people in the u.s.a. 18 Lipset and Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, 262–3.

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and Canada vaguely view themselves as members of the middle class, while only about two to three per cent consider themselves to belong to the upper classes, and about one to five per cent as belonging to the lower classes. Increasingly, however, these categories of self-ranking seem to be losing real meaning, particularly to younger people within industrially advanced democracies. They simply appear to have stopped thinking in “class” terms. As a result of these changes – which amount to diversely multiple ways of self-positioning – political alignments no longer correlate with strictly economic “class” criteria, let alone with Marx’s polarized two-class model. And, whether or not this lends support to reviving the trichotomous scheme, it certainly has compelled political parties to revise their electioneering rhetoric, as it has helped to promote the rise of new parties. Either or both ways, and notwithstanding the formidable structural transformation of the middle class, the self-positioning among a good few, at any rate in the u.s.a., does recall theories and sentiments almost unquestioned since the days of Aristotle, according to which members of the middle class could be trusted to ensure that “a state in which citizens have a moderate and sufficient property would be well-administered.”19 If so, the protection of private property has lost little of its rallying force. Possibly, therefore, while the role of class per se may have dwindled, the concept of “capitalism” appears to have assumed a new, if not blooming, complexion. It has acquired a degree of public prestige that has induced a growing number of people – and by no means exclusively within the United States – to regard it as virtually synonymous with “democracy” in its most developed form. Has Marx, then, wholly misjudged the fortunes of capitalism in his portrayal of it as its own gravedigger? It may be unfashionable to have second thoughts about such a verdict, especially in the light of the opposing subsequent trends of “class” and “capitalism,” but surely few could confidently assert that capitalism has freed itself entirely of the “inner contradictions” that Marx so emphatically insisted upon in Das Kapital. Perhaps it was precisely because of what Marx so self-assuredly advanced that social developmental trends managed to defy the twoclass confrontational model in a way comparable to that in which the middle class learned how to escape its prophesied demise. Technological changes apart, I have suggested, it was mainly financial processes 19 Aristotle, Politics, iv, ch. 2, 1295 b – 1296 a.

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that enabled capitalism’s resilience, chiefly through the evolvement of stock-market operations taking the form of share investment issues in units small enough to come within the buying reach of the not so well-to-do investor. Thus, by permitting those with modest earnings to acquire share ownership in capitalist enterprises, it created a vested interest in their preservation rather than in their destruction. Also, profit-sharing schemes could not but further assist in this direction, that is, in the diffusion of a capitalist ethos among those intended to annihilate it. Indirectly (I have suggested), the growth of private home ownership – despite not constituting industrial capital – encouraged this trend of public thinking. Certainly, fewer and fewer people are looking with fierce distaste upon the status quo or, by the same token, with ardent enthusiasm on the idea of class polarization; quite unlike what Marx envisioned. Even industrial trade unions are adopting a markedly attenuated militancy or, at any rate, no longer combine it with doctrinal anti-capitalism. And much the same de-emphasis on “class-consciousness” is evidenced, with few exceptions, by erstwhile nominally Marxist social-democratic parties throughout the industrialized world. Yet, having made these observations, there can be little doubt that the growing concentration of capital, technologically and financially – mainly through massive take-overs – has vindicated the economic dimension of Marx’s prognosis. What Marx evidently has misjudged is the full extent of capitalism’s propensity toward inner contradictions, in that he failed to recognize the magnitude of the new status differentiations among employed non-owners, to which the asymmetries of capitalism would give rise, thereby seriously undermining the projected solidarity of the “working class.” Nor did he expect that, simultaneously, the bourgeoisie would be solidified rather than debilitated, gaining thereby a new lease of life, socially, economically, and politically, albeit in a visibly refurbished costume.

the celebration of “class-openness” To note these shortcomings in Marx’s class prophecies is not, however, to sanction the way in which Marx’s thinking about capitalism’s historical self-transformation has at times been misrepresented. Dahrendorf, I believe, has made a good start in correcting this course. A good deal, though, still needs to be done to put Marx’s economic analysis into clearer perspective. So prominent a political sociologist as Talcott Parsons, for example, has been conveying the impression that Marx naively

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treated the infrastructure of capitalist enterprises as a single indivisible entity.20 In fact (as we noted earlier) Marx was perfectly aware of the multiple transformations of capitalism from the stage in which ownership and control were united in the same hands to one where they became separated, by speaking of “private production without the control of private property.”21 Furthermore, in referring to “property,” Marx expressly thought of it “in the form of shares and stock … where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks, and the lambs by the wolves.22 If Marx was wrong, therefore, it was not because he ignored the changing infrastructure of capitalism, or linked class-consciousness with property interests, but rather because he miscalculated the consequences of both; to wit, that the diffusion of property interests would turn more, and not fewer, people into “capitalists.” Possibly he associated the concept of class too closely with the concept of property, as Dahrendorf has argued. At bottom, however, the issue is for the most part, I believe, a matter of definition and, as such, cannot easily be proved wrong. In any case, to infer from the diffusion of property interests that modern capitalist society is on the way to becoming a classless or “open-class” society would truly be to draw the connection between property and class no less close than Marx has done. On the other hand, if contemporary sociologists define “class” as that stratum of society composed of individuals who accept each other as status equals (as Lipset, Bendix, and Geiger have done), then whatever class cleavages arise have intrinsically nothing to do with industrial property relations. Instead, they result from a situation in which individuals (rather exclusively) choose status equals that they are themselves willing to associate with as equals. It follows that, when talking of class in terms of social ranking, sociologists talk an entirely different language from that of Marx. At the same time, in identifying class with positions on the ranking ladder in terms of “strata,” they cannot simultaneously invoke the notion of an open-class society. Clearly, for strata to be categories of class-ranking, they must have boundaries; and these boundaries must offer resistance to those attempting to cross them. The resistance may not be formidable, but it must exist, or the boundary simply ceases to be a boundary, and strata cease to be ranking class strata. 20 Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, 324. 21 Marx, Capital, iii, 516-22. 22 Ibid., 520.

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When, therefore, the United States of America is claimed to exemplify an open-class, if not indeed a classless, society, the implication is not that it is a society in which there is no private ownership of productive industrial resources, but rather that it is a society in which social ranking strata have cease to exist or, where they still exist, offer only negligibly slight resistance to those anxious to cross their boundaries. Furthermore, to be classless, it would have to be wholly devoid of differentiated authority structures, as Dahrendorf has made clear, and not merely free of boundaries between strata – whatever sense such a formulation is supposed to make. Now, authority-free structures, if they exist at all, do so only, as far as is known, in principle; and only in particular segmental communities at that. For, in practice, they cannot dispense with organs of authority. And, even if such organs are intended to alternate, they rarely, if ever, do so in accordance with the so-called law of circulation among the elites to an extent amounting to the inauguration of “classlessness” in the Marxian sense.23 As a matter of historical interest, Marx did, however, foreshadow forms of communal advances in some such direction in his observations on the emergence of cooperative enterprises. “The cooperative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form [of society] the first beginnings of the new; they show the way in which the new mode of production may naturally grow out of the old."24 Perhaps the closest secular approximation to the envisaged “new form of society” within cooperatively designed communal forms of living and working has taken place during the pioneering stages of modern Israel. Even here, however, despite their voluntary basis and egalitarian orientation, the communal settlements demanded, as operational social and economic orders, appropriate authority structures. And, although in principle all positions of authority were open to all adult members, the circulation of executive bodies simply did not in practice conform to the egalitarian founding ideals, not so much because incumbents of authority positions were determined to hang on to their offices, but because only a small minority of members were disposed toward shouldering the onerous responsibilities attending them, since, as a rule, positions of authority were not coupled with material advantages or exceptional privileges of any kind. 23 Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict, 219. 24 Marx, Capital, iii, 521.

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As for the two-class model Marx had put forward, most contemporary sociologists have not followed Dahrendorf’s suggested adaptation. Instead, favouring multi-dimensional models of social distinctions, they have in effect reclassified class cleavages. Max Lerner, for instance, opted for three basis criteria in his typology of the American social pattern: (i) persons’ power source as the determinant of their relation to others; (ii) accessibility to statuses of higher rank, restricted to the few; and (iii) esteem enjoyed in the eyes of others as fashioning, if not determining, one’s own self-esteem.25 Another American sociologist divides the conventional three classes into further sub-categories, such as upper upper classes, lower upper classes, upper middle classes, and so on, in order to emphasize the subtle, but very real, distinctions that enter into class consciousness, often at a very early age, when such ranking notions can be most formative.26 Moreover, in a country where one strand of the public philosophy is the idea of complete social mobility, and the other strand the idea that, to make one’s mark, one has to associate from early on with the “right people,” this asymmetry can surely cause not a little bewilderment. At the personal level this peculiar mixture of public beliefs is bound to create a sense of failure when, in fact, the gates to success are bolted before the race has even started. Alternatively, one may view oneself as a top achiever when, in reality, the chances of downward mobility, let alone failure, are remote from the outset. Some may go further and warn that, in its impact on group-thinking, the antipodal existence of the two strands may occasion inertia, cynicism, resentment, and even the spread of violent behaviour or the mobilization of group hatreds and other aberrations. On the other hand, it could be argued that as long as the two conflicting strands in the achievement ideology are of sufficient ambivalence, there seems little likelihood that social cleavages would assume the force of a polarized class struggle along the lines of Marxist revolutionary thinking. It does not, of course, follow that real mobility, as distinct from sham mobility, would necessarily usher in a social millennium, in which personal frustration and social tensions would be unknown, as not a few 25 Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 473. 26 William Lloyd Warner, Social Class in America, (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1949), 12; see also Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, ch. 8; and Lipset and Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, 254-9.

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nineteenth-century writers ardently believed. Besides – as the following chapter will elaborate – the existence of social conflict or the extent of social cooperation need have little or nothing directly to do with degrees of social mobility. Also, some have increasingly come to feel that promoting maximum mobility carries a price. To be sure, the burden of proof that the price might be too high, in terms of combativeness, ruthlessness, discontent, rootlessness, and other socio-psychological ills, has yet to be established. Further research by experts in the field will undeniably assist in yielding answers to this question, although cumulative personal experience may produce reflections of equal, if not greater, merit. For, as others have pointed out, research alone cannot decide whether or not the price is worth paying.27 Clearly, this decision is inextricably linked to what people ultimately value above all, what to them, as individuals, matters most. We may have to wait quite some time before we can be certain how that cookie crumbles. Even then, however, and supposing people on the whole find that the price is too high, it may take much more time before social trends of this nature are effectively halted.

27 See Lipset and Bendix, ibid., 286. See also Richard Breen, ed., Social Mobility in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–16.

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Social Interaction: Conflict, Cooperation, and Culture

ct, Cooperation, and Culture

no doubt, learning about the elaborate rules that governed the seating arrangements of members of the nobility at functions of the small eighteenth-century German states, we may be inclined to view such regulations as just another illustration of the perversity of the ancient regimes of Europe. If, however, we find that no less elaborate arrangements governed the seating or standing order of Communist party functionaries on the May Day rostrum in twentieth-century Moscow, we are compelled to reflect as to whether such seemingly trivial procedures are not indeed essential regulatory devices for preventing latent conflicts from becoming manifest. Some set of regulatory norms governing relations of superiority and inferiority is presumably “an inherent need of every stable social system.”1 The most significant point here seems to be that regulatory measures of this kind must precede the potential occurrence of conflict rather than follow its actual happening. For it discloses that the latency of a conflictual relationship is recognized and anticipated by the norm-issuing and norm-enforcing authorities.

the concept of conflict What is meant by “conflict” precisely? Lewis Coser, a known scholar in this field, makes a useful distinction between conflict and antagonistic attitudes. Whereas conflict always denotes social interaction, attitudes or sentiments are predispositions to engage in action that do not neces-

1 Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, revised edition, (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), 325.

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sarily eventuate in conflict.2 As for the operative causes of such predispositions, Kant, as subsequently Herder, thought them to consist of an “inherent duplexity within human nature itself,” that is constantly in conflict, accounting for a never-ceasing restlessness. Humans are said to comprise two opposite “worlds,” the divergent and the convergent, the destructive and the constructive, the negative and the positive.3 A more recent social theorist, Georg Simmel, echoes Kant and Herder, over a century later, in viewing restlessness, inner conflicts, and mutual antagonisms as part and parcel of the human condition, as well as seeing in these propensities the source of progress and culture.4 They are regarded as inner necessities in humanity’s continuous striving for perfection.5 Yet, although Simmel gives a vivid account of different types of conflict, and puts great emphasis on its interactive propensities, by way of “reciprocal positions” among social participants, he hesitates to give an analytical definition of conflict.6 Coser, who had done much to make Simmel’s ideas known to the English-speaking world, defines conflict as a “struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power, and resources, in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure, or eliminate their rivals.7 Dahrendorf, also pointing to scarcity of one sort or another as the objective grounds for conflict, nevertheless equally stresses inter-subjective relations, such as “incompatible differences” between two contestants to attain “what is available only to one.”8 Indeed, “conflict” covers for him an exceedingly wide range of “interactions” involved in competition, disputes, and tensions that are latent or manifest in contacts between “social forces.” So wide is the range of conflict situations portrayed that a football game and a civil war form one and the same continuum, since they are “but different manifestations of an identical force.9

2 Lewis Coser, The Function of Social Conflict (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1956), 38. 3 J.G. Herder, Works, B. Suphan, ed., 33 vols., (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), xiii, 195–6. 4 Georg Simmel, Conflict, Kurt H. Wolff, trans. (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), 14–16, 27. 5 Herder, Works, v, 98; viii, 230; xiv, 205; xv, 263; xvi, 567; xvii, 27; and xviii, 298. 6 Simmel, Conflict, 18. 7 Coser, The Function of Social Conflict, 8. 8 Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 135. 9 Ibid.

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Although Dahrendorf acknowledges that people normally distinguish between friendly contests and military struggles, he insists that a war-game as much as a real war involves a competitive dimension in which the scarce object entails power.10 The only variable, he says, is intensity and violence, where “intensity” refers to the “energy, expenditure, and degree of involvement of conflicting parties,” whereas “violence” relates to the “weapons that are chosen by conflict groups to express their hostilities.”11 Unlike Dahrendorf, who thinks of a continuum of conflict variations that differ only in degree, an American social scientist, Anatol Rapoport, speaks of three levels of conflict that are hierarchically related: fight, game, and debate. Implicitly, these levels are also seen as differences in kind rather than degree.12 By “fight” Rapoport means a conflict that is motivated solely by mutual animosity or mutual fear, in which the combatants are dominated by an urge to eliminate the opponent. This kind of contest is comparable to struggles for food or space, and to those between rivals for a mate in the animal world. In the human world similar combats are often occasioned by what Rapoport calls “semantic reactions,” in which he includes behaviour conditioned by the operation of self-fulfilling prophecies. In such a situation we assume, for example, that someone particularly dislikes us, and we react accordingly; our reaction, in turn, evokes the other’s animosity and, thereby, confirms our original assumption.13 In a game, by contrast, “rational choice” is said to enter as a component of conflict, thereby raising it to a level which (allegedly) is not to be found in the animal world. This level is therefore characterized by the employment of strategy, designed to outwit the opponent.14 Finally, in a debate, the conflict is supposed to be resolvable by conviction, where the pattern is that of persuading the opponent to adopt your position or, at least, to abandon his or her own; and the method to be used is to be that of “rational argument.”15 Evidently, “debate” here largely excludes arguments in legislative bodies, the courts, or the United Nations Assembly, in whose forums arguments are at best calculated to 10 Ibid., 209. 11 Ibid., 211–12. 12 Anatol Rapoport, “Three Modes of Conflict,” in William J. Gore and J.W. Dyson, eds, The Making of Decisions (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), 393–402. 13 Ibid., 393. 14 Ibid., 394. 15 Ibid., 399.

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influence uncommitted third parties rather than convince opponents. However, Rapoport’s main thesis is that for conflict to perform positive functions, it has to be raised above the level of fights and games to that of debate, where it may offer scope for bridging mediation, if not instant accord or cooperation.16

the functionality of conflict vis à vis cooperation Directly or indirectly, Rapoport’s thesis of the positive functionality of conflict poses the crucial question of the conceptual relationship between conflict and cooperation as well as of their processual causality. It is not an easy question to resolve, in view of the multiple interactions that this relationship within any social contest entails. Minimally, at least three sets of interactions are coming into play: those between shared verbal and symbolic understandings; normative standards of reciprocity; and broadly cultural perceptions as to what ends are valued most on some hierarchical scale. Also, in their complex combination of descriptive and prescriptive meanings, they all require a measure of continuity over time to carry self-sustaining intelligibility. Even then, however, conceptual interpretations can and do differ. Thus, on one end of the spectrum, “conflict” and “cooperation” could be viewed as cognitively unrelated, while on the other end they could be viewed as cognitively interdependent. Implicit in most discussions of “conflict” and “cooperation” is the postulate that conceptually these notions are interdependent, insofar as one without the other would fail to yield intelligible meaning. Such stipulated relationship apart, however, any actual performative continuum would need to be more closely qualified as to what kind of conflict would be transformable into what kind of cooperation. Militant rivalry, as a form of conflict, for example, would be most unlikely convertible into cooperation of the sort that is synonymous with love or friendship. Any bridging might indeed be virtually foreclosed between such emotionally charged opposites, and manifestly would call for more than “debate” (however rational), as it probably would sooner be forthcoming were mutual interests rather than mutual sentiments involved.

16 Ibid., 401. Cf. C.I. Barnard, on “cooperation” in The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 65–74.

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Surely, there is no prima facie reason – on the thesis of a conceptual continuum – why cooperation should not be capable of equally varied (and attenuated) expressions as conflict, which, we noted, can comprise vastly different forms and degrees of contestability, whose basis has little, if anything, in common with intrinsic sentiments of affinity, yet, possibly, with a good deal of reciprocal needs. While both Simmel and Coser put primary emphasis on integrative propensities in conflict and its mediation, if not resolution, Dahrendorf, almost repeating Kant’s thesis in the Idea for a Universal History (1784), de-emphasizes integration. For he fears that stressing the cooperative function of conflict could cloud the far more important role that it plays in inducing progress, in acting as a vital spur to creativity and forward-looking change.17 According to this view, there appears to be no particular call for demonstrating the positive function of conflict, since it patently justifies itself as being “good and desirable,” as well as being “a fact of life.”18 Perhaps Dahrendorf is somewhat overstating his case, if not courting contradiction. At any rate, why should he devote the greater part of his book to suggesting ways of resolving or regulating something that, by his own account, is both natural and beneficial? No less odd, if not even more puzzling, is the way he views “progress” and “change” as seemingly interchangeable notions in presenting his argument in support of the positive functions of conflict. Moreover, why should change, per se, be necessarily creative, “desirable,” or preferable to stability?19 Besides, to grant that change may often be desirable is not the same as to regard conflict therefore as a necessary, let alone sufficient, condition for change. Unfortunately, Dahrendorf apparently feels no need to address this issue any more than Kant did, who likewise assumed that social antagonism performed the necessary condition for all progress and human culture, in addition to viewing conflict as a quasi-rational teleology in nature no less than in history.20 What seems equally problematic is to look upon conflict as a necessary condition for the emergence of diversity, in sharp contrast to cooperation which, being inimical to diversity, makes groups “grow friendly, 17 Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 207. 18 Ibid., 208. 19 Ibid. 20 Kant, in his essay on universal history, fourth and fifth proposition. Works viii (Berlin: Prussian Academy edition, 1902–13).

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unified, and narrow” in outlook.21 But again, is this not putting the cart before the horse? For what may result from diversity – namely conflict – is posited as its necessary condition. Anyhow, conflict, although it may result from diversity, has causally as little to do with diversity as cooperation has with the creation of friendliness or loving feelings. Above all, this line of causal determinism is misleading in that it may conceal, if not obliterate, the real possibility that diversity could promote cooperation. For diversity can have complementary implications that yield a basis for the division of tasks and roles in the pursuit of shared goals, and do so for reasons that are essentially prudential and utilitarian and totally remote from reasons of sentiment as much as from some doctrinal determinism. For just as conflict need not, as social tension, be rooted in emotions, such as envy, dislike, or outright hatred, so cooperation, we saw, could draw on motives of reciprocity or interdependence that are quite unconnected with love or sympathy. I believe this point bears repeating because of the all too common tendency to conflate “conflict” with personal antagonisms and “cooperation” with the acme of human fellowship. It may well be that conflict is frequently presented as a functionally desirable phenomenon in view of the dangers that “cooperation” can disclose in the hands of manipulative regimes anxious to make people conform. Is there, however, not a comparable risk courted by exaggerating the benefits of systemic adversariness? Perhaps Coser sensed this danger and therefore put forward a more qualified approach. Dahrendorf, no doubt, sensed this danger as well; yet, presumably, he considered it the lesser evil. For he, unlike Coser, did experience the menace of Gleichschaltung, of coerced wholesale homogenization, in the name of cooperation, having grown up in Nazi Germany, in Hitler’s enforced community of race. Not surprisingly, for Dahrendorf, “adversary democracy,” under political freedom, was preferable to the cooperation of the barrack square. Put in more general terms, it seems perfectly harmless to speak of conflict and cooperation in functional contexts, provided “function” is not envisioned as something tantamount to good or desirable in an absolute sense. Clearly, stripped of overly emotional or promotional overtones, either concept may be thought functional or dysfunctional, in accordance with the particular frame of reference. For example, the 21 Paul Diesing, Reason in Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 198.

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caste system or racial purity can be described as functional from one perspective, and denounced as utterly dysfunctional from another. By the same token, it may be perfectly legitimate to elicit highly clashing assessments in expressions of cooperation. The real difficulty lies, however, in resisting the temptation of reductionism. This, we have found, may not be altogether easy, since divergent expressions of cooperation (or conflict) could be more than just differences of degree. Also, and not infrequently, mixed components of any one empirical type of either may defy disentangling, and thus preclude the possibility of classifying conflict or cooperation, particularly in terms of hierarchical levels. All in all, therefore, the basic issue is not whether conflict as such is preferable to cooperation as such, but rather what sort of conflict is compatible with what sort of cooperation. On the face of it, the scope for inter-blending seems in essence an empirical matter, resolvable by experts in the field. Ultimately, it may turn out, however, to be a normative-cultural issue of multiple dimension, to which no single answer may be had. Still, there can be little doubt that none of the writers mentioned would quarrel with the desirability of recognizing potential conflicts before they become manifest or even violent. Nor would they, therefore, oppose the provision of institutional channels for both the articulation and the regulation of rival positions and interests. For only by being recognized as integral parts of any social fabric do they lend themselves, as polarities, to be bridged, regardless of whether such an attempt of bridging would actually succeed in advancing the institutionalization of conflict regulation in the direction of some form of cooperation, if not of consensual oneness. What, historically, also lends support to the need for such bridging attempts is the recognition of this need being by no means a recent discovery. Without going back further than Hobbes, Rousseau, or Kant, devices were sought for the authoritative management of potential and actual clashes in society. “For every two men whose interests may coincide,” Rousseau remarks, “there are a hundred thousand, perhaps, whose interests are totally opposite.”22 This situation was for him the normal situation within political life. “If there were no different interests,” he therefore observes, that are liable to collide, “one would scarcely be aware of the common

22 J.J. Rousseau, Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau (New York: Burt Franklin, 1767, reprint 1972), ii, 138

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interest, since it would never encounter any obstacles; everything would go smoothly of its own accord, and politics would cease to be an art.”23 Similarly, Kant, closely following Hobbes here, emphasized the ubiquity of conflict and antagonism in society, as also the need for coming to terms with both before they threaten peace and civic freedoms. Moreover, in view of the “anarchic egoism” in humans, he had few illusions about cooperation or agreement coming about naturally “in the absence of lawful constraints.”24 Neither he, nor Hobbes and Rousseau before him, took social harmony or public lawfulness for granted, humans being what they are and not what, hypothetically, they morally could and should be. For some time, then, it has been known that society needs a legally protected space and a well-cultivated sort of institutional subsoil able to afford the chance of creative diversity and reciprocal liberty. Hence, only by building into plurality norms of civic mutuality did it seem possible to these thinkers to envision conflict and cooperation as two dimensions of one and the same social world or, to change the metaphor, as interwoven threads within one and the same social fabric. It would appear, therefore, that polarities or “inner contradictions” not only characterize “capitalism” or “class society” but are tendencies that almost inescapably surface whenever and wherever individuals act together in pursuit of goals or interests within a wider social context. Evidently, interaction, thus conceived, can pose serious, and potentially ticklish, problems, especially if a government is expected to be the principal means of their resolution. The chapters ahead directly or indirectly return to this issue of balancing, as also to conflicts arising from institutional arrangements. Cultural components are now widely recognized by political sociologists to be capable of performing integrative functions, although they are not unknown to be equally able to cause inner tensions.25 What, however, is less widely known or agreed upon is the extent to which normative elements in social cultures lend themselves to mediation of a kind that facilitates interblending without the loss of tolerance and humanity, on the one side, and the abandonment of convictional and directional integrity on the other.

23 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. ii, ch 3, n7. 24 Kant, Works, iv, 402, viii, 22–3, esp. Anthropologie, 326–8. 25 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964), 15.

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The next two sections, while they may help to shed light on “culture” as a vital ingredient of social interactions, are nevertheless not meant to decide whether politics per se, can or should be looked upon as the answer to difficulties encountered in striking a degree of balance. But from much that has been said so far, it should not be hard to infer a preference for a politics that recognizes these problems as ongoing questions; that is, as almost perennial challenges that demand the reopening of issues held to be settled once and for all. And, for the most part, challenges of this kind are not, I have suggested, easily detachable from cultural constituents of one sort or another, since frequently they have more than marginal bearing upon the choice of appropriate forms of blending real or apparent opposites and also upon promoting or resisting the use of manipulative devices, especially in societies undergoing rapid change. The last section of this chapter focuses on the culture component of such societies, and seeks to draw attention to culturally conditioned sources of strains and tensions arising from major structural transitions. It therefore also emphasizes the importance of persistence as a balancing factor of change, and the need for distinguishing adaptation from full assimilation. Consequently, what follows takes into account that irreducible obstacles to “development” occur whenever cleavages between the new and the old are too deep to be organizationally bridged. In other words, regardless of modernizing aspirations among emerging new states to partake in a supposedly universal “world culture,” the odds may not favour a smooth “culture diffusion” in some or most regions, as they try to reinvent themselves.

the culture component Semantically, “culture” derived its original (Latin) meaning from the idea of cultivating the soil, in contrast to that of advancing “civilization,” which referred to the status of citizenship. Both words acquired, however, secondary meanings at an early stage. Thus, Cicero applied “culture” to the cultivation of the mind, while civilization came to denote not only the fact of Roman citizenship but also its superiority to the condition of foreigners. Surprisingly, though, “culture” gained little currency in European thought before the eighteenth century; yet, when it did, it rather quickly assumed a degree of proliferation in its uses that prompted one of its major exponents to remark that “no thing was

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more indeterminate than this word.’26 Unfortunately, its extended usage did not enhance its clarity. “Nothing in the world,” a twentiethcentury writer complains, “is more elusive … it is like trying to seize the air in the hand, when one finds that it is anywhere except within one’s grasp.27 Nonetheless, such attempts have been made, bringing to light no fewer than 164 definitions.28 A widely accepted understanding of culture opposes it to that of civilization, by virtue of distinct modes of development. Thus, whereas culture is viewed as occurring sporadically, as non-transferable from one social grouping to another, and as non-susceptible to the generalizing methods of science, civilization is associated with material and technological advances, and viewed as a continuous and cumulative process, capable of universal diffusion, and susceptible to the generalizing methods of science.29 Another frequently accepted distinction is that between roughly “humanistic” conceptions of culture and “anthropological” conceptions. The former usually refers to ideas of human perfection, intellectual pursuits, or the general body of the arts, whereas anthropological conceptions commonly pertain to a whole way of social life: material, intellectual, and spiritual. And while humanistic approaches are evaluatively selective, anthropological approaches are designed to be non-selective, by applying “culture” to the total fabric of a given society, to its entire transmitted heritage, and to what is subsequently added to it. Also, for fear of succumbing to ethnocentrism, cultural anthropologists seek to eschew making evaluative pronouncements. And although there is broad agreement on the need to distinguish the cultural from the biological in human and social life, the criteria for what is crucial within social-cultural concerns differ between these two conceptions.

26 J.G. Herder, Works, B Suphan, ed., xiii. Herder, to my knowledge, was one of the first of modern thinkers to reflect in depth on “culture.” 27 A. Lawrence Lowell, At War with Academic Traditions in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 115. 28 See A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952). See also my “Culture and Civilization in Modern Times,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 613–21. 29 See Alfred Weber, “Prinzipielles zur Kultursoziologie,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920/21), 1–49. See also my “Alfred Weber,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), 281–2.

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The distinction itself between the life of societies and the life of biological organisms owes perhaps most of its persuasive force to Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). For Vico boldly declared that the human world was in essence cultural, since it was self-created, at once the source and the product of human creativity. And, that being the case, the world of culture was intelligible to humans in a way that the world of nature was not.30 This pronouncement, above all, became the principal entrée, if not the bedrock, of all later theorizing about the genesis, the content, and the development of culture. All the same, when in the New Science Vico claimed that “the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men have made it, men could come to know,” he did not mean that humans, as individuals, everywhere or at the same time, consciously made the institutions, symbols, and norms that characterize national cultures.31 Rather, the first steps in the building of the “world of nations” were taken by creatures, the consequences of whose acts were not intended by them.32 Religion, for example, came about “when men’s intentions were quite otherwise; it brought them in the first place to fear of the divinity, the cult of which is the first fundamental basis of commonwealths.”33 Unintended consequences, then, are clearly seen as integral to the emergence and development of social cultures. Yet, while Vico concedes, indeed stresses, that humans have finite minds, and frequently do not know the outcome of their actions, at the same time he insists that their “wills” rest on consciousness, or conscienza.34 There is no suggestion at all, accordingly, that humans follow the dictates of some transcendent being, or that they toil “for the sake of those who come after them” – as Kant maintains in the Third Proposition of his Idea of a Universal History (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in Weldburgerlicher Absicht, 1784). Humans merely obey their own will and spirit, and only accidentally advance, if they do, the cause of posterity.35 Thus motivated, humans can understand the working of human purposes in a way they can never hope to understand the working of non-human phenomena. In other words, they can cognitively and perceptively grasp the human 30 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, Bergin and Fisch, trans. (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1961), para. 331 (52–3). 31 Vico, ibid. 32 Ibid., para. 133 (20). 33 Ibid., para. 629 (189). 34 Ibid., para. 137 (21). 35 Ibid., paras 340, 341 (58–9).

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world because they are participants and not only observers of their form of life and mode of culture. As for the genesis of human and social cultures, Vico emphasizes their “separate origins among the several peoples, each in ignorance of the others.”36 Nevertheless, Vico insists, there are institutions on which “all men have perpetually agreed and still agree” so that we can derive from them “the universal and eternal principles … on which all nations are founded and still preserve themselves.”37 Vico identified these institutions with religion and rituals of birth, marriage, and burial – events common to all cultures; indeed, without them “culture” itself would be inconceivable. In effect, therefore, Vico advanced two theories of the genesis of culture which, on first appearances, seem to clash. For on the one hand, he rejected cultural diffusion in favour of a multiple-independent origin theory; on the other hand, he stipulated a common-origin theory, by viewing diverse manifestations of cultures as “modifications” of certain archetypes “common to all nations,” a proof for which he saw in “proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.”38 There is, consequently, no clash, since in one theory Vico is concerned chiefly with the actual emergence of cultures as such, whereas in the other theory his chief interest lies in the study of cultural origins. The latter consists for him in the uncovering of a “common mental language” underlying the diversity of cultural manifestations, which task he ascribes to philology, as the means through which one may penetrate into the empirical foundations upon which philosophy could erect its theoretical edifice.39 But clash or not, Vico undeniably attempted to blend the particular with the universal, intimating in different contexts that imaginative seeing demands grasping things through the prism of both. Closest to Vico’s attempt to pay heed to both the particular and the universal aspects of the culture component is that of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Inquiring into the genesis of culture, Herder asks what characterizes humans as creatures of culture as distinct from their biological existence as creatures of nature. He addresses this question as 36 37 38 39

Ibid., para. 146 (22). Ibid., para. 332 (53). Ibid., para. 161 (25). Ibid., paras 162, 445 (25, 105–6).

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a core issue in his first major philosophical work On the Origins of Language (Uber den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772). Refuting the idea that humans are simply “rational animals,” that is, beings in whom an entity or faculty, called “reason”, is superimposed on their animal nature, he insists that humans are fundamentally different from animals. Their capacity for speech derives from an entirely divergent totality of powers or “economy” of their “perceptive, cognitive, and volitional nature.”40 And it is precisely in view of this wholly different direction of human energies that “man is no longer an infallible mechanism in the hands of Nature.” Although not endowed at birth with conscious self-awareness, humans have the propensity to attain it and thus, unlike animals, they can achieve a state of development in which, by “mirroring” themselves within themselves, they become reflective beings.41 By dint of not being wholly determined by biological forces, humans, however, face problems that no animal encounters in a comparable manner. Both as individuals, per se, and as members of diverse social groups, they come upon obstacles that are not susceptible to “natural” resolution, as impediments are in the animal world. Additionally, owing to their capacity for self-awareness, humans are acutely conscious of their imperfections, and hence are “always in motion, restless, and dissatisfied.” Unlike the bee, “which is perfect when building her first cell,” human life is marked by “continuous becoming,” by an urge for self-creation through self-improvement.42 But while animals are confined to the sphere of action for which they are best equipped by natural instincts, humans, not thus provided, are not thus limited either. Hence, like Vico, Herder stresses humankind’s sense of freedom. Both human perfectibility and human corruptibility are closely bound up with this distinguishing feature. “Man alone,” Herder writes, “has made a goddess of choice in place of necessity … he can explore possibilities and choose between alternatives … even when he most despicably abuses freedom, man is still king. For he can still choose, even though he chooses the worst.”43 Herder posits a sense of imperfection and a sense of freedom, then, as the essential conditions for the emergence of human and social cultures. Hegel, taking over Herder’s theme of human self-consciousness, 40 41 42 43

Herder, Works, v, 28. Ibid., v, 28, 95. Ibid., v, 98. Ibid., xiii, 110, 146.

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made it the very basis of a people’s sense of history, while the notion of conflictual restlessness occurs, in a more socially oriented form, in Kant’s essay on universal history as the “mutual antagonism in society,” which he views as the origin of “all the culture and art that adorns humanity.”44 Unlike Herder, however, Kant defined “culture” in a narrower sense, and opposed it to “civilization.” Not insignificantly, especially in connection with subsequent (anthropological) understandings of culture, Herder rejected this dualism. Culture, for him, included all creative human activities, whatever their content or place in the hierarchy of values; and to dismiss such “non-rational” forms of thought as religions, myths, legends, or even prejudice qua components of culture, amounted in his view to depriving social cultures and national cultures of vital moulding agents.45 Still, how was one to locate such spiritual propensities and flights of the human imagination within the overall scheme of social institutions? More specifically, were they primary determinants, self-generated and inherently autonomous, or were they rather reactions, induced by extraneous sources, in particular by elements in the physical environment? This was the question with which Montesquieu principally sought to come to grips. In his De l’esprit des lois (1748), he accordingly inquired into the nature and source of a “general spirit” within social and political cultures. Fully aware though he was of the interrelation between people’s imaginative, cognitive, and social propensities, as well as institutions, on the one side, and natural or physical elements, on the other, he nevertheless appears on occasions undecided as to the ultimate determinants. His hesitancy over the primacy of climate versus political constitutions and his vacillations concerning the causal force of religion, treating it alternately as determining and determined,46 provoked commentators such as R.G. Collingwood to suggest that Montesquieu “conceived human life as a reflection of geographical and climatic conditions, not otherwise than the life of plants.”47 Fair comment or not, what does lend support to his line of criticism was Montesquieu’s basic assumption that human nature was a constant 44 Kant, Fourth and Fifth Propositions. 45 Herder, Works, xiii, 307. 46 Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris: Societé Les Belles Lettres, 1955), bk xxiv, ch. 3. 47 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, Oxford Paperbacks ed., 1961), 79.

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– an assumption widely shared at the time, yet precisely the point that triggered chiefly Herder’s hostility to the Enlightenment conception of culture. Voltaire, although he did not challenge this assumption, nevertheless questioned Montesquieu’s emphasis on geo-climatic factors as the major determinant of cultural differences. Not the physical facts of a given environment but human ingenuity in mastering them constituted for Voltaire (in his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, 1769) the root of civilization – which, for the most part, was synonymous for him with culture. If human life were a matter merely of biology, civilization would indeed be the same wherever natural conditions were alike. But “the realm of custom is much vaster than that of nature; it gives variety to the scene of the universe.” Therefore, Voltaire concluded, it is not nature but “culture [that] produces diverse fruits.”48 With respect to the content of culture, there are, broadly, two distinguishable approaches: those that employ culture as a critique of modern civilization; and those that conceive of it as an integral whole. At times both positions have been held concurrently, insofar as the critique, deploring the fragmentation of culture, was invoked as a plea for unity. Thus, when Diderot, Rousseau, Herder, Spengler, or the romantics pointed up the contrast between the natural organic, creative, and authentic, on the one hand, and the artificial, mechanical, stereotyped, and superficial, on the other, the chief impetus was almost invariably polemical. Underlying it was a craving for spontaneity, sincerity, and warm sensibility rather than cold reasoning, as well as a distinct emphasis on the incomparability and immensurability of human creativity. Although Vico’s ideas were already moving in this direction, they were little known, in contrast to those of Diderot, whose influence was at the time most pervasive, soon to be followed by that of Rousseau and Herder. Diderot’s critique of contemporary society centres on human self-estrangement, brought about by modernity, involving the inversion and perversion of genuine and lasting values. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), written with Diderot’s encouragement, likewise pursues the theme of alienation. Modern civilization, he charges, imposed a wholly uniform pattern, casting every mind in the same mould. “Politeness requires this, decorum that, ceremony has its set forms, fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the 48 Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, Oeuvres (Paris, 1877-85), xiii, ch. 197.

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promptings of our own nature.”49 In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), Rousseau assails the natural law theorists (as Vico had done before him) for mistaking the artificial for the original, by giving the name of natural law to a collection of norms that they find expedient, thereby rationalizing existing practices and institutions. As a result, “to be and to seem became totally different things.” Humans lost their sense of identity; they became estranged from themselves and each other. In place of community bonds, there arose “rivalry and competition, on the one hand, and conflicting interests, on the other.”50 Herder’s indictment of his age was no less severe. With the incisiveness of a surgeon’s knife, his Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774), lays bare the sores of eighteenth-century “paper culture.” People have been forced into mines and treadmills, and cities have become slag-heaps of human vitality. So much has been mechanized that the human machine has ceased to function. Head and heart are rent apart, ideals mere abstracts, if not indeed instruments of self-deception. In short, humans have become dehumanized.51 Much of this criticism reverberates in Karl Marx’s writings and in other subsequent social and political tracts. But perhaps nowhere is the parallelism of mood and terminology as striking as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–23). For Spengler, civilization of modernity marks the disintegration, or late dying phase, of a culture symptomized by the giant city, the “megapolis,” in which “mass” replaces society and community, in its nomadic, parasitic life, not knowing where it is coming from or where it is going, devoid of past and future, the seed of its own destruction.52 Remarks such as these echo not only Diderot, Rousseau, and Herder, but also Kant who, in the Second Proposition of his Idea of a Universal History, observes that though we are civilized “even to excess in the way of all sorts of social forms of politeness and elegance … there is still much to be done before we can be regarded as moralized.” In this view, only morality “belongs to real culture.” This distinction between civilization and culture became common in nineteenth-century English writing, largely owing to the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an 49 Rousseau, A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in G.D.H. Cole, trans., The Social Contract and Discourses (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1913), 122. 50 Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ibid., 202–3. 51 Herder, Works, v, 532–41. 52 Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, C.F. Atkinson trans. (New York: A.A. Knopf 1926–8), i, 31–4, 424; ii, 310.

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ardent disciple of Kant, who declared his nation a “varnished” people, out of touch with qualities and faculties that characterize true humanity.53 Matthew Arnold, another leading advocate of culture in terms of moral self-perfection, rather impressively anticipated the influential theme of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” since for Arnold culture is first and foremost moral improvement, and not “merely or primarily [the perfection] of the scientific passion for pure knowledge.”54 However, none of these distinctions has found resonance in the writings of modern cultural anthropologists, the first leading exponent of whom was E.B. Tylor. In his Primitive Culture (1871) he defined culture as “that complete whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”55 This holistic conception was not entirely novel, however, having its intellectual antecedents from Vico to Herder and beyond. Vico’s ideas in particular prove once again profoundly seminal. Both his multiple-independent-origin theory and his theory of cyclical development clearly disclose that he thought of cultures in terms of wholes or configurations. At each stage a given culture is a complex independent constituent. “As from a trunk, there branch out from one limb logic, morals, economics and politics.”56 The point to note is that such a cultural whole is qualitatively unique and altogether different from an aggregate of individual parts. The image of a whole as a complex whole characterizes also Voltaire’s epoch-making contribution to the study of culture. Although, as mentioned earlier, Voltaire frequently uses “civilization” interchangeably with “culture,” he invariably describes it as a totality forged by humans in their social life and its diverse interactions. Few thinkers, before or after him, penetrated more deeply into the “spirit of the time” – a concept he was the first to express. All the same, it must be conceded that only rarely did he succeed in transcending the values of his own times. While he strongly emphasized the need for a harmonious balance of diverse human aspirations, his criterion for what constituted a proper balance was highly one-sided. 53 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1830), ch. v. 54 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1869), ch. 1. 55 E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray 1871), 1. 56 Vico, New Science, para. 367 (72).

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Herder, whose thought in this regard owes much to Voltaire, was nevertheless not slow to object to what he dismissed as presumptuous ethnocentrism. Why, he asked, should we take for granted that the standard of happiness in other realms and ages, together with their beliefs and cherished goals, must be the same as ours? “Has not each man, each nation, each period, the centre of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its centre of gravity?”57 There is no single standard of comparison or evaluation, let alone a universal yardstick of human values such as European culture. Each culture carries within itself its own immanent validity. “The philosopher is never more of an ass,” Herder concludes, “than when he most confidently wishes to play God; when with remarkable assurance, he pronounces on the perfection of the world, wholly convinced that everything moves just so … according to his ideals of virtue and happiness.”58 In a later work, Herder, writing about the approach to history, again picks up this theme in no less vibrant language. Would, he asks, a natural scientist judge a sloth for failing to perform the activities of an elephant, once again insisting that similar comparisons are wholly out of place in the study of history, for they fail to recognize and appreciate the plural diversity of cultures in their own terms.59 Yet, while he objected to Voltaire’s notions of what constitutes the criterion for balancing diverse and conflicting impulses, he fully accepted the need for balance itself, for making every attempt to blend or bridge clashing cultures or sub-cultures, in a search to elicit sources of cultural interrelations as well as integration. Clearly, in this direction, as in his resolve to view opposites in historical processes, such as preservation and change, as instances of interplay and mutual interaction, he was every bit as nuanced in his thinking as Voltaire. There is, additionally, a striking consistency here between Herder’s vision of a cultural whole and his vision of the inner dynamic of social-cultural development. In each case we must not assume an inherent state of blissful harmony. Even a single nation “may have the most sublime virtues in some respects and blemishes in others, show irregularities and reveal the most astonishing contradictions and incongruities … always dwelling under one and the same roof.”60 This tendency of simultaneous, multi57 58 59 60

Herder, Works, v, 509. Ibid., v, 557. Ibid., xiv, 85–6, 145. Ibid., v, 505–6.

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ple, and discordant forces interpenetrating and interacting fascinated Herder. Recognizing it to its fullest extent but, nevertheless, trying to transcend it by imaginative bridging, he succeeded in putting forward ideas about the character and development of social cultures that have lost none of their relevance, both in themselves and in their sociological and political implications.

cultural development: its mediating dynamic Herder’s heuristic principle of treating every manifestation of culture as essentially autonomous, however interrelated it is with any other, carried with it the recognition that the dominant causality involved is that of multiple interactions. I believe that this recognition has considerably helped to guide enquiries into social-cultural development patterns over the last two hundred years as well as to sharpen general interest in what causes people, acting in concert, to believe, to create (or destroy), under what circumstances and influences. Additionally, it also seems to have induced a greater awareness of what sustains or threatens the preservation of social values and assists or hinders the provision of institutional artifacts designed to cope with whatever inner tensions such values may produce. Preoccupations in this direction also witnessed, as they expressed, what has become known as historical and cultural selfconsciousness among members of diverse national entities. Although many chief practitioners in this causal search have been a hybrid species of historians cum philosophers, some preferred to be thought of as social scientists; for example, M.J. de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx. Even when they sought to follow Vico and Herder by recognizing that the methods to be applied had to be radically different from those of the physical sciences, they all variously shared a remarkable degree of confidence in the progressive discovery of the principles governing the emergence, perpetuation, and development of socio-cultural phenomena. Perhaps more interesting was the growing realization that, whatever “culture” is precisely, it is not a thing, dropping out of nowhere like a meteor, but a relational continuum in and through time, a product of the past and a creator of the future. More interesting, because thus viewed, the notion of cultural development raises the problem not only of change but of persistence. Generally speaking, writers employing the organismic paradigm of growth – and these usually coincided with the “holists” – have emphasized the importance of an unbroken con-

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tinuum.61 Clearly, this was starkly at variance with mainstream thinking, but very much in keeping with the subsequent conservatism of most political romantics who, like Burke, preferred to cast their gaze backwards rather than forwards. Still, the prevalent orientation was forward-looking, even among those who traced cyclical or dialectic patterns in historical development. Thus Vico envisaged development in terms of recurrent cycles, within an upward-spiralling movement.62 Curiously enough, the man who set the tone of the progressivist Enlightenment, Voltaire, was himself no sanguine optimist when thinking about the future. Acutely conscious of the debits that accompanied the credits in the ledger of history, “later” did not mean “better” for him. It seems, therefore, that his well-known contempt for the Middle Ages cast him into the progressivist mould in which many have come to see him. As the heading of this section indicates, I view the cultural component entering blending and balancing, notably those of seeming or real opposites such as conflict and cooperation, in essentially dynamic terms – a perspective to which I return in the next chapter, which focuses on political development and on the broadly cultural role in the forging of balances through the mediation and diffusion of standards amidst conceptually diverse elements, agencies, and beliefs.

61 Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France (London: Works, 1899), ii, 351. 62 Vico, New Science, para. 1096 (372–3).

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if the origin of the idea of uninterrupted progress has been erroneously associated with Voltaire, its culmination is rightly identified with Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind (1794). For it discloses unbounded optimism in the progressively mounting capacity of humankind to understand the “laws” of its own development and its ever-increasing ability to control the working of these laws.

the march of civilization Knowing, understanding, and controlling being thus mutual entailments for Condorcet, he, no less than Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, self-assuredly spoke of the “march of civilization” – often used interchangeably with “culture” – as something inevitable and continuous. Barbarism was bound to recede before the advance and diffusion of knowledge; a new ethic was to enrich social cultures as a result of these developments, and herald the attainment of scientific procedures of a kind capable of liberating humans from the religious and metaphysical beliefs of the past as so much excess baggage. While for Vico and Herder religion and myth constituted vital ingredients of social cultures, both were dismissed summarily as the work of cheats and scoundrels. And in contrast to Vico’s and Herder’s skepticism towards cultural diffusion, Condorcet displayed not a shred of doubt concerning the transferability of cultures from more developed regions to less developed ones. Indeed, he maintained that the less developed would actually overtake the more developed, after importing their scientific, technical, and broadly intellectual achievements, insofar as they could avoid their mistakes on the way to becoming more advanced.

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Condorcet’s Sketch divided the overall development in this direction into ten stages. Arriving at his own age, Condorcet felt that “philosophy has nothing more to guess, and no more hypothetical surmises to make.” It is enough to assemble the facts and to show that useful truths can be derived from their connection and totality.1 Condorcet’s Sketch profoundly inspired Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42) and its attempt to establish universal historical laws of development. Of particular interest to our purpose is Comte’s analysis of cultural development, in that its division into social statics and social dynamics strikingly recalls the two-dimensional mode of Herder’s approach to historical-cultural processes, in so far as social statics trace interconnections of culture components at a given time – the synchronic dimension in anthropological terminology – whereas social dynamics refer to formations over time – the diachronic mode – respectively corresponding to Herder’s horizontal and vertical dimensions. Comte stipulated three phases through which all human societies must pass: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The positive stage, demanding that sociocultural development should be studied in a manner analogous to that applicable to causal uniformities in nature did not fall on deaf ears. In particular, two highly influential works that appeared in close succession, Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, (1857) and Karl Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) strove to pay heed to Comte’s positivist empiricism. Buckle attempted to demonstrate that “the actions of men, being determined solely by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results.”2 Moreover, like Comte, he was convinced of the superiority of European (and especially English) culture, from which universal laws of development could be derived. Marx also generally wrote as though he regarded historical tendencies to be akin to the operation of natural laws, having universal applicability, and “working out with iron necessity toward an inexorable destination,” so that the laws of development operating in industrially advanced countries “simply present the other countries with a picture of their own future development.” However, the most succinct statement 1 Antoine Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Paris: Oeuvres, 1847–49). 2 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, (New York: D. Appleton, 1864) i, ch. 1.

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of his views on cultural development can be found in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. “The sum total of the relations of production,” he writes, “constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”3 In addition to this descriptive theory Marx advanced a prescriptive doctrine intended to come to grips with the problem of alienation, on which he had focused in his earliest writings, notably The German Ideology (1846) (with Friedrich Engels). The theme of cultural estrangement links Marx intimately with Diderot, Rousseau, Herder, and Schiller, as also with the romantics. But whereas the latter reverted to the past, to a decidedly traditional order of social life, from which humans, seeking liberation, had taken the wrong turn, Marx looked for a cure in a transformed society of the future. Among attempts to combine traditionalism with progressivism – or persistence with change – Herder’s treatment of culture formation and culture preservation is undoubtedly one of the most original contributions to the study of cultural development. He used both Bildung and Tradition in their original dynamic sense of “building up” and “passing on.” Thus, Bildung is not equated with a particular state of development or confined in its connotation to intellectual, artistic, or strictly individual pursuits. Instead it is viewed as an interactive process in which people receive from as well as add to a common heritage of thinking, feeling, and doing things. The modern concept of socialization comes, perhaps, closest to Herder’s interpretation of Bildung in which he conferred also a dialectic meaning on the word by identifying it with critically taking in, and not merely with passively assimilating. Thus interpreted, the interplay of receiving and adding is not simply a replicative process, but one in which change entails the emergence of transformed cultural manifestations, without involving, however, the deliberate or total destruction of whatever underwent the course of developmental transformation.4 All the same, Herder was not unaware of the possibility that the reconciliation of the old and the new contains in its operation affirmative and negative properties, so that “change” is not necessarily tantamount to a smooth advance or progress. Every discovery, every replacement, he 3 Karl Marx, Preface to the first edition of Das Kapital (1867). See also the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904). 4 Herder, Works, xiii, 343–8.

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writes in the Ideas, knits a new pattern of society, and thereby potentially creates new problems. Hence, every advancement, although it may meet new wants, simultaneously also raises new expectations that cannot be satisfied, and that therefore fail to augment human happiness – the cost of displaced alternatives.5 More Bildung, by way of new discoveries, simply does not of necessity translate into the feeling of continuously coming closer to perfection. Tradition, likewise, is not identified with a stock of accumulated beliefs, customs, and ways of doing things, but rather with an ongoing process, by way of intergenerational transmission. In their interplay, therefore, Bildung and Tradition reinforce each other in rendering “culture” as a composite of transformingly emergent and preservingly stabilizing forces, insofar as Bildung leads to shared patterns of social life that have become “patterns” by virtue of a greater or lesser degree of institutionalization through Tradition. What is worth noting in this connection, is that, although Herder opposed the idea of linear progress, he nonetheless refused to view stages of cultural development in a dichotomous manner. Similarly, while he stressed the uniqueness and autonomy of each social culture, he did not think one to be inherently opposed to another or to exist in isolation of the other. No culture, he urged, should isolate itself from every other in the belief that only it, “and it alone possesses all the wisdom.6 In other words, he thought of the diffusion of cultures on lines parallel to those on which he though of Bildung, namely, as an evaluatively critical process of absorption, in which neither mere identities nor polarities loom as prominently as blending and balancing. In view of this novel terminology, tradition and progress no longer embody two opposed tendencies; progress, or more precisely change, becomes a built-in characteristic of tradition, and development is seen, therefore, as at once part of a given culture continuum and as the instrument for its transformation.7 Accordingly, it requires not only historical antecedents but also emerging goals pointing to the future. And although Herder categorically denied the possibility of complete discontinuity – since this would deprive “development” of any intelligible meaning – he by no means ruled out conflict and tension as potentially marking the interpenetration of Bildung and Tradition.8 5 6 7 8

Ibid., xiii, 372-3. Ibid., xvii, 212. Ibid., xiv, 89. Ibid., xviii, 313-20, 331–2.

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herder’s emphasis on balance Thus, to posit culture as a complete whole is not to imply a state of blissful harmony, just as to view cultural development as a historical continuum is not to imply the absence of inner strains. Both stipulations, therefore, are as compatible with a field of multiple tensions as they are with areas of mutuality and cooperation. Significantly, however, it is, in Herder’s thinking, neither the number of divergences nor the degree of tensions between the old and the new that decisively bear upon the national cohesion of a given social culture but the relationship within the outcome of merging. In particular, when certain forms of cultures, such as “values” and “techniques,” are widely out of step, there is the danger of a crisis, comprising such risks as manifestations of alienation, if not outright fragmentation.9 And, in this relationship, as in the case of Bildung, the inner generating forces, apart from the dialectic of the overall evolvement, are the abidingly effective determinants, rather than external pressures of political, geophysical, or climatic forces.10 In short, it is the internal balancing of cultural constituents that calls for pivotal concern. Herder’s observations on cultural balance and the dynamics of culture diffusion are not without relevance to what has become known as “world culture” and “globalization.” Notably, emerging nations have been put under pressure to embrace globalization as a cultural absolute on the road to joining the industrially advanced world. And if some of their chiefs express fears that a scientifically and technologically superior world culture might threaten their indigenous values and traditions, such fears are not rarely assuaged by identifying the world culture with purely “material” elements that would not impair their spiritual-traditional values. This alleged distinction, we found, Herder rejected as a false dualism – a view that has been echoed by a prominent twentieth-century writer on political development.11 At least two basic misunderstandings seem to be at the heart of this alleged distinction. One is a misconception of tradition, and the other is the erroneous belief that spiritual components of a social culture are

9 Herder, Works, xiii, 371; xiv, 149. 10 Ibid., xiii, 172-88, 244–7, 273. 11 Ibid., viii, 178, 193. See also Lucian W. Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 97.

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easily separable from material components.12 In essence, Herder had serious misgivings about the idea that emergent nations could or should embrace lock, stock, and barrel modes of social and political life that are urged, if not imposed, on them. Contemporary anthropologists, as well as earlier writers, have endorsed these misgivings for some time, since conflicting pulls of cultures are not new in the history of social development. Situational-functional analysis, taken by itself, has not helped to reduce such misgivings, especially if it ignored the danger (against which Herder had already warned) of assuming that similarities between situations and functions establish identities, because there may well be other characteristics, and possibly highly important ones, that are not alike, but from which attention has thus been withdrawn. In this connection, I would single out, by way of conclusion, three major principles that Herder contributed to the theory or methodology of cultural diffusion and cultural development generally: first, the relational principle, in view of which the crucial emphasis is on balance rather than identity, since a cultural whole is viewed as a composite, and not as a homogeneous mass – that is, as something other than a mere sum-total or aggregate of atomistic parts; second, the displacement principle, according to which every change occurs at the cost of displaced alternatives, so that, in effect, whatever gains are made involve some losses, at any rate in culture processes of development, where changes cannot easily be unmade; and finally, the interpenetration principle, in the light of which “development” definitionally demands the marriage of persistence and change, so that any attempt to explain change must entail the recognition of a pastness in presentness and of a measure of persistence projecting into the future. Taken together, these principles rather strongly suggest that a developmental theory of social cultures, insensitive to the need for balancing advances against displacement costs and transmutations against preserving continuities, is unlikely to serve as a guide for, or an account of, the transferability of cultures, in ways that are workable or intelligible in implementational or explanatory terms.

12 Alfred Weber’s analysis of this issue is of particular relevance to this false distinction which, nonetheless, has made considerable inroads into the thinking of some leaders of transitional societies. See also my article on Weber in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, mentioned in ch. 3, n29.

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the causal tangle Given that human action is the principal source of the causal dynamic of political development, I put major emphasis in the previous pages on dimensions of interaction associated with, as well as arising from, a variety of interpenetrating causal agencies, notably between circumstantial antecedents and orientational directions, in their bewildering complexity. There is, however, a measure of agreement that their basic causal dynamics are twofold: those that account for reasons or ends in view of which particular actions are chosen; and those that account for contextual influences that help their coming into being. Admittedly, orientational and contextual sources of explanation are at times so closely interrelated that neither agents nor observers can disentangle them. It is a commonplace experience to find motives inextricably mixed as well as highly volatile, together with the choices they occasion in different contexts and with different people. To link “choice” with “motives” manifestly presupposes an availability of alternative courses of action in addition to people’s awareness of them, and presumably also a degree of willingness to face the burden of selecting which to follow – often among a plurality of conflicting ones.13 A young person’s search for evaluative criteria for acting in Hitler’s Germany, for instance, could have been no easy undertaking. And to have recourse to “personality” types of explanations may therefore at best only provide partial answers.14 Furthermore, if not ultimately, evaluative criteria cannot be divorced from the broader perspectives yielded by what was referred to in chap-

13 See Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, eds, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 14–15. For definitions of political culture, see also Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), chs 9 and 10; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Sidney Verba and Lucian Pye, eds, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); and Richard Rose, ed., Studies in British Politics (London: Macmillan, 1966), 1–3. The earliest mention of what contemporary anthropologists call “the patterns of culture” I came across in the writings of J.G. Herder, referred to in chapter 3, in connection with societal culture components. 14 I am thinking here of the “authoritarian personality” approach, associated mainly with the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, leading intellectuals of the Frankfurt school of social research.

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ter 3 as (mediating) culture components. For they are what crucially help to shape people’s perceptions of what can or cannot be done.15 So viewed, the structuring of political development is virtually bound up with prevailing modes of thinking and judging, as also of shared expectations and aspirations, just as political configurations themselves are historical continua, unlike substantive bodies, forming relational events, as distinct from simply being an aggregate of people who at any point happen to live in a particular territory. If anything, as a relational event, sui generis, they are closer to an ensemble that, apart from its inherent contingency, involves a measure of continuity in time, together with a measure of contiguity in space. Thus conceived, “interaction” can strictly refer to humans only, forming a “chain of being,” capable of acting in concert with others like themselves. No doubt, a common medium of communication (as other cultural affinities) is able to facilitate and extend such interactions. A common language is, however, no guarantee that mutual expectations will be correctly interpreted or, even if they are, that actions based on them will avoid the occurrence of friction. To state this is, of course, to state the obvious; it seems appropriate nevertheless to risk doing so, since in common parlance “interaction” has a distinctly cooperative connotation. But then, in common parlance, the term is not infrequently applied to the interplay between human and non-human forces, as, for example, in connection with a particular society and its physical environment. Moreover, interaction may involve varying degrees of reciprocity, simultaneously and over time, as we noted when contrasting its horizontal dimension with its vertical dimension. Likewise, the degree of reciprocity need not be exactly matched. In short, the character of interaction can differ in mutuality, frequency, and intensity from case to case and from time to time, and thereby bear divergently on a society’s development and ongoing existence. Once again, therefore, we discover that features such as plurality, diversity, and contingency, if only by virtue of entailing multiple forms of interaction, are no strangers to what we commonly describe as “political development.” What, however, we have so far failed to discover is the extent to which we can take development to usher in improvement, 15 As readers will recall, I apply “culture” to shared beliefs, images, symbols, and norms, which have been transmitted to at least one generation. Thus viewed, culture is inherent in a variety of activities, and not confined, as in everyday language, to artistic or literary pursuits.

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of governance or anything else. Certainly, Voltaire would not care to enlighten us or to herald criteria or indicators in this direction to guide us. The Ideen, Herder’s principal analysis of historical change and purposive development, makes it evident that his balancing approach to the multiple sources occasioning the occurrence of actions and events goes beyond themselves. It is their value or “significance” he seeks to establish. His search for developmental continuity, therefore, is a composite and, in a sense, a two-dimensional undertaking; for it is intended to provide explanations, in terms of the antecedents operative, and evaluations, in terms of the occurrence’s direction or orientation. Each is concerned with tracing connections and broadly distinguishable interactions that come into play. Thus, while the explanatory search is essentially backward-looking, the evaluative search is forward-looking. What complicates matters is Herder’s postulate of an internal balancing power of causality, in that it problematically contrasts with the commonly held view of (simple) causation. For this view presupposes that “A,” the cause, is recognizably distinct from “B,” the effect; is not only earlier in time, but is the necessary condition of its occurrence. Yet, surely, for A to have this causal effect, it must have causal power; and, if so, there must be a mediating link that is causally inexplicable, unless we resort to an infinite regression. Moreover, if this power is not something separate, neither “A” nor “B” can be separate either, since we have no way of distinguishing their separate existence, and the view of causation in the customary form is thus rendered inapplicable, unless we additionally accept the postulate of an internal power being at work. Hume, known to have rejected this alternative, therefore concluded that the customary view of causation was wholly unfounded, and that all we can do is link in our imagination events that past observation has shown to occur regularly together, as though they were necessarily related. At first sight, Herder appears to agree with Hume’s projection of a mental construction, based on analogy and observation. On closer reading, however, it emerges that Herder questions not so much the reality of internal causation, but its understanding as something simple and readily intelligible. For the causal relation that he stipulates as a balancing mediation is that of an internal (organic) Kraft, and the mode of causation that he puts forward in place of “simple causation” is that of pluralistic causation of an exceedingly complex and varied pattern. To come to grips with it, we therefore have to be able to penetrate into the

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inner being of things – in view of which it is not hard to see why Hume could not accept such a postulate. Two reasons account for Herder’s faith in internal causes: one is that he could employ Kraft as a conceptual support for his avowed “empiricism”; the other is his recognition of a balancing-teleological element in his theory of multiple causation, acting not as an external agency upon the universe but as an internal force acting through the universe. This universe, in his religious-metaphysical conception, is seen as itself the manifestation of Kraft, the organic-divine source of all existence, not antecedently as an origin, but teleologically as directive purpose. What, it seems, is emphasized as the balancing causal efficacy is the causality of ends, in view of which the purpose in its developmental unfolding makes actual what is already latent. The distinction between “cause” as a temporal antecedent and “cause” as a purposive direction is methodologically significant in the treatment of social and political development. For drawing it makes it possible to maintain a measure of causal determinism without subscribing to a theory of inescapable fatalism. Perhaps the chief weakness of Herder’s balancing hypothesis lies in the overly comprehensive sense in which he views the external context of development, to which he applies the term “climate” (Klima). For, unlike Montesquieu, Herder does not confine it to meteorological phenomena, notably physical influences attributable to geographical, geological, or biological sources. Rather, he includes in it the most diverse constituents forming the milieu in which an individual is born, such as educational institutions, political systems, the standard of living, amusements, and the arts in general. He even calls for a “climatology” of all human thought and feeling (Works, xiii, 269). Moreover, Klima is variously held to be a mere “medium” that is incapable of initiating activity by itself, whereas at other times it is presented as the “global sphere of interaction,” reflecting, as it were, the effect of the interplay between human agents and their physical environment. Nonetheless, Herder’s conception of Klima is of interest in attempting the balancing of diverse elements that bear upon the shaping of forms of associative public life in their multiple causality; and not least, because of relating the physical and human components of its development organically, by bringing out the contrast between the somewhat passive nature of “environment” taken by itself, and its active potency when “energized” by humans acting upon it. Herder saw this “balance” as a synthesis between the essen-

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tially objective and the essentially subjective, in particular by way of the human susceptibility to the impelling force (Drang) of ideas. He considered human organizations as their balanced expression, which resembles “systems of ideological forces” emanating from interacting ideas as the main energizing source within social and political development (Works, xiii. 181–6.) Out of this tangle of causally interacting penetrations within a society’s political development, its wechselweise Ineinanderwirken (Herder, Works, xxi, 179), I earlier singled out three main conceptual principles, in accordance with which any “development” definitionally combines persistence with change, and hence comprises a measure of pastness in presentness. It amounts in effect to the existence of antecedents persisting and projecting into the present and the future. As a result, the dynamics of this process involves an overlap of interacting human agencies in the form of circumstantial origins and orientational directions whose motivational sources, together with their selective choices, not uncommonly get so inextricably mixed that their crucially determining causality defies indisputably valid discovery. Such difficulties apart, linking motives with choices presupposes the availability of alternative courses, as we have noted; and this, in turn, usually helps to bring to light further considerations as well as potential problems. Commonly, too, for instance, awareness of performative alternatives entails a degree of willingness to assume the burden of selecting among the (frequently clashing) options those we want to pursue as our own. Presumably, making such choices is rendered no less problematic in political contexts in which the notion of accountability is paramount at any given time or in historical retrospect. Finally, to fit our actions into an overall framework of any social or political configuration of joint agency, interactions need as their essential condition of continuity the observance of laws, which assist to promote within the most formative stages of a society’s political development an institutional setting conducive to the emergence of normative reciprocity as a self-sustaining standard. In other words, such a standard must be perceived as conceptually separate from particular positional claims of any one individual or group in support of their self-serving ends or interests. In this view, common standards must not be confused with common understandings or agreements per se. They are what they are by virtue of their own self-constitutive and self-authentic worth, and in this sense, their intrinsic (given) selves, if they are to serve their normatively mediating role, notably within political contexts.

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Put slightly differently, standards, as an autonomously mediating political category, have an effective causal force only – in a regulative and corrective direction of outcomes – if they are not seen as relying on any extraneous support, in the form of (positional) guidance, consent, or general will doctrines, on the one hand, or on allegedly transcendent traditional authorities, of a moral or legal kind, on the other. For then they but forfeit their recognition as a societal umpire of civic reciprocity, within the given or aspired form of human interactions. Whatever we accordingly posit as a mediating path of instrumental standards within the context of multiple types of causal interaction cannot alter the fact that a political society, in its dynamic of development, resembles more closely an uneasy truce than the attainment of an unchallengeably perfect associational harmony.

the given and the political Geopolitics is a relatively new concept with a pretty old vintage. Because of its close association with Pan-Germanism, if not Nazism, it has acquired a somewhat sinister connotation. Particularly in the period immediately preceding World War ii it was frequently invoked by Adolph Hitler’s Lebensraum propaganda. But the idea underlying the concept is, as I suggested, by no means modern. Political tensions and wars have for a long time been attributed to population pressure and land hunger. All the same, the bond between humans and their native land has also provided one of the strongest political-cultural sentiments, and has been recognized as such by nation builders throughout the ages. A remarkable illustration of the power of this sentiment has been the return of the Jewish people to the ancient homeland after twenty centuries of dispersal. This could scarcely have come about, however, had not Moses already linked in his Law the spiritual-cultural unity of his people with their providential homeland – a linkage that one of the fathers of modern nationalism regarded as the foundation of a social-cultural tradition and as the “most perfect” exemplar of the abiding sense of historical, geographical, and political continuity.16 16 When, in 1783, J.G. Herder published The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, he urged his readers to regard the work not merely from a literary and theological point of view, but as something of profound political significance. (Works, xii, 119). For a more extensive discussion of this point see my Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 203), ch. 1.

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The notion of a land being divinely ordained to belong within particular geographically given boundaries to a given people is a recurrent theme in political rhetoric. To quote the words of a United States Congressman, uttered in 1821: “The Father of the Universe, in his peculiar Providence, had given natural boundaries to every continent and kingdom – permanent, physical, imperishable boundaries, to every nation, to shield it from invasion … The great Engineer of the Universe has fixed the natural limits of our country, and man cannot change them.”17 When, after World War i, the boundaries of another seemingly ordained country, Austria, with its centuries-old monarchy, were to be redrawn on strictly linguistic lines, these frequently conflicted with the “natural,” geographically given boundaries that were held to be indispensably essential for the defence of the newly emerging successor states. Thus Czech nationalists appealed at one and the same time to linguistic principles to justify the creation of a Czech nation state and to topographical and historical “givens” in order to include strategically valuable parts of the original kingdom of Bohemia, even though these were predominantly populated by German-speaking people. Poles, Irishmen, Germans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others had to learn to accept the unpalatable fact that geography alone as a “given” could not be relied upon to prevent the partition of what they considered to be inherently indivisible entities, their national birthright. That partition was necessary to prevent even worse calamities did not make it any the less sacrilegious in their eyes.18 The crucial significance of geographical givens to a country’s political security as well as to its internal stability has long been recognized. Generally, the less physical contact between nations, the less cause for friction in their relations. No neighbours has almost always been preferable to hostile neighbours. Islands, therefore, whether in the cast of maritime formations or in that of lands bordered by mountains, oases surrounded by deserts or clearings closed in by forests, offer greater security to their inhabitants than large expanses of plains. The relation between geography and political fortunes was not lost on political thinkers. Montesquieu, one of the most astute students of geopolitical inter17 Cited in Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), 35. 18 See Norman J.G. Pounds, “History and Geography: A Perspective on Partition,” Journal on International Affairs 18 (1964), 161–72.

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action, is often quoted in this connection. “Island peoples,” he observed, “are more disposed to liberty than continental peoples … The sea separates them from great empires, whose tyranny cannot therefore lend a hand; conquerors are stopped by the sea; the islanders are not enveloped by conquest and so they more easily preserve their laws.”19 Montesquieu’s generalizations no doubt contain their measure of truth; but they are not unequivocal. Insularity has certainly been an inestimable asset to Britain; it has hardly been of benefit to Ireland, however. Moreover, technological advances have tended to lessen the strategic advantages of geographic location. On the other hand, the consternation that the political developments of a small and poor island such as Cuba could cause to so powerful a neighbour as the United States of America, merely by virtue of its geographical proximity, goes to show that geography has not ceased to be of relevance. Nonetheless, as technology keeps advancing, geographical influences are increasingly of less direct impact. Instead, sociological effects of geographical factors seem to impinge more directly on matters of political import. A Dutch anthropologist, Rudolf Steinmetz, has aptly coined the term “sociography,” which contemporary political sociologists have come to apply to the study of interactions between geographical and socio-political phenomena. Thus, the work of André Siegfried in France and that of V.O. Key in the United States are outstanding examples of the application of sociographic method to the investigation of political attitudes. Similarly Rudolf Heberle has made good use of this method in his studies of political opinion and party allegiances among the rural population of Schleswig-Holstein, which, rather surprisingly perhaps, became a stronghold of Nazism.20 However, the evidence is not such as to postulate a sort of geographical determinism, to establish that topography can be of appreciable help in assessing the extent of communication and centralization channels of political agencies or in enquiries into the changing modes of social stratification. Especially in rural areas and economically underdeveloped regions it discloses not only the correlation between the configuration of the land, the quality of the soil, and the type of farming that is

19 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris, Société les Belles Lettres, 1955), ii, bk 18, ch. 5. (The translation of this and subsequent passages is my own.) 20 Rudolf Heberle, “The Political Movements among the Rural People in Schleswig Holstein, 1918 to 1932,” The Journal of Politics 5 (1943), 3–26, 115–41.

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chosen but also that such decisions vitally affect the social positioning and political self-location of members of the farming community.21 The study of climatic influences has also been closely connected with geographic and sociographic correlations between the “where” and the “how” of political developments. To trace diverse social characteristics and national-political differences to the influence of climate has tempted writers from the time of Herodotus to the present day. The general tendency has been to regard hot climates as conducive to indolence and cooler climates as conducive to enterprise and innovative thinking. To quote Montesquieu again: “We have already said that great heat weakens human strength and courage; and that in cold climates there is a certain strength of body and mind which renders men capable of sustained, laborious, great and bold actions … It is not astonishing, therefore, that the cowardice of people in hot climates has almost invariably made them slaves, and that the courage of people in cold climates has kept them free.”22 Although it is not uncommon even in our own day to hear such “theories” – a circumstance which should not be too quickly dismissed, as students of the operation of the self-fulfilling prophecy have found – the psychological effect of climate is now generally held to be far less direct than has traditionally been thought. Just as economic depressions are no longer linked with sun-spots, variations in behaviour characteristics are no longer directly attributed to climate influences as such. But that climate has a more or less direct effect on social and political contexts, in particular on economic development and social standards of living can hardly be gainsaid. Agricultural production is undoubtedly as much affected by climate as by the quality and configuration of the soil. But, once again, the impact is sociological in character rather than psychological. Since the supply of food has over past centuries been by far the most important single factor in the growth of population centres, climatic circumstances that favoured food production causally occasioned population concentration. It is not surprising, accordingly, that most of the under-developed and under-populated countries lie in the glacial, equatorial and tropical regions where food production as well as the climatic extremes do not promote economic growth and diversification of products or occupations. Technological aid to such areas might, it is true, encourage secondary industries, but it is not easy to see how they 21 Heberle, “On Political Ecology,” Social Forces 31 (1952), 5. 22 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, ii, bk 17, ch. 2.

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could, at least within the foreseeable future, effectively catch up with the industrially developed areas of temperate zones, since these are also forging ahead at a rate not far below that of the most rapidly developing minority of underdeveloped areas at a continuously higher rate than most of the others.23 The close correlation between demographic conditions and the availability of food production and natural resources generally was roughly the case up to the middle of the eighteenth century. At any rate, the density of the population outside the large European urban centres coincided with the agriculturally most fertile areas. Only the intensified mechanization of farming equipment eventually opened up larger stretches of farming land without necessitating a proportionate increase in the required labour force. However, it was often not commercially profitable to augment agricultural outputs until land and sea transport made it possible to sell food surpluses at freight charges that made it affordable for others to buy them. Up to this point, most countries had to aim in their national policies at a high degree of self-sufficiency. In any case, heavy dependence on agricultural production only meant (and still does in parts of the world) that bad harvests could spell ruin for the bulk of the population. Thus, whenever the population increased at a higher rate than food production, “overpopulation” (as it was termed) became a serious problem. The underfed and underemployed were not, arguably, in themselves revolutionary material; they were, nonetheless, a reservoir that could be tapped by political malcontents of different stripes. Still, as long as givens are viewed as unchangeable givens, the risk of revolutions is probably minimal. Moreover, or by the same token, the size or the density of population in relation to cultivable areas need not be the most relevant, let alone the only, consideration. For even in essentially rural areas confined to the production of one or two primary commodities, it is not human resources as such, or natural resources as such, or even their interaction, that necessarily pose a politically worrying problem, as long as there is no change of outlook regarding givens. Only when there is a marked change in this respect, brought about by faltering traditions of thinking, a situation that politicians cannot blithely ignore threatens to arise. For, more likely than not, such a 23 See Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory of Under-developed Regions (London: Duckworth, 1957), 4. See also Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds, The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

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change can cause an appreciable difference to people’s expectations, notably as regards their aspired standard of life. Changing needs of defence may also have politically significant demographic implications. Real or perceived threats, from new neighbours or from existing neighbours grown more hostile, will call for having larger armies, and these in turn will pose new political risks, not only in terms of their cost but also in that they are felt to be conducive to the emergence of autocratic regimes by removing the most virile members of a state and thereby reducing the risk of effective mass revolts. A war psychosis or indeed the outbreak of actual hostilities may have similar effects. Montaigne referred to this artful device as a way of purging a nation’s organism and preventing its being imperilled by an excess of youthful blood. Thus he says of political regimes that sometimes they “purposely maintained wars with some of their enemies, not only to keep their own men in action, for fear lest idleness, the mother of corruption, should bring upon them some worse inconvenience … but also to serve for blood-letting in their Republic, and a little to evaporate the vehement heat of their youth.”24 An ongoing contextual source of change, apart from, though undoubtedly affecting, standard of living expectations and the character of defence requirements, is the type or intensity of technological progress. For it can, and does, convert a situation of unchangeable givens into one of protean transmutations.

the transformation of the given When, in 1798, Thomas Malthus formulated his famous, yet depressing, population theory, Britain was considered a highly overpopulated country. A hundred and fifty years later, with a population that had almost grown fourfold, Britain suffered acute shortages in manpower and had to encourage immigration to be able to meet the demands of its economy. At the same time, while technological developments created new trades and occupations, their impact was uneven. Thus, although they massively altered employment conditions and future prospects in manufacturing, extractive, and service industries, they nevertheless failed to prevent periods of prolonged unemployment in other industries or in diverse parts of the world for one reason or another. Evidently, the 24 Essays of Montaigne, Charles Cotton, trans. (London: Navarre Society, 1923), bk ii, ch. 23.

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problem of “overpopulation” is not attributable to any one factor, but intricately related to a variety of interacting causes, of which the overall manner of economic organization represents one of the most vital. Evidently, too, economic forces appear effectively more relevant than demographic ones when it comes to tracing political implications, in particular broadly shared attitudes among voters, in societies in which they can articulate their preferences. André Siegfried, by contrast, in his study of modern France, still put maximum emphasis on demographic conditions, arguing that sparsely populated areas tend to be more conservative than densely populated ones and that, consequently, revolutions are more likely to originate in industrial cities than in rural villages.25 Supported though this thesis seems by revolutionary patterns in Europe – where peasant rebellions have been rare, ineffectual, and short-lived – it loses plausibility when applied to the Asian scene, where the peasantry formed the backbone of twentieth-century revolutionary movements. It could be argued, however, that conditions in Asia confirm rather than refute Siegfried’s demography, in view of the density of Asian rural populations. On the other hand, Heberle’s findings that the sparsely populated rural areas in the North German plain displayed extremist political tendencies does cast doubt on the validity of Siegfried’s generalization regarding the conservative “peasant mentality,” which somewhat echoes Marx’s description of the mentality of rural populations in terms of the pervasive idiocy of the countryside. Be that as it may, it seems more reasonable to accept the view that there is more to political attitudes than psycho-demographic propensities. Wealth of farmers, conditions of the soil and of land-holding, and other socio-economic elements might be taken to exercise a more decisive influence on rural political attitudes than sparseness in demographic distribution. And although organizing political movements or parties is undeniably facilitated by population concentration, this does not by itself warrant the conclusion that either of these must assume a revolutionary complexion. It seems nearer to the truth to attribute the political extremism of urban conglomerations in both advanced and underdeveloped countries to the dismal housing and working conditions that the bulk of city-dwellers have had, and often still have, to contend with.

25 André Siegfried, Tableau Politique de la France de l’Ouest sous la Troisiéme République (Paris: Colin, 1913).

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Furthermore, industrially developed countries tend to be characterized by a higher average age than underdeveloped countries. In new states, especially, this tendency is reflected both in the younger age of political leaders and in their more revolutionary outlook. More developed and longer established states, on the other hand, have, on the whole, a predominantly conservative political ethos, if not also a “pensioner mentality,” which upholds the status quo and is inimical to change. Admittedly, these rather imprecise generalizations have not been sufficiently tested to permit generally valid assessments. Nevertheless, they do not appear all that wide of the mark. Also, not infrequently, revolutionary postures reflect discontent, per se, and do not necessarily coincide with politicalideological orientations. For example, manifestations of hostility among young people in erstwhile Communist countries in Eastern Europe toward the old-time revolutionaries suggested a closer correlation of revolutionism and youth, which, while of potentially political significance, was not necessarily political in origin. More often than not, it indicated instead the age-old sociological antagonism between the generations. As for the correlation between a prevalent sense of affluence and liberal-democratic attitudes, opinions vary strikingly. For example, Montesquieu supported the view, shared by a number of classical writers, that excessive wealth is likely to undermine the craving for liberty, on the part of both individuals and nations.26 Tocqueville, too, felt that democracy in America was favoured by the existence of comparatively few people who were rich enough to live without a profession.27 By contrast, more contemporary writers have maintained that the “more wellto-do a nation, the greater chances are that it will sustain democracy.”28 However, it is not always made clear whether “democracy” is supposed to connote above all more freedom, more citizen participation, more equality, more stability, or less extremism. Without wishing to deny that “sharp differences in the style of living between those at the top and those at the bottom” make a mockery of egalitarian understandings of democracy,29 it by no means follows that

26 See, for example Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, iii, bk 21, ch. 3. 27 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), 55. 28 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 31. 29 Ibid., 51. A view that Rousseau already emphasized, especially in the Constitutional Project for Corsica (1765) in F. Watkins, trans., Rousseau: Political Writings, 289.

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greater equality in the distribution of consumer goods or other resources implies the existence of democracy viewed as a regime of maximum political freedoms or political participation, or for that matter, a high degree of governmental accountability. Nor does it follow that such wider distribution of consumer goods evidences “that there is relatively little difference between the standard of living of adjacent social classes.”30 Surely, per capita incomes in averages are as informative about the distribution of income as are bathtubs regarding the equality of wealth. Moreover, a fair allocation of bathtubs is as compatible with totalitarian dictatorships as with liberal democracies, regardless of differences in income or wealth. And, likewise, neither tells us much about the likelihood of social unrest or political revolutions.31 What is less equivocal is the linkage between the distribution of natural resources, such as oil, within a country’s different regions, and internal tensions arising from marked or persistent discrepancies of this kind. Many newly formed states are particularly bedevilled by such problems. The struggles between areas in the Congo or in Nigeria, for instance, illustrate the added difficulties ex-colonial countries have, because of such discrepancies, on top of tribal, religious, or linguistic rivalries, in preserving their territorial cohesion as independent national entities. Even older ex-colonies, such as Canada, have not entirely overcome the problem of inter-provincial tensions arising from disparities in natural resources, although even here such disparities do not tell the whole story. No wonder statistically based inter-causalities do not fare any better. Thus, the number of bathtub or telephone owners in different countries does not necessarily prove a relevant indicator of a nation’s economic status or the nature and stability of its political regime. Often the spread in the values of a claimed indicator is so wide that the specificity of its causal force is lost. If European stable democracies, for example, are said to be characterized by the ownership of 43–400 telephones per 1000 persons, and European dictatorships by 7–196 telephones per thousand, one does begin to ask oneself how those nations whose members possess 43–195 telephones manage to remain stable democra-

30 Lipset, Political Man, 50. 31 Ibid., 36; see also Phillips Cutwright, “National Political Development,” in Polsby, Dentler, and Smith, eds, Politics and Social Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 570.

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cies.32 Not the least part of the trouble is an obvious lack of theoretical focus. For statistical hypotheses of this sort tell us little about where we are going – democratically or on any other path.

directions of the transformation I had better clarify at this point my earlier reference to “under-development.” Plainly, countries can display highly disparate forms and levels of development in the field of human strivings. There can, for example, be exceptional artistic skill, combined with low literacy as, say, in Yemen; or there can be a relatively low standard of consumption, combined with an impressively high level of scientific research as, say, in the later years of the Soviet Union. My focus, however, was essentially on attitudes to the given; that is, to traditional ways that characterize pre-modern societies, although here, too, this needs qualifying, in that no modern society (in it common understanding) is ever entirely free from traditionality. Thus, features considered peculiar to primitive communities are usually also found in highly developed ones, and not only on the fringes, as it were, but as integral elements in their social structures.33 Perhaps it might be more appropriate to think of various levels of development in terms of continua rather than types, as well as to recognize the seemingly inevitable time-lags between changes in technology and modes of economic organization, on the one hand, and between changes in prevalent attitudes (especially as regards the range of what are held to be unchangeable givens) and forms of thinking generally, on the other. Even here, though, one can easily put the cart before the horse. At any rate, Max Weber has persuasively argued that changes in religious, moral, and broadly social norms precede changes in economic organization. Especially from the political point of view, Weber felt, individual and collective symbols, as well as action-inducing images, are of no less objective relevance than occupation or income data.34 Still, one way or another, there have been significant structural changes within what are considered prevalent givens that have decisively helped to fashion economic patterns within modern societies and, with them, social stratification and political self-locations. 32 Lipset, Ibid., 36. 33 Almond and Coleman, Politics of the Developing Areas, 20. 34 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons, ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 324–6.

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Hence, whether structural changes preceded changes in social, political, and economic thinking or followed in their wake, technological as much as financial transformations were part and parcel of them and, together, favoured the concentration of industrial production in larger units in close proximity. Integration in this direction proceeded on both horizontal and vertical lines. During the twentieth century, in the u.s.a. about half of the capital equipment came under the control of about 20 major concerns and nearly half of the total corporate wealth landed in the hands of 200 large firms.35 At about the same time, however, in Britain and other industrial countries in Europe, smaller firms remained plentiful; but, because their share of the market was not significant enough, the pricing policies were sizably influenced, if not controlled, by the large corporations. In turn, the localization and urbanization of industries have given rise to a tremendous increase in the number and size of cities, although they have assumed diverse sociologically relevant forms in different national and municipal settings.36 Financially, the growth of vast business undertakings was facilitated by developments in the provision of loanable funds through banks, finance corporations, and the stock market. This, rather than the existence of a money economy as such – as distinct from barter – has enabled industry to take full advantage of technological inventions. More important still, the ready availability of credit made it possible to engage in investing into long-term forms of capital expansion, where a considerable time gap has to be bridged between the period of financial outlays and the start of returns. The relative absence of credit facilities was one of the most basic circumstances that prevented the industrialization of under-developed areas, not merely in a direct way but chiefly indirectly, since such vital auxiliaries as road, railroad, seaport, and airport construction, electricity, telephone and postal services, sanitation, and so on, are forms of investment that are slow in showing returns and therefore long-term credit is essential. Such credit, incidentally, has been remarkably augmented in recent years by the issue of stock market securities in smaller units, in that it has led to the tapping of widely diffused sources of funds – mainly from small and medium savers – 35 Amitai Etzioni, Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 105. See also Simon Kuznets, Capital in the American Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 36 Gideon Sjoberg, “Comparative Urban Sociology,” in Merton, Broom, and Cottrell, Jr, eds, Sociology Today (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 334–59.

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which in their aggregate have considerably added to the pool of producers’ credit. While I emphasize these financial innovations, because they are at times rather overshadowed by the more visibly impressive advances in industrial technology, I do not wish to detract attention from our main focus, the remarkable transformation in living patterns and social stratification as a whole, which, as chapter two indicated, has been closely paralleled in political attitudes to the status quo in general and within the structures and policies of political parties and industrial trade unions in particular. The social transformation is perhaps most visibly disclosed by the dwindling number of self-employed in proportion to those employed, in all industrially developed societies. In Britain, for example, no less than three-fifths of the adult population was still selfemployed in the middle of the nineteenth century. A century later it was less than one fifteenth; that is, over ninety per cent of working people were relying on outside jobs, while in the United States the proportion of self-employed workers dropped to less than 12 per cent as compared to 20 per cent in 1910, over a period of intense growth in the economy as a whole.37 Here the decline has been most marked in agriculture – a trend that typified also most European areas where, in contrast to industrial forms of employment, agricultural work has much decreased as a source of employment.38 The drop in the number of people working on the land has not meant, however, a proportionate drop in agricultural production, owing to the rate of labour-saving mechanization. On the other hand, the number employed in “non-productive” services, such as commerce, transportation, entertainment, the massmedia, or social and health services, has risen greatly and is continuously rising, not least as a result of vast increases in government expenditure on defence, education, and the administration and provision of social services. Together with the explosion of the consumer market and business administration, public administration and government spending have been at once the cause and the effect of the rapid industrialization of Western society. This (odd) combination has brought about gigantic changes by way of ongoing bureaucratization and, above all, economic organization. 37 Britain: An Official Handbook (h.m.s.o., 1992), 450; Statistical Abstract of the United States (g.p.o., Washington, (2003); Clarence D. Long The Labor Force under Changing Income and Employment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 168. 38 Britain: An Official Handbook, 451.

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Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to conclude that, while no earlier societies had been without some organization, contemporary society is almost entirely “a society of organizations.”39 Yet, granted the broad validity of this verdict, it is nonetheless remarkable that, however pervasive the organizational element has become in the industrialized world, the social transformation that accompanied it hardly corresponds to that Karl Marx foreshadowed. Above all, what totally failed to materialize is the emergence of a united, homogeneous, and growingly classconscious proletariat. In spite of the bulging number of the employed working force and the degree of organizational fervour, no such result ensued. Instead, and somewhat paradoxically, both the organizational trend and the occupational trend, acting together, militated against producing such a result. For the most part this was evidently so because both trends were attended by the rise of a new stratum of society, which, rather than wiping out the middle class, massively helped to enhance its importance. Admittedly, it was a middle class whose complexion had radically altered since the time in which Marx was writing, since the “bourgeois” segment of society had undergone almost total change in its composition. In place of shopkeepers, small factory owners, and the clergy, there now predominated technocrats, bureaucrats, and finance corporations, and these were closer in outlook to administrative functionaries than to what Marx called business “hucksters.” As we noted, the increasing scale of business operations simply demanded a degree of bureaucratization unknown in the business world up to the twentieth century. These changes not surprisingly found their reflection in the political domain in the form of a vastly expanding, but largely anonymous, governmental bureaucracy – a central topic of chapter eight. And, as in the world of business, it brought in its train a marked shift of governance. In the broadly social world, post-Marxian developments likewise belied the projected polarization within industrial society by appreciably diminishing, rather than augmenting, glaring differences in life-styles among the greater part of the total population, despite its growingly intense occupational differentiation. Such, it seems, can be the force of self-denying prophecies, even though I would hesitate to infer from what actually happened the work of an inner dialectic or “cunning” of history, at any rate on the evidence

39 Etzioni, Modern Organizations, 106.

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alone that the account sketched here about the passing of traditional givens has managed to yield. However, what the traced developments do suggest, as their strictly political outcome, is a general move away from monolithic “authoritarian” structures toward “oligarchic” structures in matters of organization and control. Whether or not such emergent configurations of governmental power, and their mode of authorization (the theme of the following chapter), are likely to convert eventually into recognizably polyarchic-democratic structures – a question touched upon in chapters 6 and 7 – remains, alas, a moot point.

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orization

preoccupied though he was with politics, Thomas Hobbes nevertheless recognized that relations involving power transcended the dominion of rulers. Power, he declared, a good while before Max Weber, enters into every human relationship in which command can be established over others in such a way that obedience is exacted even against their will. In politics, however, to minimize the use of arbitrary force, and make possible an authorized use of power, Hobbes recommended the making of basic covenants. The extent to which his recommendation (in its specifics) settled the rightful use of political power is another matter altogether. This has been made evident time and again, but especially since the emergence of modern democracy. Apparently, problems with the authoritative employment of coercive power have a way of rearing their heads in ever new disguises.

the matter of meanings Arguing that the concept of power has no single, generally recognized meaning, Charles Merriam went so far as to favour the abandonment of formal definitions. Instead of worrying about a precisely worded definition – an undertaking he thought, like Friedrich Nietzsche before him, doomed to be unprofitable – we ought, in the study of politics as much as of history, discover what symbols, motives, procedures, and so on are commonly associated with “power,” and why. In other words, since comprehensive definitions cannot be had, we should attempt at least partial definitions in terms of the operational characteristics that are generally observable, and speak accordingly of “operational definitions,” in

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conformity with the practice of the natural scientist.1 Max Weber made similar suggestions, although in exploring power, he frequently went beyond political dominion (Herrschaft), by putting major emphasis on inter-personal relations, in which some exercise command over others. In the strictly political sphere, however, in which public rights and duties loom prominently in most modern societies, Hobbes’s approach – in which power is commonly associated with positions within transpersonal, “institutional” structures – seems to me more to the point. For here supreme power, in its valid authorization, arises out of normatively grounded contractual processes, designed to “operationalize” obedience unequivocally as a matter of public duty. In more contemporary terminology, such operational authorization is accomplished, according to Talcott Parsons, by “mobilizing” people in support of certain public goals, thereby inducing them to act out of a sense of duty toward the attainment of publicly defensible “goalachievements.” Somewhat analogously to Hegel’s idea of rational necessity or Kant’s notion of self-imposed commitment, Parsons argues that the best way to involve people in such public self-commitments is to assign positions to them, in which they can think to have a personal stake – a prescription that unmistakably recalls J.-J. Rousseau’s formula of “objective thinking.” Only, unlike Rousseau, who professed to have merely a city-state such as his native Geneva in mind, Parsons, speaking of the “Distribution of Power in American Society,” envisions civic commitments within a whole sub-continent. Likewise, his portrayal of a power structure has a striking resemblance to organismic approaches to politics of an earlier age. For he views it as a “system,” in which every part has its proper place and is performing a specific “functional” role.2 Yet, while such a portrayal may fit stable, traditional societies, where ritual, custom, and the virtual absence of change make for a clear-cut and practically fixed distribution of functions (as in settings of feudal regimes), it doubtfully fits open and highly mobile societies, with multiple and intensely competitive tendencies, barring, perhaps, extreme conditions of wartime.

1 Charles Edward Merriam, Political Power (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-HIll, 1934), 3–4, 82–3. See also his The Making of Citizens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 1–26. 2 Talcott Parsons, Political and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1969), esp. chs 8 and 14.

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Manifestly, an emphasis on “system” and “functionality” conjures up degrees of societal cohesion that render attempts to come to terms with clashing opinions and interests otiose. More worryingly, though, it may postulate that anyone not finding a functional place within the system is a social misfit, belonging to that pathological breed of humanity that everywhere inhabits the fringes of mainstream society. As a rule, functionalism, thus viewed, is associated with authoritarian, if not necessarily totalitarian, forms of politics, in which dissenters are looked upon as unpatriotically subversive elements. On the other hand, the paradigm of organicism is not incompatible with social and political pluralism. J.G. Herder, for example, in his portrayal of organic regimes as being synonymous with authentic nationstates, went so far as to view the diffusion of governmental power as the quintessential condition of political legitimacy, in sharp contrast to Rousseau’s undisguised doubts about pluralism, dreading it as the sanction of group egoisms. Undeniably, Herder’s image of organicism in terms of plural, non-hierarchical structures of power may court serious dangers in reality, if it is not roundly dismissed as wishful thinking of the worst utopian kind. For, apart from underestimating the need for central coordination of multiple autonomies, it may also be held to ignore the limits of any political regime to encompass a plurality of potentially conflicting issues – something of which Rousseau evidently was acutely aware.3 In the final analysis, therefore, whether we applaud Herder’s pluralist faith or share Rousseau’s pluralist fears, there is seemingly room here for a good deal of nuanced thinking and judicious balancing. In view of the perceived risk of “anarchic” pluralism, thinkers such as Hobbes, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons favour forms of hierarchical structuring of governmental power and authority, regardless of its doctrinal underpinnings. Their various approaches disclose a remarkable consensus, principally on four stipulations. First, that a relationship exists between superiors and inferiors, which, although not necessarily marked by qualitative differences, demands that some are formally subordinate to others. Second, that superiors have the right – and, in this sense, the authority – to issue orders or instructions. Third, that, as a command structure, superiors command obedience by virtue of their office, since only thus obedience can be exacted institutionally. And, 3 J.-J. Rousseau, Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau (New York: Burt Franklin, 1767, reprint 1972), 138. See also Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 3, n7.

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fourth, that it is in and through such an institutional mechanism that power is wielded authoritatively, that is, in accordance with constitutionally enshrined norms, and not by sheer caprice. The nature and meaning of political power, accordingly , to be authoritative, is derived from a setting of operational norms that are broadly accepted by a given society as generally valid. The point worth noting here, however, is not whether or not such formal stipulations legitimate the wielding of political power, but only the extent to which they illustrate the terminological distinction that is commonly made between the sheer use of power and its authoritative use. Conceptually, therefore, “authority” in this distinction has more to do with foundational-constitutional sanctions, within a particular institutional-legal context, than with universally valid or intrinsically self-sustaining (moral) rightness. In other words, whatever authoritative functions political power exercises, it does so by virtue of its validating source, and not necessarily by its legitimacy in an absolute sense.

authority delimited All the same, at least since the European Enlightenment, an added demand has been gaining ground. For power to be politically right, it proclaimed, the authority underlying it must itself be made conditional. No one, to my knowledge, insisted upon this requirement more emphatically, after Locke, or popularized it more boldly, than Christian Thomasius, an almost forgotten political jurist, although he has been acclaimed as the originator of the German Enlightenment. While he was not denying that a regime of absolute power was distressingly possible, an absolute authority was an Unding, an existential and logical monstrosity of the purest water. The liberal-critical intent of this declaration is unmistakable; for it implies that, in principle, all adult citizens of sound mind have the freedom and the right to submit whatever claims their government makes to their own critical judgment in light of their understanding of “public reason.”4 Unfortunately, this bold demand may, in its practical application, prove painfully problematic to anyone but the most radical philosophical anarchist, unless there is an almost unanimous consensus on the meaning of public reason and its legitimizing force as a basis for the 4 See my Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2006), ch. 5.

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acceptance of governmental authority. Moreover, to speak of conditional authority may strike some, such as Hannah Arendt, as a glaring contradiction in terms, since, to them an authority that is limited or restrained ceases to be an authority.5 For to whom or to what, they wonder, can “authority” be made subject, whose validating force exceeds that of itself? More fundamentally still, perhaps, the distinction between political power and political authority, while important and highly desirable for most practical purposes in contexts of civic interaction, may nevertheless prove to be misleading, if curbing power is in itself seen as a warrant for the generation of political legitimacy or as a criterion for distinguishing despotic rule from just rule. Accordingly, both the curbing of power and its replacement by “authority,” as grounds for accepting political rule as unquestionably rightful, rest on assumptions that are totally unfounded.6 But, if delimiting power and authority, or setting them apart, does not escape theoretical objections or fails to avert the risk of abuses associated with the might-is-right syndrome, what, liberal democrats may ask, is the alternative? Is it not precisely the possibility of the sway of ruthless coercive power, wielded by unchecked, absolutist regimes, that has induced fearful citizens, anxious to guard their rights and freedoms, to put forward the idea of checks and balances? And all the more so, because this idea calls for combining state-craft with state-legality, and thereby holds out the prospect of the Rechtsstaat, the rule of law. Such a prospect, moreover, enshrines the principle that lawfulness demands maximal emphasis on the quality of actions, rather than persons; that is, it calls for a form of conduct that is legally circumscribed and constitutionally sanctioned and, by virtue of its jurisdictional demarcation, capable of being subjected to politically intelligible ways of validation. Applied to political authority, the idea of checks and balances, for example, therefore specifically refers to the exercise of political power, whether or not it matches with legitimacy as such in terms of moral principles in some absolute or transcendent sense. Among contemporary political sociologists who most closely subscribed to this liberal-republican conception of authenticated political power, Ralf Dahrendorf is a leading representative. It is a school of 5 See Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), ch. 3. 6 See Carl J. Friedrich, “Authority, Reason and Discretion,” Nomos I (1958), 28–48.

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political thinking that, following John Locke, includes such names as Christian Thomasius, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, and John Rawls. Furthermore, Dahrendorf, like Weber, combines this validating conception of political power with a hierarchical structure in its operation, but insists with him on the importance of the source of its valid exercise. For both, therefore, political power radically diverges from economic power and all the more so in that, within the political realm, there is the possibility of “participation in, and influence upon, the distribution of power.”7 At the same time, Dahrendorf, no less than Weber, acknowledges that the actualization of this possibility, in its particular procedural form, cannot be abstracted from prevalent historical modes of political thinking and preferred political practice. And such modes of thinking and acting both presume to parallel principal assumptions about human nature and its dominant propensities or attitudes as regards basic sociability. According to this line of argument, writers from Hobbes to Lewis Coser, for example, stressing conflict as characterizing human relations, are likely to focus on dissensus as marking the grain of political life, whereas those essentially accepting Locke’s thesis that humans are not combative by nature will opt for a minimum of coercive centrality in the forging of political institutions. Yet while such general assumptions may carry some practical weight, the contrast, surely, must not be overdrawn. Rousseau, for instance, while in agreement with Locke’s thesis about human nature, was acutely conscious of clashing interests within civil society. Hence we find him, like other political thinkers, torn between radically divergent interpretations – two dissonant versions of the “general will.” One recognizably discursive, the other non-discursively “transcendent”; one follows debate, the other precedes, or preempts debate.8 Although both versions invoke the common good as their source, as well as the supreme validating sanction of authoritative power, the “transcendent” variant presents it in a mode that could harbour the worst kind of despotism – as Kant, and Tocqueville after him, argued.9

7 Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921, 1958), 397. 8 See on this point my Reason and Self-Enactment, 171–2, which critically discusses Rousseau, Social Contract, bk iv, ch. 1. 9 Immanuel Kant, Theory of Right (1797), in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), ch. 7.

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Ultimately, it seems that what pre-eminently matters is not so much a question of underlying assumptions about basic human attitudes to sociability, as of a thinker’s particular image of strictly political requirements, especially with regard to preserving a union of citizens, once it has been formed. And, in this regard, the nub of the problem appears to be not principally the interrelation of power and authority, any more than psychological theories about human nature. What seems to count most, when the chips are down, is what we make of authority itself. This recognition looms most prominently if and when political preferences point in the direction of maximally acknowledging the existence of plural ends in and through multiple bridging and unrestrained public debate. For it is then, within such a context of manifold interests, opinions, and expressions of taste, that diverse choices not only exist but also, and not infrequently, violently clash. Plato, no doubt sensing in this situation the “shifting sands” of authority (to borrow Tocqueville’s phrase), urgently advanced a radically different scheme, a scheme in which, according to Hannah Arendt’s account, Plato transferred the ethos of authority governing the private sphere of the household into the public domain. Hence, instead of having people acting in the plural, as equal citizens, Plato, she charges, had to promote the monistic notion of philosopher-kings, for it alone could project a true image of authority in terms of master-minding.10 When, then, is the alternative? Can one replace an all-encompassing political authority by an array of plural authorities? Or does a pluralist conception of politics inexorably demand the abandonment of a terminology involving the hierarchical and monistic structure of “authority” as a concept that has less to do with founding or authoring than with controlling, commanding, and mastering? I am not sure whether there are unequivocal answers to these fundamental questions, but in view of the widely professed faith in pluralism as the “authoritative” basis of mainstream democracy, the next section explores components of this faith, however cursorily.

games, paths, and blind alleys Not even the most enthusiastic proponents of liberal democracy are prepared to claim that it has succeeded in settling the issues contained 10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 197–203.

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in these questions, however eagerly promotional they are in coming to its defence. At the same time many, and I believe not unjustifiably, uphold with a fair degree of assurance the belief that whatever success mainstream democracies have had in meshing societal order with political freedom is attributable to having been able to combine the exercise of governmental authority with the conditionality of its reaffirmation at regular intervals by those subject to it. Although there is no causally necessary connection between doctrinal liberalism, political pluralism, and the idea of conditional authority, the historical roots of this idea appear to be firmly planted in the liberal soil of the European Enlightenment, from Locke and Thomasius to Adam Ferguson and J.S. Mill. It is a strain of thinking at once doggedly critical and doggedly tolerant; one that, perhaps oddly, fuses acceptance with challenge, and the toleration of differences with their celebration, by not only refusing to obliterate them but also by resisting their relegation to a position of merely marginal importance. To some, however, the celebration of diversity has gone too far; so much so that they refer to it as adversary democracy. And while this does seem a distortion of diversitarian liberalism, insofar as contestation is not doctrinally built into it, the resolve to accept dissensus has undeniably helped the institutionalization of opposition as though it were an essential attribute of liberal democracy. Yet, whether or not the emphasis on diversity, if not on contestability for its own sake, has gone too far as a way of coping with differences, the motivating source seems to have been the same; to wit, the feeling that it pays to avoid militant confrontation, by accepting divergences, whether they arise from actual diversity or merely from the individuality of different persons. The notion that it pays to avoid open warfare rather tellingly suggests that taking this path for the most part rests on prudential considerations such as not wanting to harm others, rather than on any a priori principle such as that of diversity. Just as practical considerations of this sort, derived from experience, inform people waiting for a bus to form an orderly line, simply to escape the hassle of pushing, shoving, or fighting, so they inform citizens to come to terms with competing wants, views, and interests, in order to live with others without harming them or being harmed by them. Many liberals profess to follow precisely this practical wisdom of reciprocity, and one of them, Immanuel Kant, made it the fulcrum of his theory of justice and the basis for his liberal republicanism.11 One might go one step further and contend that he 11 Kant, Theory of Right, ibid., 134–5.

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thereby, albeit wholly unwittingly, laid the philosophical foundations of a democratic liberalism. I say “unwittingly” because Kant is known to have thought the combination of liberalism with democracy a logical monstrosity. At the same time, though, he emphatically insisted that a rightful politics demands a legal system able to combat the anarchic propensities of freedom which, without legal boundaries, are apt to negate freedom.12 And for many, therefore, who contra Kant, nevertheless seek to combine democratic concerns with their liberal vision, it is precisely the fear that freedom may be abused that prompts them to argue with Kant in support of setting boundaries to freedom to prevent it from negating its enjoyment on the part of others. Putting it slightly differently, freedom, in involving a form of power, must be viewed, like political power, as something that, in society, must be governed by set rules. In the language of political sociology, each should be considered as the variant of a game that, without rules, ceases to be a game. And, undeniably, as an analogue, the idea of a game is persuasively plausible but, like most analogues, it can entrap (or corrupt) the unwary. Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, who was as much a sociologist as a political economist and, like Tocqueville, keenly aware that compromise typified democracy – especially in America – was equally sensitive to the traps that the notion of a game may entail in terms of wheeling and dealing. For he observed that some issues defy compromise, since the stakes may be too high. Treating such issues as mere ploys of a game, by striking deals, could therefore, he felt, “maim and degrade” the very substance of the political attachment that “democracy” generally evokes for its supporters.13 The implications of Schumpeter’s comments are of particular relevance to the central theme of this section, by alerting us to the dangers of using the “game” analogue and, thereby, to a pitfall of pluralist democracy. For they disclose that not all issues are reconcilable, or even capable of coexisting, just as “authority” as a traditional concept cannot easily coexist with the modern idea of conditional authority. Opposites, 12 Kant, Perpetual Peace, ibid., 121; see also Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice (1797) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 112–13. Precisely because of their servility and egoism, Kant writes, some, if not most, act like animals, and hence need a master who sees to it that they do not except themselves from the laws. See his Universal History, Works, viii, 22–3. (Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings, 46–7). 13 See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, third edition, 1950), 251.

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moreover, may not only resist compromise; they may also render the applicability of set general rules questionable. Evidently, unlike games, as contests, which can be neatly encompassed normally within a body of regulations, political moves toward solutions often grope in the dark, with few or no rules or maxims to guide them. Politics, it seems, is too knotty a phenomenon, and too grave in its consequences, to be taken, even metaphorically, for a game. The intrusion of exceptions, limits, and imponderables makes for a complexity that no general rules manage to encompass. Instead, highly special “rules” may be called for, in the form of particular modalities that, far from creating perfect solutions, are at best able to provide for institutionally guarded spaces, in which contending voices can agree to differ. What matters most, therefore, is not the availability of general rules, but the existence of appropriate political judgment, principally to determine what can or cannot be done and, more significantly still, how far governments can or should get involved in issues on which people fiercely disagree, not least because involvement may mean spiralling administrative costs. Forging agreements entails ensuring their observance, and this demands not only mediators, but also controllers and enforcers – additional public servants, court officials, policemen, correctional services, and so on. In turn, augmenting bureaucracies and security agencies means higher taxes, which politicians are loath to impose and citizens are loath to shoulder. Hard choices, in short, cannot be escaped, if deadlocks are to be averted. And, as I indicated, what makes choices so hard, and politics so complex a game, is that given options are not simply good and others evil (although politicians like to reduce problems to this level), but rather that several may be good and worthy of pursuit. Few, among contemporary liberals, have reminded us more forcefully of this not infrequent predicament than Isaiah Berlin.14 Democratic liberals, radicals or moderates, seem to be racked most profoundly by the painful burden of conflicting values and loyalties. To let people smoke, for example, where and when they like, is surely more in keeping with liberal gut-feelings than establishing, and enforcing, smoke-free public places. Similarly, the freedom, if not the God-given right, to bear arms, entrenched even in some countries’ constitutions and an article of faith in their public philosophy, does not sit well with 14 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118.

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demands for gun-control, however cogently it may be defended by others equally invoking principles of right and freedom to life and security. And both radical and moderate liberals, although not exclusively either, resent any added controls in view of the costs and the amount of red tape they involve, as we noted earlier, regardless of how strongly they are motivated by intrinsic principles. But then, motives, reasons, and principles are not infrequently mixed on such public issues – adding to the complexity of choosing between competing ends. And, to make matters worse still, people are often confused, if not downright dishonest. Contemporary political psychologists and sociologists merely confirm what Rousseau never tired of observing, namely, that acting in public or within a multitude, humans tend to be differently motivated from when they act as individuals in private. Moreover, the reasons they give in either situation, he added, are as often used to conceal their real motives as to reveal them. And what is true of ordinary folks is no less true of governments, since, whenever it suits them, they make entirely spurious claims, giving reasons that in truth are mere pretexts, designed at times to disguise the vilest abominations. And the fact that in modern society reasons are generally expected and demanded only helps to encourage their fabrication; all the more so because, Rousseau informs us, modern folk feed on make-believe, and incessantly indulge in wishful thinking and flights of self-deception, not knowing therefore, what the truth really is or when they really speak it. Indeed, self-deception is even more worrisome than fraud or trickery, in that people frequently sincerely believe that they promote the public good, when in reality it is their private interest that causes them to act the way they do.15 A strikingly telling example of mixed motives is given by Joseph Schumpeter. Americans, he says, express the wish to serve humanity (or freedom, or democracy, or the market economy) at large. Irreducible differences arise, however, as well as conflicting understandings, as soon as specific political choices are debated. Some, then, want their country to be the world’s policeman and outdo every other country in its armaments, while others think humanity is best served if Americans work out their own problems.16 The point at issue here is not the absence of agreement about the overall motivation or the overall objective. Rather, 15 Rousseau, Geneva Manuscript, in R.D. Masters, ed., On the Social Contract (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), 161. 16 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 251.

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the example Schumpeter gives demonstrates that even if there is broad consensus in general terms, fierce dissensus surfaces as soon as general objectives are translated into concrete policy ends. For it is then that people have difficulty in divorcing pragmatic options of workability, voting fallout, and economic implications (including taxation levels) from normative motivations and principles. Down to earth as he remarkably was when thinking about politics, Kant warned against the snares of applying “pure reason” to drawing up constitutional proposals, and hence, against “political moralists,” lest their illusory projects harvest massive disenchantment. Instead, he advanced a political constructivism that few have interpreted more faithfully as the essence of democratic liberalism in our days than John Rawls. Beyond his guarded hope that such gradual steps may eventually engender an ethos of lawfulness, and, thereby, the augmentation of mutual restraint within and between states, Kant found the task of political consummation too complex or intractable, and too vastly demanding for humans, such as they are, to expect much more.17 Hence, as things are, aside from general rules, scant and narrow paths, or genuine advances in this or that direction, there are plenty of blind alleys, few real or lasting solutions, and no dearth of stalemates. And I doubt that contemporary political sociologists or theorists would find much wrong with Kant’s overall verdict.

the tightrope of political power If there are echoes of Plato in Kant’s skepticism about political breakthroughs, its source is closer to Rousseau since, like him, he saw it chiefly in the work of human self-deception. Professional politicians, perfectly aware of this tendency in the public domain, therefore tell people mainly what they know they want to hear and believe. But, then, there are also those, from Socrates and the Hebrew prophets to Rousseau, Kant, and beyond, who thought they had a duty to uncover unvarnished truth and reality, come what may, viewing themselves as the conscience of humanity, defying others, like Voltaire or Pufendorf, to whom discretion was the better part of valour. Among political sociologists, likewise, there have been those profoundly concerned with discovering unvarnished reality, the undergrowth, so to speak, beneath the veneer of political institutions and the 17 Kant, The Contest of Faculties (Reiss, ibid., 188.)

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facade of political rhetoric, as well as others who sought to transcend discovered reality by changing it. Some put emphasis on reforming particular conditions by legal-constitutional means, while others opted for more general changes by revolutionary means. But whether they were reformers or revolutionaries, halfhearted or sanguine, in changing things, few failed to discover, sooner or later, what Kant had so clearly articulated; to wit, that total cures cannot be had. For, as with most medications, there are side-effects, creating new, and often equally serious problems of their own. In short, it is like walking on a tightrope; especially in politics, where curative attempts can rarely, if ever, dispense with coercive measures – embarrassing and painful though this recognition must be to many well-meaning individuals and institutions bent on changing the world by wholly peaceful methods. To pursue the “game” metaphor a little further in this connection may seem appropriate, despite its shortcomings in other directions. For, in politics, as in a game, there must be penalties to ensure that rules are observed; and just as in a game, the observance of rules depends not only on the players (or citizens) themselves but also on the prowess of umpires (or courts and judges) who interpret the rules (or laws). For players, like citizens, although in principle they recognize the need for rules and standards of conduct, in practice not seldom try their best to get around them, or act as though any particular rules apply only to others and their conduct, not their own.18 Usually, in constitutional regimes, as in a rule-governed game, we consider rules to be fair and reasonable, if not “rational,” when we believe them to be impartial; that is, valid for everybody without exception. For only then do they recognizably disclose an inner consistency, together with the force of general external applicability. And, while citizens, like players in a game, may regard even the most rational rules as an unwelcome yoke, they are rarely totally unaware of the perils of the alternative, that is, of sheer arbitrariness and lawlessness, under which rights are based solely on the power of the strongest or most ruthless. Even the least reflective of humans of all ages and all cultures, and whether they like it or not, eventually realize that politics, like a game, ceases to be viable once it dispenses with standards and norms backed by enforceable laws. For it is these standards and norms that, like girders of a bridge, provide the structural abutment of equity and reciprocal

18 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 12.

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conduct. Without them, legality is purely nominal, being bereft of what gives lawfulness its life and sustenance. Similarly, legalized violence, in the service of however noble a cause, amounts to the negation of lawfulness, once legality is devoid of its intelligibly definitional characteristic of general reciprocity. Even the loftiest ideal thereby runs the risk of being swamped by the means chosen for its realization. Intensely conscious of such a risk, Max Weber urged political leaders to be mindful of weighing their ethic of faith against their ethic of responsibility. For some of them, however, such appeals fell on deaf ears, for they failed to meet their vision of statehood, which involved the expression of far deeper human strivings than the mere attainment of general reciprocity. Especially the rise of political romanticism, together with strands of nationalism, has brought with it an emotion- charged mentality, in sharp contrast to the despised liberal idea of the minimal state. Rooted in aesthetic, religious, or ethnic attachments, and their symbols and icons, statehood assumed for them an almost spiritual meaning. With its elevation of nostalgic imagery and devotional-psychic intensity, political romanticism in effect added a quasi-transcendent dimension that, by its sheer sublimity, was intended to surpass humdrum concerns with order, welfare, or security. Increasingly, therefore, the chasm between state and society seemed unintelligible, artificial, unreal, and unnecessary; a baneful distinction that threatened to smother the inner life of the nation. Conjoined with variants of nationalism, it sought to replace, accordingly, as a counter-model to liberalism, the image of a state-machine by that of a state-organism. Thus bringing together state and society – foreshadowing somewhat post-modern communitarianism – it was to resolve the inner tensions of political liberalism, and at once ennoble civic belonging. At the same time, these “communitarian” sentiments should not be confused with modern totalitarianism. While political romanticism – evidently dismissing the coercive dimension of political power – fundamentally diverges from the liberal tradition, two features in particular ought to set it apart from dominant tendencies of totalitarianism. One is the revival of traditional authority, as something intrinsically hallowed, which, although intimately linked with (reactionary)conservatism – mostly as a result of the disenchantment with the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath – was not monolithic, in that it favoured a hierarchy of plural-intermediary authorities, and fiercely opposed revolutionary thinking of any kind. The other feature, especially in its nationalist variant, although it likewise emphasized cultural-

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historical foundations, organicism and, occasionally, religious-ethnic attachments, disclosed unmistakably populist, if not democratic, overtones. And, while in both the boundary between society and statehood was variously blurred, it was not, as in totalitarianism, altogether obliterated. All the same, what is of greatest interest and relevance to our purpose is, as I indicated earlier, the assumption that somehow the coercive properties of political power are sublimated, if not wholly eradicated, once state machines are replaced by state organisms. Why? Because within the latter, individuals, contra traditional liberalism, are fully embedded in a contextual matrix that protects and sustains them, making them feel that they belong and, thereby, that they are truly free and truly themselves. Therefore, as long as the Jews are fragmented, Rousseau maintained, deprived of a patrie of their own, in which they can genuinely be themselves, so long will they remain unable to escape the tyranny exercised against them.19 Echoing this emphasis on embedment as a vital source of human self-enactment, Herder affirmed that there can be no optimal creativity in the absence of a place that humans can view as theirs sui generis.20 As for the inner structuring of these counter-models to political liberalism, preferences oscillated between diffusion and concentration of governmental power. On the whole, thinkers in the Platonic tradition, such as Rousseau, favoured unity and expressed distaste for sectionalism of any kind. On the other hand, thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, such as Herder, favoured federal-pluralist approaches, and stressed the value of plural diversity. To be sure, neither vision fits neatly into the mould of subsequent monistic or pluralistic regimes; what, on the other hand, has lost none of its importance is their shared conception of a participatory ethic; if anything, it has gained mounting relevance, so much so that contemporary sociologists speak of it as typifying the “world culture” of post-modernity.21 19 Rousseau, Emile, Allan Bloom, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 304. 20 Herder, Works, xiii, 383–4. The conviction that optimal human creativity demands a national matrix of embeddedness lies, I believe, at the core of Herder’s ideas on nationality. 21 When Harold Lasswell declared in the early 1930s that “political symbols and practices are so intimately intertwined with the larger array of symbols and practices in culture,” he remarkably echoed Herder’s ideas of a “world-culture,” which he nevertheless combined with an unmistakable warning against what is now generally known as “global modernization.” For a more detailed discussion, see my Herder on

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But, participatory or elitist, pluralist or monist in their overall approach, political sociologists continue to be haunted by the spectre of the state-society nexus as the most critical issue defining the texture of a political fabric. Indeed, in a real sense it is the major concern that has prompted the coming into being of what has become known as political sociology. Karl Marx, arguably the most familiar name associated with the distinction between a society’s allegedly spurious superstructure and its real infrastructure, may be looked upon as among its earliest originators. He was undoubtedly one of the first to urge social scientists to go beyond formal appearances, outward symbols, and professed legal-constitutional frameworks. Liberal institutions, he charged, were merely designed to mask social and economic realities and massive exploitation. Vested interests, artfully using the dignity of the state, with its ambience of lawfulness, as a facade, did so merely to entrench their privileged position. Echoing Rousseau, he accused them of presenting themselves as embodying the common interest, only to pull wool over people’s eyes. And, countering romanticism, Marx attacked the apotheosis of rural life as a device for preserving and promoting feudal servility, autocratic rule, and the “idiocy of the countryside.” Intriguing as an anti-romantic thesis, Marx’s attack is also of interest in its political-sociological thrust. For Marx contrasted this portrayal of rural life with the progressivism of industrial and urban development. Yet, while possibly effective as a “mobilizing” doctrine, his thesis is rather debatable as a general causal projection of economic-political interactions. Just as the growth of industrial trade unions failed to prefigure the predicted demise of capitalism and the middle class but, if anything, helped to give birth to a new and invigorated version of both, so “progressivism” has not universally coincided with urban and industrial development. Did not a highly developed industrial society turn (under the Nazi regime) into a political-social order of the most autocratic kind, whereas a predominantly agricultural state, such as Canada, promoted liberal-democratic governments, with its prairie provinces spawning progressive farmer movements and populist-socialist parties? Perhaps, such is the fate of predictive Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), ch. 6, entitled “The Dynamics of Social Cultures and ‘Globalization.’” On the respective roles of social cultures and political institutions in these dynamics, see Adam Przeworski, “Institutions Matter?”, Government and Opposition (39), 2004, 527–40.

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determinisms that, while possibly opportune in the short run, have been known to backfire as long-term prognoses. Evidently, not all prophecies are self-fulfilling. Truism or not, it bears reiterating that, whatever “mobilizing” power predictive determinisms are said to have, political and economic shifts of development tend to follow a momentum very much of their own. Not infrequently, therefore, if history is anything to go by, they have a way of ignoring doctrinal prognoses, however self-assuredly they are made.

power and authority: concluding thoughts Theodor Mommsen may have most accurately (as well as most elegantly) defined the meaning of “authority” as that of more than counsel and less than command, within the Roman legal setting, as well as correctly portrayed its institutional separation from “power,” but I doubt that abstracting coercive power from governmental authority – even purely analytically – materially helps toward an understanding of modern political rule. By the same token, Edmund Burke’s idea of rendering political power more gentle, by means of shared beliefs and venerated traditions, or nationalism’s infusion of cultural-ethnic elements into politics, no longer strikes the same emotional chord. On the other hand, Max Weber’s opposition of Herrschaft and Autorität, and his celebrated juxtaposition of an ethic of faith (Gesinnung) and an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortung) still speak to current realities in their emphasis on the scope and limits of political power. Admittedly, to pair authority with legitimacy in some absolute sense may not, as we have noted, result in the most fortunate of marriages in politics, insofar as it can lead to the kind of confusion to which Carl J. Friedrich (among others) has drawn attention. But, then, this is only one of several recurrent ambiguities in political discourse – of which not all are entirely accidental. “Authority,” after all, like other political concepts, inhabits a domain typified by opinion rather than knowledge; and not least so because unequivocally valid truths are hard to come by and even harder to fully substantiate. Also, many inhabiting this domain are rarely certain about what they want most or consider to matter most. Thus, demands for more equal and more active participation not infrequently clash with demands for strong leadership, efficient administration, and boldly decisive action, as opposed to drawn-out consultations and public debate. As I sadly observe in chapter 7 (on democracy),

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obtaining conditions that ensure an all-encompassing form of discursive democracy may prove a tall order indeed. Resting as it often does on highly fragmented, and also conflicting, bases of power, democratic politics, notably in its pluralist expression, calls therefore for skills that, for the most part, cannot easily be learned, if they can be learned at all. It is not only more or better information that is required – important though it undoubtedly is – since, as we have noted, most of it is not principally a matter of mastering the rules of the game or of following the instructions of a manual, but rather that of acquiring skills of political judgment. Besides, if not even more taxingly, there is the difficulty of combining the quantitative idea of the “rule of the many” with the qualitative idea of practical assiduity, of “knowing how,” one being postulated as the required genesis of democracy, while the other is (more or less glumly) acknowledged as the preserve of the few, but no less essential, as the means of its effective and authoritative exercise. Not altogether surprisingly, this problematic combination hardly warrants the expectation of finding simple and readily popular answers to the multiple, and often discrepant, issues that face democratic governances. Neither this chapter nor the next two chapters, therefore, are likely to provide such answers. The most that can reasonably be attempted is to go beyond prescriptive scripts and raise questions about the players’ capacity and willingness to follow them, in the hope of uncovering ways to enable them to cope with evident weaknesses and shortcomings, so as to prevent these from marginalizing or altogether bypassing the concerns of those who for one reason or another fail to make their voices effectively heard. Otherwise, chances are that whatever faith in mutuality democracy potentially has to offer could be fatally undermined, and whatever legitimating claims it seeks to stake fatally dwarfed. No doubt, such claims may go on proving useful as catchy slogans for both internal electioneering and external crusading, but scarcely for anything beyond.

6

Electoral Choices: Parties and Governments and Governments

the (hegelian) distinction between civil society and the state – a distinction that has assumed prominence in political sociology, especially since Marx’s use of it – can be of help, I believe, in underlining the difference between segmental pressure groups and nationally organized political parties. For, as a rule, pressure groups look upon themselves as representative organizations serving segmental goals and interests, while political parties commonly view themselves as pursuing a society’s general or national objectives. Also, whereas pressure groups aim chiefly at exercising influence upon governments, political parties seek to become governments themselves, in order to have major control over the state apparatus as a whole. And although claims to transcend particularist concerns cannot always be taken at face value, this chapter focuses on political parties as distinct entities rather than as branch-plants of interest groups. Interest groups will receive separate treatment in chapter 8, notably as regards their propensities to serve as forms of political mediation.

defining characteristics Despite rarely being entirely homogeneous, political parties usually possess a degree of overall purposive continuity, at any rate during their formative stages, that comprises a broader range of implementational targets than single-issue pressure groups. Also, historically, parties have received reflective attention long before the study of pressure groups was even thought of.1 Apart from its older vintage as a political phenom1 David Hume’s Political Essays, Charles W. Hendel, ed. (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1953) are an outstanding example, especially his essays “Of Parties in General,” and “Of the Parties in Great Britain.”

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enon and a subject of intellectual interest, at least three distinct characteristics warrant our treating political parties as a conceptual category of their own. The most obvious feature, etymologically speaking, is that a political party embraces only a part of the citizenry, politically organized, a societal fraction, a pars pro toto, as Robert Michels put it.2 At the same time, membership is generally open to all citizens, regardless of occupational or educational background, religious persuasion, colour, race, or any other qualifying condition or prerequisite. There are, it is true, exceptions to this general rule, as in the case of parties representing religious, ethnic, economic, or regional groups; but, strictly, such parties must be viewed as second-order political parties, for they are only quasi-political, in that they usually fail to give expression to goals capable of serving the aims of all members of a given state. As such, therefore, they are more like interest groups than political parties proper. Second, political parties, as distinct from interest groups, are virtually the sole medium by means of which individuals can directly participate in political activity and also gain access to positions of political office. They therefore involve what Max Weber described as a “dual teleology,” by offering objective aims in addition to personal opportunities.3 Third, since, as we noted, parties not only seek to exert influence on governments but themselves aspire to assume governmental control, they, unlike interest groups, form an integral part of the political system. Weber, as much as Michels, regards the striving for power as every party’s general orientation.4 Functionally, therefore, parties are in principle designed to be organized on a permanent basis. And, insofar as they are open to anyone eager to join them, they can be expected to pursue causes and programs that are of potential relevance to all citizens. But, even if this should not hold good, parties still are radically different from most pressure groups in that they seek direct participation in the political process through formally institutional channels. Nonetheless, parties may turn out to be virtually indistinguishable from pressure groups, not so much because they are too particularistic

2 Robert Michels, “Some Reflections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties,” The American Political Science Review, 21 (1927), 753. 3 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1925), 167, 639, cited in Michels, “Some Reflections, “American Political Science Review, 21 (1927), 753. 4 Ibid.

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in their goals, but because they do not seem likely to achieve governmental power within the foreseeable future. In that event, they represent, by virtue of their limited electoral appeal, quasi-permanent minority organs. Consequently, to have any chance of taking part in governmental policies, they have to enter into coalition with other parties. This, however, does not alter the fact that parties form the principal, if not the only, channel for recognizably political participation. And, in view of it, we found Weber maintaining that parties serve not only causes but also persons. Accordingly, to take part in political activity no less than to attain access to political power, people must either found parties or establish their niche in existing parties. Thus, whatever their individual motive (or motives), be they power seekers, greedy for self-aggrandizement, or selfless strivers for the public good – as they envisage it – they have little hope of success outside the political party. Just as clothes maketh man, parties maketh politicians.

typology of political parties Perhaps the main difference between the Marxist and the non-Marxist conception of political parties lies in the Marxist correlating party membership with class membership, and the non-Marxist denying that such identification is a valid description of mainstream political party systems.5 Commonly, the non-Marxist regards parties as political organizations that provide the voter with a choice in the election of a government. Hence, parties are seen as either in government or as opposing government; they are the “ins” or the “outs.” The very possibility that the “ins” have to reckon with being replaced with the “outs” constitutes for citizens living under these conditions a significant fact of political life. And, essentially, this is so because they look upon the “outs” as an institutional safeguard against the arbitrary use of governmental power. At the same time, many view the outs not merely as a curb on overweening governmental designs, but also as a device for responding to governmental inaction, persistent negligence, or complacency;

5 At any rate, in Western democracies, there is no simple or complete alignment of social class and political self-identification; as a rule, a substantial minority of the working class votes Conservative, notably in Britain, while a smaller, but politically significant, minority of the middle class votes Labour. For more details, see Mark Abrams, “Opinion Polls and Political Parties,” Public Opinion Quarterly 27 (1963), 9–18.

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that is, as a method of ensuring that the confidence of the electorate is not flagrantly abused. If parties are functionally considered principally in this fashion, it is not surprising that most commentators do not rate doctrines all that highly or, for that matter, attach great importance to whatever policy objectives are claimed to differentiate party a from party b or party c. All that seems to count, in the main, is that parties a, b, c, with their different leadership, exist, and that their chances of gaining government control are left open to the decision of the electorate.6 Clearly, this is in stark contrast to so-called one-party systems, since, in those known so far, attempts to oppose the governmental party are liable to be branded as treasonable; citizenship being then generally equated with party support or at least with passive acquiescence to the ruling party. Sigmund Neumann, often regarded as one of the leading party sociologists of our times, has elaborated Weberian warnings against the dangers to democracy in such one-party integrative systems.7 His typology of political parties distinguishes between three types: the liberal representative party system; the democratic party system of integration (also referred to as “mass-party” system); and the absolutist or totalitarian system of integration. Under the first system, the sole function of parties is to provide a choice of candidates at general elections, thus their main actions consist of canvassing electors. Little attention is paid to continuous party organization and party membership or to carefully articulating a party program during the period between elections. Active party workers are not expected to be professional party functionaries; instead they are portrayed as amateurs, attracted to party activity on a purely voluntary basis. The liberal party system is therefore akin in its style of operation to an intermittent and loosely controlled association or to an informal political club. By contrast, under the second type of party system – the earliest examples of which were the European working class parties – permanent party organizations were the rule, although their activities were originally carried out for the most part outside the existing legislative bodies, because they rested on the membership of those who, not having the 6 Admittedly, the extent to which the electorate is an effective democratic corrective varies with a number of conditions, especially those bound up with the way in which parties themselves are organized, a point to which I return. 7 Sigmund Neumann, Modern Political Parties, Approaches to Comparative Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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right to vote (not being enfranchised) had no direct access to parliamentary-political activity. Their prime interest was accordingly not in elections but rather in nurturing an ongoing organizational nucleus, capable of supplying experienced party functionaries if and when the disenfranchised “masses” would be given the right to vote. Major emphasis was therefore on instruction, on propagating party aims at diverse levels of work-situations within different areas. The largely politically inarticulate were intended to acquire thereby a sense of common purpose and a disciplined will to act in concert. To accomplish this task, it was felt necessary to create an oligarchic, hierarchically structured organization – the sort of thing Michels found – that covered the whole country, from the central national leadership down to the party functionaries at regional and local levels. The move from a mass party system of this kind to a totalitarian mass party involves a change that is a great deal more than simply a shift of emphasis. For whereas under a mass party system an oligarchic-elitist organization is regarded as a necessary evil and merely as a means toward gaining access to the democratic (parliamentary) process, it is hallowed under the totalitarian mass party system as a worthy end in itself. In other words, the hierarchical-oligarchic element in the organizational structure is formally institutionalized as well as legitimized on a permanent basis. Democratic parliamentary procedures are spurned and have to give way to variants of military command systems, with little squeamishness about coercively legalized brutality. And there is no longer any suggestion of providing an alternative; rather it is the unquestioned institution of the alternative; not merely a solution to the problem of effecting governmental continuity along with party-political change, but the solution. This typology, it is true, is more useful as an analytical tool for sociological approaches to European political parties than for application to their American counterparts. While the American party system is comparable in significant features to the British party system up to the end of the nineteenth century, American parties were always run by party bosses on the lines of commercial business undertakings. Evidently, within an essentially laissez-faire political and economic context, party interests were held to be closely intertwined with the private economic interests of a party’s chief supporters. Only with the emergence of a broader franchise and stronger federal or national governmental power did American parties attempt to adopt more “national” postures. But, for the most part, even now American parties reveal a remarkable

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lack of homogeneity in outlook on national issues or on matters of political principle while, on the other hand, they display a remarkable degree of overlap between the two traditional parties. Another interesting typology is that advanced by the French political sociologist Maurice Duverger, although he leans heavily on the works of Moisey Ostrogorski and Robert Michels.8 Duverger maintains that parties are not necessarily or chiefly doctrinal bodies – “organized opinion,” as Disraeli put it. This helps to account for the possibly startling fact that parties bearing the same label and professing the same doctrine react at times entirely differently to the same political issues. Duverger, by means of a comparative analysis, brings out the variations in party organization instead: the social composition of party memberships; and the degree of correspondence between the kinds of aims a party articulates and the interests it claims to serve. Also, rather strikingly, he does not take the British party system to be the normal party system in the light of which multi-party systems (such as the French) or non-doctrinal parties (such as those on the American continent) ought to be assessed. In other words, the French and the American party systems are not to be seen as anomalies simply because the British party system had the longest continuous history. Besides, contemporary party systems, almost anywhere – including Britain – are twentieth-century creations, that is, mechanisms designed to bring the new mass voters into the political forum. In short, Duverger attempts to bring into the discussion a markedly dynamic element by stressing that modern political parties have had no historical parallel. Similarly to Neumann, Duverger distinguishes between interior and exterior parties, in contrasting the older “parliamentary parties” with the more recent developments in party organization.9 The older parties have been primarily bound up with the workings of parliamentary politics, whose chief purpose was to get a functioning governmental system going by evolving majority parties. Outside parliament political parties had significance only at election time. To the new parties, as we have noted, party life outside parliament was vital, however, since they represented the recently enfranchised population of a country. Indeed, par8 Moisey Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (London: Macmillan, 1902); Robert Michels, Political Parties (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1915), Dover reprint (New York: Dover Publications, 1959); Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (London: Methuen, 1954), rev. ed. 1964. 9 Duverger, Political Parties, 63–7.

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liamentary politics was only one of their ongoing objectives. Even when they became integrated within the parliamentary system, their non-parliamentary section still regarded itself to be of equal, if not superior, standing and fully entitled to instruct and control the parliamentary members, to act, so to speak, as their permanent watchdog. Parliamentary members were not to neglect in the give and take atmosphere of parliamentary dealings the interests and guiding principles of the party. As a result, the parliamentary party was no longer thought of as the core or directive of a party’s policies. In France or Germany, for example, parliamentary party deputies were at times denied a free hand – more or less effectively, as it turned out. In Britain, too, clashes in party conferences between parliamentary and non-parliamentary party members were not unknown, especially in the case of the Labour Party. All the same, here as elsewhere, the party militants, although they often succeeded in electing their favourites to the party executive, could not thereby ensure their dominance over the parliamentary section of the party. As to the general nature and status of ordinary party members in the contemporary world, it would appear that party members are usually those who vote for the party ticket, and that the effective party policy is essentially the work of a minority of active parliamentary members. Quite frequently, though, membership of a party means a good deal more than that. For one thing, a member pays subscriptions and thus contributes to the financing of a party’s activities, even if, with the rising costs of party advertising, financial resources are required that far exceed the revenue from subscriptions, by virtue of which a party’s financial base fails to coincide with party membership.10 For another thing, joining a party voluntarily implies a measure of individual commitment that, in turn, carries with it a degree of disciplined submission to the duties party membership calls for. Such an individual commitment forms a crucial element in the ethos of a party’s continued existence. An extreme example is membership of a Communist party, where a member has to toe the line or leave the party.11 10 See Mark Abrams, “Opinion Polls and Party Propaganda,” Public Opinion Quarterly 28 (1964), 17–18. 11 There have, however, been increasing divergences from this pattern, especially in countries with strong communist parties that no longer wholly succumbed to Soviet-style communism. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy: Reflections on “Opening-Up” Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Undoubtedly, there are divergently strict understandings of party membership. What, however, is empirically beyond any doubt is that the extent of personal commitment demanded of a party member rises in proportion to a party’s doctrinal extremism. By “extremism” I mean here the sense of urgency with which radical changes are pursued, notably by non-parliamentary or anti-parliamentary parties of the left or the right, and the intense ruthlessness it frequently tends to display. Almost invariably, it also entails the suppression of opposition or any form of dissent or deviation from the strategy laid down by the party leadership.12 Nonetheless, my interpretation of “extremism” in connection with political parties must not be construed to be synonymous with the emergence of despotic regimes, despite the “totalitarian” expression that often coincides with it in post-modern societies. Clearly, despotic regimes can exist, and have existed, in the absence of any political parties. But then, equally clearly, my concern here is not with causes of despotism but rather with the possible effect that extremist political parties have on their members’ understanding of individual commitment, and, in connection with this concern, the question of what conditions are most likely to give rise to party extremism. Seymour Martin Lipset has argued that extremist parties and movements are most likely to gain support from the “masses,” that is, the lower strata of society, rather than from the middle or upper classes. The liberal tradition, in his view, has always been confined to a minority, and should therefore be regarded as a somewhat elitist tradition.13 Characteristics Lipset associates with the lower strata include low education and little, if any, desire to participate in political activity or in any type of voluntary organization, as well as economic insecurity and authoritarian family patterns as contextual circumstances that contribute to extremist predispositions. Any or all of these factors tend under normal conditions, Lipset maintains, to breed apathy and withdrawal, but in times of crisis commonly lead to political extremism. Additionally, Gabriel Almond’s study of two hundred and twenty-one ex-Communists, cited Lipset, lists anti-intellectualism – a feature already noted by Marx and Engels among working-class supporters of socialism – as a prominent characteristic, which has induced members of Communist

12 S.M. Lipset, Political Man (London: Heinemann, 1960), chs 4 and 5. 13 Ibid., esp. 100.

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parties to prefer functionaries from working-class origins, especially once they have come to power.14 It is perhaps of interest to note that Lipset considers the division of extremist parties into right-wing and left-wing organizations as a misleading description of Fascists and Communists respectively. Just as we speak of right, centre, and left-wing orientations among democratic mainstream parties, so we should apply this three-fold division to extremist parties. Thus, we should think of Fascists as representing the extremism not of the right but of the centre. Fascist ideology, although anti-liberal in its glorification of the state, discloses for him significant similarities to Liberalism in its opposition to big business, trade unions, and socialist state intervention and, in its European variant, by sharing a marked distaste for religion and other forms of credal traditionalism. Likewise, Lipset maintains that the social characteristics of Nazi voters in pre-Hitler Germany and Austria resembled more closely those of most liberals than those of most conservatives. On the other hand, Lipset admits having difficulty in identifying Spanish or Peronist fascist movements, as he also concedes that there are extremist parties on the right that are more properly identifiable with conservatism, such as the Horthy party in Hungary, the Christian-Social party under Dollfuss in Austria, Salazar’s party in Portugal, and the pre-1958 Gaullist movement of Monarchists in France.15 Unlike the centre and left extremists, the right-wing extremists are said to have been conservative because of their anti-revolutionary stance, whereas Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany viewed themselves as revolutionary, by opposing both capitalism and socialism, notably big business and big unions, and by seeking to displace existing parties and forms of party leadership. Lipset may well be correct in questioning established usages by reclassifying extremist parties; but what seems to me of greater relevance to this discussion is that each type of party, extremist or not, views itself as a rival to any other party, so that, in an electoral contest, one confronts the other in an almost warlike manner, as if it were engaged in a latent or actual war. The grounds for such warlike conduct are more often than not shrouded in mist. Perhaps this is so because of ambiguities arising from overlaps of aims, principles, interests, party labels, and organizational structures. Anyhow, while it may be melodramatic to view 14 Ibid., 112. 15 Ibid., 136.

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contestation between political parties as analogous to a battlefield between warring armies, words like “mist” or “fog” do not seem unduly wild metaphors, since things are not infrequently far more confused than party theorists would have us believe. As Robert Michels has pointed out, “political parties tend to envelop themselves in a very thick terminological fog, and one of nearly even color.16 Certainly, almost identical purposes are at times avowed by opposing parties, so that the choice between them is not between goals as such, but between the advertising techniques used to present them. Also, party labels themselves are often so indistinguishable that they cannot but thicken the fog. Even if it is claimed that electronic and other forms of contemporary communication are vastly more capable of imparting information than was possible in earlier times, it is highly doubtful that improved means of communication have made political contestation any the less ambiguous or, for that matter, that they have managed to discourage party advertising from being deliberately opaque or enigmatic. Not rarely this situation is attributed to the alleged fact that most people, but particularly the undecided voters, are not interested in principles, ideas, or fundamental doctrines at both national and local levels. The next section, therefore, seeks to look more closely at the substance of this view, in particular the relative importance of organizational and advertising methods, as against conceptual or directional content, in attracting and preserving party memberships or, at the least, party supporters.

organization and principles “Parties from principle,” writes Hume in his essay “Of Parties in General” (1760), “especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon that has yet appeared in human affairs.”17 Duverger appears to have taken Hume’s observation as his guiding theme when assessing the role and importance of “party doctrines or ideals” in his own study on Political Parties.17a While he agrees that credal principles 16 Michels, “Some Reflections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties,” American Political Science Review, 763. 17 David Hume’s Political Essays, 81. 17a Duverger, Political Parties, Preface, xiv.

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form an essential part in the initial phase of a party’s existence as a means to bring together scattered individuals, he nevertheless insists that soon after organization comes to the fore, with doctrinal platforms becoming subordinate. Twentieth-century parties especially, he feels, are distinguishable far less by their programs – or indeed by the class of their members – than by the nature of their organization. Hence, it is the organizational anatomy of established parties, their particular structure, that matters most. Oddly enough, however, Duverger’s empirical illustrations do not for the most part support his central thesis. For, in their light, the historical setting of a society, its traditional habits of thought, patterns of political institutions, and ways of doing things seem at least as effectively important as the technicalities of organizational structure. In particular, the degree of interaction between these situational elements, highly elusive though it is, undoubtedly exerts a more continuous impact on the shaping of parties and their survival than Duverger seems to grant, although he does emphasize the tentative character of his generalizations. Moreover, he frequently is more anxious to challenge assumptions that have been tacitly accepted or left unanalyzed than to put forward strikingly original theories. This searching and critical approach to the study of political parties – notably his treatment of party membership – proves refreshingly stimulating and thought-provoking. Also, even though his overall conclusions do not go far beyond Michels’s or Neumann’s, they do strike a more hopeful note regarding the future of modern democracy.18 In his discussion of organizational issues, Duverger distinguishes between direct and indirect party structures; that is, between those based on individual membership and those based on the affiliation of collectivities, such as trade unions, cooperatives, or professional groups. As a classic example of indirect membership he points to the British Labour Party, in contrast to the German Social Democratic Party, which, before World War i, counted over one million individuals among its membership. In this connection, Duverger also touches on the selection of party leaders, the tendency toward oligarchy (or even autocracy), the relation between party leaders and parliamentary representatives, and the sources of conflict within certain forms of party organization.

18 Ibid., 422–7.

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As for party systems, Duverger sets apart one-party, two-party, and multi-party political regimes, and discusses the bearing of each on the formation of party alliances, the selection of candidates for electoral representation, and the type of party leadership called for. In each case he also examines the important question of whether parties follow, create, or direct political attitudes or public opinion in general. Throughout Duverger’s study it clearly emerges that parties everywhere originated under specific historical conditions, and that the doctrines and principles guiding them had to adjust to change just as much as, if not more than, they were able to bring about change themselves. Like Michels he was disappointed with the bureaucratic and oligarchic tendencies in ostensibly socialist and democratic parties; but like Michels, too, he had to face the fact that Liberals no less than Conservatives had to revise their ideological assumptions in the course of social and economic developments, if they wanted their parties to survive. Even in newer countries, such as Canada, books like that by George Grant (Lament of a Nation) are symptomatic of an outlook that cannot come to terms with the attitudinal changes that technological and financial advances have produced. But, Duverger, by contrast, dismayed though he was, followed Michels in accepting the inevitability of bureaucratic and oligarchic elements becoming integral components of every large-scale organization and that, as a result, full and equal participation by the rank and file cannot be regarded as a realistic requirement of party democracy. In other words, adjustments of principle cannot be escaped. Absolutes have to give way to degrees. For instance, the extent of power distribution within a party organization has to be judged by less stringent criteria of democracy than full and equal participation, if total disenchantment by its rank and file is to be eschewed. One such escape route is to devise methods whereby a measure of party feedback can be ascertained. If no such steps are taken, Duverger warns, if decisions taken at the top are meant to be automatically accepted by party members because the leadership is held to be infallible or, more likely, because the hazards of any challenge to it are too great or, again, because the rank and file has ceased caring, then democratic diffusion of decisionmaking is either purely formal (or “rhetorical”) or wholly non-existent. A crucial consideration here, as in most political contexts, is to achieve some sort of rapport at some stage on matters that members of a party, at a given time, believe to be of basic value on the scale of aspired preferences. Especially in view of political principles being rarely fixed

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and clear-cut axioms from which what is to be done in terms of practical objectives can be deduced and for which logical validity can be claimed for all situations, general principles worked out in practice can mean different things to different party members. What also enters into the picture in practice is the prevailing overall situation in which a party finds itself. Thus, where unity, decisiveness, and prompt action are of high priority, forceful leadership may be valued a good deal higher than fully representative or eminently responsive leadership. Similarly, a precariously struggling party, or one that favours authoritarian, monolithic leadership, will not be likely to tolerate challenge or undue controversy. Especially in the former situation, even members who take their principles and ideas seriously, and who under normal circumstances might strongly disagree, would nevertheless vote in accordance with whatever policy conditions demand to help the party attain power or, at the least, to hold together. An internally strong party, on the other hand, operating within a relatively stable set of circumstances can afford greater diversity, and its leadership may permit, or even encourage, dialogue, for it sees itself in a position to regard minimal bases of agreement between factions as functionally adequate. Past experience also helps to shape attitudes toward divergence and dissent. Hence, where it has led people to feel that discussion has resulted in endless bickering, deadlock, inaction, or even chaos, it could and did give rise to intolerance and a strong craving for consensus, either or both of which have contributed to granting a wide margin of discretion to party leaders. Regarding these diverse emphases on dialogue and consensus respectively, Duverger’s observations on party financing are certainly not without relevance, even though the relevance is perhaps indirect rather than direct. Thus, where parties insist on being membership organizations and independent of external sources of financing, they tend to succeed in engendering a degree of group loyalty among their members that frequently renders their ongoing support for party policy more forthcoming than where a party favours business or trade unions because it thus draws on substantial donations with fewer strings attached, thereby giving the party leadership in most cases a freer hand. I shall return to the leadership issue in the next section, and to the extent to which group loyalty may carry with it a greater proneness for identifying the party with its leadership to the point of thus personifying it. Here I principally want to draw attention to the effect of financing methods on aspects of party organization, notably a party’s concern with quality rather than quantity.

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Clearly, these aspects are not unrelated. An individual’s subscription is not only financially significant as a safeguard against a party losing its particular identity; it is also, as I have indicated, a certain warrant for the emergence of a closer-knit organization, which encourages both a sense of group loyalty and a disposition on the part of individual members to act in concert. There can be little doubt that the financial sacrifice a member makes is an index of his or her loyalty and support, and both may be more meaningful to some parties than the support given by non-committed and only loosely attached members in other types of parties or by non-member supporters at election time. Also, at some organizational phase, concern with quality will loom more prominently than at another. Lenin, for example, advanced the notion of a relatively small but highly disciplined party that could serve as an avant-garde. The Nazis also, at first, gave doctrinal expression to this conception of cadre-elitism, although after Hitler’s rise to power they were rather ambivalent about it, fearing that it could give undue influence to the revolutionary militants who wished to subordinate the state to the party. The Communists, while more consistent in upholding Lenin’s idea of a small but qualitatively superior party core, did not have to face, as the Nazis did, any elections before establishing control over the state apparatus; the Bolshevik revolution had done this for them already. Doctrinally, socialist (or social-democratic) parties also at first put prime emphasis on qualitative considerations and membership financing before they became fully integrated into the parliamentary system, at which point they started to be more interested in strong finances than in the enthusiasm of individual members or, at best, equally concerned with each. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party has sought close association with such supporting collective bodies as the trade unions and the cooperative movement. Something similar was true of the ccf in Saskatchewan, with respect to its alliance with the Wheat Pool, the Cooperatives, and the Credit Union. As noted earlier, these shifts of emphasis had much to do with electoral calculations and the steeply rising cost of party advertising. Apart from changing internal circumstances causing a shift of emphasis by a party as regards quality and quantity considerations, a more external causal relationship is involved, which, while it may not have any bearing on the quality aspect of a party’s membership, is often thought to affect its numerical size; namely, the influence of a country’s electoral system on the character of its parties. Thus, proportional representation is frequently cited as the cause for the proliferation of small splinter par-

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ties. There are, however, probably as many cases supporting this view as there are refuting it. Moreover, there are situations in which, under proportional representation, several smaller parties coexist with two major parties. In contemporary Germany, for example, this has been so for the most part, enabling a single party to assume power without having to form coalitions with any of the smaller parties, whereas in present-day Israel proportional representation has indeed necessitated more often than not some alliance or coalition between a number of parties. On the other hand, in Canada, where single-member constituencies are the rule, the two dominant parties have at times failed to achieve overall majorities, and therefore formed minority governments, relying on splinter parties for support. The only instances where it seems safe to generalize are countries in which parties are widely based on ethnic minority groups, as originally in Czechoslovakia, with no less than fourteen parties. Conversely, it is not so safe to invoke collective psychological traits among certain nationalities as a necessarily foolproof reason for the existence of proportional representation and, with it, the multiplication of splinter parties. Historical experience does lend support, however, to the thesis that when one major party persistently succeeds in becoming the government party and thus feels strong enough to form an executive able to ignore the legislature, party proliferation may be encouraged, since no other existing parties see a likely prospect of assuming the responsibility of government. This was the case, for example, in Germany before 1918, but by no means because of its electoral system. More relevant here than the existence or non-existence of proportional representation was the monopoly position of the governmental party. For such a situation is liable to induce developments within the other parties that cannot but favour the dominant party. That is, once other parties have little or no chance of assuming governmental power, they tend to become doctrinaire, not having to worry about the responsibility of delivering what they espouse. Yet, however admirable unflinching fidelity to principles may be, their determination to insist on the purity of principle only helps to play into the hands of the governing party, with the effect of denying themselves the opportunity to acquire practical governmental experience. And, lacking such experience, their appeal to the electorate as viable alternatives will thus be drastically impaired. Furthermore, having only the slenderest prospect of assuming governmental power, ongoing minority parties may also fail to attract the calibre of leaders needed to turn things around. Inevitably, such a

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course of events forces upon these parties the unenviable choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, namely between being virtually indistinguishable from a permanent pressure group and ceasing to exist altogether.

loyalty and leadership I mentioned earlier that the extent to which group loyalty forms an integral part of the ethos of a political party commonly bears quite remarkably on the disposition of its members to uphold its basic principles, and also on their readiness to accept its practical policies. Experience suggests that most members then let their party shape their political thinking and policy priorities where they have no particular opinions or preferences of their own, or at least show considerable willingness to align their personal ideas, independently formed, with the prevalent party platform. All the same, it is not easy to define precisely what “loyalty” means. No doubt, it is a highly complex sentiment that involves a variety of emotional elements; in the context of groups such as parties, however, it usually displays propensities akin to affection in favour of party leaders, party goals, and the kind of persons a particular party tends to attract. The sentiment of loyalty accordingly comprises certain selective objects that we value more than others and that we are prepared to guard and defend; and, by the same token, this sentiment induces us to attack those who oppose what we value, take pride in, and frequently regard as superior to any alternative. It goes without saying that this complex of attitudes is a significant asset to a political party, and all the more so because the party, together with its leadership, knows that once a member’s loyalty has been secured it constitutes an emotional allegiance that is not lightly discarded. Even if tensions arise, and factions produce conflicting loyalties, usually powerful countervailing factors capable of bridging or transcending such tensions are at work. Especially in times of crisis, factors such as fear of electoral defeat, civic strife, or the danger of weakening a country’s national prestige will conspire to keep a party together, notably if it happens to be a government party. Under such circumstances, feelings of loyalty may become so intense that potential renegades may experience a degree of hatred and contempt that far exceeds the hostility shown to members of another party, and that makes them think twice before leaving the party.

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Nevertheless, it does happen that members of a political party feel so torn between maintaining their loyalty and standing by their principles that they can no longer readily support their party’s policies. Understandably, perhaps, party leaders and party stalwarts find “principles” as grounds for wavering or dissent exceedingly odious – practically as contemptible as treason. Disraeli, for instance, did not mince his words: “Damn your principles, and stick to the Party,” he instructed a waverer. It is not hard to see why. The proliferation of waverers can easily form a serious threat to party ties, if not generate the total break-up of a party’s coherence. At the same time, unfaltering support by party members can go so far as to imply blind acceptance of a party’s shifts of policies, which, no doubt, may produce results that are no less damaging, in being able to affect not only individual members of a party but also the rest of the population. As Robert Michels has observed, few things are more harmful all around than a party in power, whose members fanatically support its leader, convinced of the superiority of its principles and imbued with a missionary zeal, for this combination of loyalty and missionary principles can cause havoc, involving much savagery, destruction, and, not rarely, self-destruction of the party itself.19 Not a great deal less serious is the effect that unswerving submission to a party’s directives has by way of transferring intense loyalty and devotional fervour toward the party to its leader. The leader then virtually personifies the party and, thereby, monopolizes the allegiance of its members. This total investment in a leader in and through personifying the party in his or her image can lead to a state of affairs in which only the most reckless member will dare to question the leader’s political judgment. Besides, any challenge to the leader’s absolute authority could signal disunity in the party and, before long, seriously undermine the party’s standing in the polls. Plainly, once a leader attains this degree of personal mystique, loyalty to the party leader becomes the overriding concern of the rank and file. Fully conscious of this functional self-importance, of this degree of personal indispensability, only a very exceptional leader will resist the temptation to exploit the situation. Having become the vital link that holds the party together, such leaders will enjoy ample discretion, being assured that, within extensive limits, they will be able to rely on the loyal following of the bulk of the party. 19 Michels, “Some Reflections,” American Political Science Review, 759–60.

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Even in the absence of so extreme an elevation of the status and role of party leaders, there has been a marked distancing between leaders and led which, as Michels kept reminding the unsuspecting, almost amounted to the estrangement between leaders and the rank and file, notably within large parties.20 Moreover, when such parties are parliamentary parties and, by virtue of commanding a majority, form the governmental party, their leaders, as prime ministers, will be in a position to select a cabinet and party caucus largely of their own choice, whose members will be responsible to these leaders rather than to the party as a whole or to members of parliament as such. This predominance of governmental party leaders is paralleled in the opposition by its leaders and their “shadow cabinet.” And, for the most part, these inner circles of leadership effectively control party policy, as well as instruct parliamentary representatives on how to vote. This degree of leadership control is made possible, Michels explains, by the growingly elitist structuring of party organization. Arguing that “who says organization says oligarchy,” he in effect maintains that efficient organization entails elitism.21 Professionalization of party leaders, moreover, brings to the fore individuals who are bureaucrats at heart and, as such, as we noted earlier, more interested in the technique of maximizing controlling power than in strengthening party principles. Especially parties wont to assume governmental power have found (like all large-scale organizations) that they cannot dispense with professional direction by a leadership possessing specialized expertise, notably in matters of canvassing support and augmenting party finances.22 Michels attributed this professionalizing trend to the fact that the calling of politics had become ever more complicated as a result of the vast expansion of publicly run social services, which, in turn, has given rise to a massive multiplication of legislative rules. In combination, these developments imposed on party leaders burdens that made a high level of professionalization absolutely necessary. For they expected leaders not only to cope with an ever-widening outpouring of information, but to cope selectively, with considerable savoir-faire and exceptionally “delicate finesse.”23 20 Ibid., 761. On the idea of a “larger loyalty,” see Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Cosmopolitics, P. Cheah and B. Robbins, eds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 45–58. 21 Michels, Political Parties, 401. 22 Michels, “Some Reflection,” APSR, 753, 764–7. 23 Ibid., 761.

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Like two other prominent elitists, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, Michels found the notion of non-hierarchical social or political structures without any scientific foundation, and hence dismissed the Marxist vision of an emerging classless society that could dispense with all superordination, making any form of institutional leadership superfluous, as a deplorable attempt to put wool over people’s eyes, blinding them to the “flagrant contradiction ... between democratic declarations and intentions, on the one hand, and the concrete oligarchic reality, on the other,”24 a reality which, for Michels, was a matter of historic necessity, from whose strict “iron laws” of social development there was no escape. He concluded, therefore, that in view of the continuously mounting trend of elitism, most democratic societies and the political parties in them will have to accept these “laws.” Yet, despite this Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods), as he calls it, Michels does not altogether despair; some form of democracy, he suggests, will survive (in its liberal aspects), insofar as even the inherently “anti-democratic and theoretically minority elite” cannot completely cast aside certain basic democratic principles if it seeks to rule with the consent of the many, however estranged they may have become from one another, and however tacitly their consent may be forthcoming.25

party elitism and democratic prospects The concern of these concluding remarks is not with “democracy” as such in its diverse modern expressions – the principal subject of the following chapter. The present undertaking is rather different and more limited in form and content. In essence, it seeks to uncover why the doubtfully democratic development of political parties, as portrayed by two of the most prominent analysts of party elitism, Robert Michels and Maurice Duverger, need not herald the demise of democracy in the modern world. More specifically still, the chief concern here is their hypothesis of operational compatibility between ever-growing oligarchic tendencies, on the one hand, and ever-surviving founding principles of democracy, on the other, notably within industrially based mass societies. This conceivably odd hypothesis, with its stubborn faith in the continued structural vibrancy of democratic principles, is, however, not 24 Ibid. See also Michels, Political Parties, 405. 25 Michels, “Some Reflections,” APSR, 770–1.

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quite as startling as it may seem at first sight, once it is borne in mind that Michels and Duverger, as subsequently Joseph Schumpeter, strip democracy of its “idealistic” or so-called classical attributes. They claim to do this to preserve the reality of its “scientific” anatomy, which, in essence, they see bound up with the involvement of the “mass” of people in politics, in contrast to the exclusive rule of hereditary aristocracy, yet which they simultaneously seek to free from its envelopment within overly lofty, but altogether illusory, popular expectations. Radically, they wish to distinguish, therefore, the basis of a democratic regime from its subsequent operation. In the light of this distinction, the failure of parties to conform to democratic ideals should not demand the abandonment of democratically based governments or the end of civic rights and freedoms that many associate with democracies, and notably parliamentary democracies, together with their (assumedly) representative character. To be sure, Michels and Duverger have not been the first to point to the tension between the oligarchic organization of political parties and the principles of democratic government, as both fully acknowledged. In particular, they singled out Mosei J. Ostrogorski (the author of Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, London, 1902), whom they equally looked upon, albeit not uncritically, as their greatest precursor.26 Nevertheless, few writers before Michels and Duverger were as insistent upon viewing the elitist trend of modern political parties as anti-democratic and pro-democratic at one and the same time. Perhaps this blend of “democratic elitism” may turn out to be somewhat less paradoxical if judged in conjunction with either’s historic-conceptual starting points and their quasi-prescriptive conclusions. For, although 26 M. Ostrogorski, who in his work on democracy and party organization (see n. 8) focused on the rise of a mass party in England at the end of the nineteenth century, expressed little hope for the coexistence of an elitist party system and a viable political democracy. Even in a (socialist) mass party, he feared, the caucus would at first gain power over the party, only to be replaced itself by, and become the machine of, a small group at the centre, not accountable at all to the public or its representatives. Nevertheless, correctly sensing the mounting trend of elitism, he, as did Michels and Duverger later, underrated the extent to which a principled commitment is a two-sided affair, encompassing leaders as well as followers. Thus, if generally endorsed, it can set boundaries to the wheeling and dealing of party leaders and, thereby, at a minimum, can prevent followers from feeling wholly pledged to any unconditional allegiance. Ostrogorski’s own reform proposals, by way of temporary associations, were (not surprisingly) totally dismissed by both Michels (Political Parties, 361) and Duverger (Political Parties, xxvi, 186).

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neither pretends to offer precise causal theories or foolproof remedies, each throws out significant hints to counter excessive pessimism regarding the destructive effects upon democratic institutions as a whole brought on by the operation of oligarchic parties – hints that largely prefigure Schumpeter’s celebrated (or despised) redefinition of democracy, which, in effect, amounts to preferring half a loaf to no bread at all. A central clue to Michels’s democratic elitism is his thesis that no modern party, even if genuinely aristocratic in its pedigree, and politically conservative in its outlook and interests, can afford any more not to assume a democratic facade, if it wants to remain in the competitive race. Hence, on “the principle of the mass,” even parties of the aristocracy have “irrevocably lost” their aristocratic purity.27 Aristocratic-conservative candidates, presenting themselves as the defenders of the gentry’s landed interests, would accordingly “not win a single seat,” especially if they openly declared that they considered most people totally unfit for playing any active part in public affairs. Although, in that event, they would be undoubtedly persons of “incomparable sincerity,” as candidates they would have to be “politically insane,” if they failed to adopt a “democratic mien,” and started hailing farmers and farmworkers as their colleagues, whose interests were identical with their own.28 Conversely, however, “democracy,” thus employed, nevertheless contains, Michels makes clear, an indispensable, aristocratic-like, “oligarchic nucleus,” so that in effect (he concedes), the aristocratic principle is not altogether lost. It is revived, in a new form, as an integral part of democracy.29 As Michels sums it up: “In modern party life, aristocracy gladly presents itself in democratic guise, whilst the substance of democracy is permeated with aristocratic elements. On the one side we have aristocracy in a democratic form, and on the other democracy with an aristocratic content.”30 Rather surprisingly, perhaps, this antithetical inner combination was already suggested in the political thinking of an eighteenth-century writer, J.G. Herder, who, as students of the history of ideas might recall, spoke of “aristo-democracy” as the principle of future conceptual devel-

27 28 29 30

Michels, Political Parties, 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., Preface, viii. Ibid., 10–11.

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opments of the idea of national self-government.31 No less intriguing in this context is Michels’ recognition, recalling Rousseau as well as Herder, that, while “ideal democracy” is a chimera, there are nevertheless budding energies “tending to approximate towards ideal democracy” among the elements endeavouring to overthrow aristocratic conditions, so as to replace them by a new social order. And these democratic energies “find an outlet in that direction, or at least to work towards it.”32 Unfortunately, regardless of the sincerity of such aspirations, Michels concludes in his “Final Considerations,” that such hopes are bound to be dashed because of the “technical indispensability of leadership,” in view of which oligarchy cannot be eschewed, regardless of a party’s social roots or ideological aims. Even if leaders come from the people (or masses), they get detached from them in the process of becoming professionalized, for this process inevitably entails control over others. Organization itself, by its very nature, Michels explains, means oligarchy, whatever its democratic basis. “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors,” since the “oligarchic structure of the building suffocates the basic democratic principle.” Consequently, the notion of popular representation – and the interests and principles that this notion invokes – is of necessity an illusion, a mirage, “engendered by a false illumination.”33 For this very reason, Michels wants to establish to “what degree democracy is desirable, possible, and realizable at a given moment.” And, while he judges it “unscientific” to assume that the interests of leaders could ever “coincide perfectly with the interests of the led,” he feels that it would be misguided “to renounce all endeavours” to ascertain how far limits could be imposed upon the powers “exercised over the individual by oligarchies,” and how far democracy, without leading the masses astray, could serve as “a moral criterion.”34 Although, as in the fable about the treasure buried in the field, democracy may never be found, we should not cease “labouring indefatigably” to preserve it as the “least of evils,” in counteracting the “disease of oligarchy,” and in 31 J.G. Herder, Saemtliche Werke, B. Suphan, ed. 33 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), xxiv, 174. For a more detailed discussion of Herder’s concept of Aristo-Democracy, see my Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 33–4, 47–8, 155–7, 175–6. 32 Michels, Political Parties, 11, 406. 33 Ibid., 400–1. 34 Michels, Political Parties, 402–5.

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preventing “a return to aristocracy.” All in all, Michels therefore urges, “nothing but a serene and frank examination of the oligarchic dangers to democracy will enable us to minimize these dangers, even though they can never be entirely avoided.” It follows that the outlook is “simultaneously encouraging an depressing,” since the “democratic currents of history ... break ever on the same shoal.”35 In a strikingly similar way, Duverger’s theory of democratic party elitism advances the view that, while modern parties are mass-democratic in origin, they cannot of necessity be “in conformity with orthodox notions of democracy” in their development. Leaders, Duverger elaborates, are not really appointed by the membership of a party as a whole, but are “co-opted or nominated by the central body,” and then form a “ruling class,” isolated from party members – almost an exclusive caste. This means, as Michels has argued, that the “mass of electors is dominated by the small group of members and militants, itself subordinate to the ruling bodies of the party.”36 Where Duverger introduces a new theme is by asking whether a political system without parties would be more satisfactory. Indeed he regards it as a central issue, and his answer leaves us in no doubt about his own response. For it is an unequivocal “no,” coupled with an outright denial that democratic representation or political liberty would be better served if governments found themselves faced “with only a scattering of individuals not grouped in political formations.”37 According to Duverger, it is not the existence of parties that gives cause for worry, but the idea of “government of the people by the people,” which he considers a totally misleading, artificial notion – a “fine phrase,” with an entirely “empty ring.” Quoting Rousseau (Social Contract, Book iii, ch. 4), he reiterates that “no true democracy has ever existed and none ever will,” since all government is inherently oligarchic, adding that it is contrary to the natural order for the majority to rule and the minority to be ruled. He concedes that to proclaim the identity of rulers and ruled is “an admirable way of justifying the obedience of the latter to the former.” but insists that it does not stop the identification from being “a pure abstraction” and a piece of “verbal juggling.”38

35 36 37 38

Ibid., 405–8. Duverger, Political Parties, 422. Ibid., 423. Ibid., 423–4.

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Instead of supporting the abolishment of parties, therefore, Duverger calls for a more modest but more real conception of democracy. And, in so doing, he goes further than Michels by spelling out what such a democracy – despite oligarchic leadership trends – would have to imply. On top of the list he puts liberty, and “not only for the privileged by birth, fortune, position, or education.” In this connection, he uses such terms as “social equality” (by way of a certain standard of living and a certain basic education) and “political equilibrium,” and points to the “liberal democracies,” where “liberty and the party system coincide,” and in which it was possible for new elites to be created, chiefly through “the rise of working-class parties.”39 The emergence of new elites is of the “deepest significance” for Duverger, not least because this development “restores to the notion of representation its true meaning,” in addition to making oligarchy and democracy structurally compatible. And both outcomes induce him to suggest a revision of the formula of “government of the people and by the people,” and its replacement by “government of the people by an elite sprung from the people” – a transformation which, to Duverger, “represents an advance of democracy, not a retreat.”40 Somewhat oddly, however, while both party elitists hold out the promise of a degree of compatibility between oligarchic forms of party organization and democratic forms of political regimes, they appear decidedly less optimistic about any reduction of the distance between party leaderships and party memberships. Michels, we have noted, points to growing measure of utter estrangement in their relationship, which in turn, causes a formidable intensification of apathy among party members and parliamentary voters in general. Michels diagnoses the original source of such apathy as principally a corollary of an endemic lack of active interest by most members of the rank and file, who, technically incompetent in political matters, are unable to organize themselves without professional guidance and therefore gladly leave it to others to take on their own political responsibilities.41 This may well be so, but need it be all there is to apathy and its source? Undeniably, the “iron law” of oligarchy by professional leaders arises out of the reasons that Michels cites and, therefore, the notion of active and equal participation by all members in all affairs is a thoroughly 39 Ibid., 424–5. 40 Ibid., 425–6. 41 Michels, Political Parties, 49–57; 400–4.

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unrealistic notion. Democratic theory, consequently, had better accept this as a fact and try to live with it. On the other hand, it is at least arguable that apathy may not be natural at all, and that, in the absence of inhibiting or deforming elements, it would not occur, or not to anything like the same extent. In this argument, the lack of confidence by members in themselves, and their psychological need for superior guidance, might, for example, not be endemic, but rather a normal reaction to having experienced for an ongoing period the rule of manifestly incompetent leaders. So, feeling as a result disoriented and aimless, they have lost any motivation for active participation. In this event, a waning interest in politics would stem from a resigned, if not cynical, realization that, having been let down by their leaders, there is little to participate in by way of continuous principle or practice. Coupled with this realization, or because of it, there may be a growing belief that the party exists chiefly for the leaders, and not for the members; that membership may mean little more than choosing between different personalities – not purposes – and simply having to abide by the command to follow the leader, come what may. A lack of intense political interest, at any rate on a continuous basis, may therefore be ultimately attributable to the feeling that party rivalry is in essence a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This feeling, of course, need not cause apathy, but it well might. Regardless of whether a lack of interest in politics is natural or not, and whether a degree of political apathy may have some merit or not, there seems little doubt that this issue is related less to whether or not humans are political animals than to what people tend to expect of politics and politically generated change, notably in a democracy. If so, it does seem to call for a thorough reappraisal of the scope and limits of democratic governance, in the direction suggested by Michels, Duverger, and Schumpeter. Implicit in these suggestions there appears an increasingly tormenting doubt that “equality” and “liberty” can realistically be integral parts of “democracy” – however useful these concepts may be as approximations to the politically demandable or politically attainable. A reappraisal of this nature, it is felt, may also go some way toward a truer understanding of the extent to which ordinary voters can participate in the democratic process. What ultimately, therefore, seems to underlie the demand for a careful rethinking of democratic governance, is the belief that a more credible notion of participation might induce the voting horse, if led to the water, to actually want to drink. From this perspective,

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Schumpeter’s redefinition of democracy has been regarded as coming close to the kind of realism required for bridging the gap between party elitism and a viably operative democratism. For it is said to acknowledge the indispensable role that leadership plays in modern democracy, together with the more modest role of the democratic electorate in the initiation of national policy.42 “Voters do not decide issues,” Schumpeter asserts, nor do they pick their members of parliament.” The initiative lies with the candidate who makes a bid for the office of parliamentary membership.43 In effect, Schumpeter recommends a reversal of roles: the election of those who do the deciding is primary, but the electorate at large is secondary. Its task is essentially confined to producing a government democratically. Beyond it, the electorate itself should do little to interfere in politics, to enable the political leadership, once elected, to get on with the job of framing and implementing national policy, for which it can then be held duly accountable. The democratic “method” consists, accordingly, in “arriving at political decisions” through that institutional arrangement, whereby “individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” what is to be done.44 Evidently, Schumpeter’s chief criticism of the “classical theory” of democracy is that it overrated the function of the citizens at large and “practically amounted to ignoring leadership” as a result. In this view, parties are simply groups whose members propose to act collectively in the competitive struggle for political power. Their “psycho-technics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics,” part and parcel of the striving for power and an indispensable instrument for regulating political competition.45 In Schumpeter’s theory of democracy, as in that of Michels and Duverger, this institutional struggle for governmental power between the leaders of rival parties – often resembling mammoth bingo drives, especially during election campaigns – nevertheless is considered an important safeguard against elitist absolutism and the unrestrained 42 See, for example, the comments of Geraint Parry in his Political Elites (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), 144–5, whose even-handed treatment of political elitism I still regard as a masterpiece in the field. 43 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 282. 44 Ibid., 269. 45 Ibid., 270, 282–3.

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wielding of political power. More recent theories of democracy have extended the range of the competitive struggle by introducing other organized intermediary groups in which leading functionaries put added pressure on parties and governments to promote their special interests in competition with other groups.46 While methods of enquiry and analysis have undeniably made advances since Michels and Duverger reflected upon the effects of party elitism on democratic governance, or Schumpeter put forward his redefinition of democracy, it is most arguable whether things have moved very far beyond the “conjectural nature” toward a “truly scientific” account of the working of political parties that Duverger hoped to be attained, over half a century ago.47 Certainly, few could claim that party democracy or, for that matter, political democracy itself, has become less problematic, in theory or practice.

46 Chapter 8 goes more fully into this point. Schumpeter himself, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, practically ignores the role of intermediary groups in his emphasis on political leadership. 47 Duverger, Political Parties, Preface, xiv. See also Daron Acemoglu, “Oligarchic vs. Democratic Societies,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 6 (2008), 1–44.

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taken literally, “democracy” is a rather amorphous concept; certainly, in its modern political form, it has no fixed shape or meaning. The gamut of usages, emphases, or structural components is frequently so wide that commentators have virtually given up the attempt to define it. As one of them despairingly puts it, “it has almost come to mean all things to all people.”1 Definitions, when they are put forward at all, are unfortunately so promotional as a rule that they are practically indistinguishable from partisan justifications. Also, commonly envisioning a somewhat idealistic script, such definitions hardly correspond to, or account for, what actual players do within the context of any particular democracy – a recurrent moan in the previous chapter. And yet the glow of the concept’s dawn has not entirely faded. At any rate, we do keep returning to its beginnings, in search of its authentic roots – a turning back that strikingly recalls the spiritual thrust of the biblical Lamentations (v, 21). And, however inadequately the original Greek script or practice of democracy may address contemporary problems of principles or organizational structuring, both players and observers have not ceased glancing back or, indeed, finding that, on reflection, ingredients of the “classical model” still have their modern relevance.

1 Henry B. Mayo, Introduction to Marxist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 264. See also Mayo’s Introduction to Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) and his “How Can We Justify Democracy?”, The American Political Science Review 56 (1962), 555–66. I still consider Mayo’s approach to both democracy and Marxism exceptionally lucid, as well as critical among introductory accounts.

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images and reality Admittedly, if a classical Greek democrat were to visit any contemporary democracy, he would look askance at what he sees. At first glance, “he would probably deny them the title of democracy at all.”2 For he would be surprised that citizens were not actively involved in governmental decisions, but instead entrusted supreme authority to only a small fraction of them, elected every five years or so, which was nevertheless empowered to declare even war and peace without the people being directly consulted. No doubt, on further scrutiny, our Greek visitor would recognize that the democracy he was familiar with was not possible in states so vastly exceeding the polis he had known, and that, therefore, the ideal toward which it aspired, namely to be absolute master in its own domain, had no longer any appeal to the modern world.3 At the same time he could find points of contact with his own experience, in that in most Western democracies, rich and poor had a vote that counted the same for each person, members of parliament enjoyed a fair amount of freedom to voice their opinions, and so on, even though he could not help viewing with suspicion the existence of organized political parties, the emphasis on their leaders, and the degree of their control over policy decisions, together with the influence of appointed professional administrators. Conversely, modern democrats, although finding the Greek classical model very strange in such respects as the closely interwoven power of the executive, the legislature, and, above all, the judiciary, would nonetheless be able to recognize affinities in features that are by no means unfamiliar to them. Thus American democrats, still imbued with the sentiments prevalent during the War of Independence, would find themselves having much in common with the Greek democrat’s opposition to monarchy and aristocracy, especially as overlording regimes. Similarly, Abraham Lincoln’s definition of democracy, de-emphasizing organized leadership and the need for professional bureaucrats, recalls the Greek model that no doubt inspired it. And, although its ideals have not found institutional implementation in the United States, or for that 2 G.C. Field, Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1963), 286. 3 Possibly, the ancient Greek democrat would, among modern democracies, find Switzerland closest in size to the ideal democratic state, although Aristotle would question whether the democracy to which the polis he had known aspired was possible even there.

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matter, anywhere else, they have clearly enjoyed strong populist support almost everywhere. Lincoln himself, while he could hardly have been unaware of the difficulties that his “Greek” definition of democracy would encounter, were it to be politically “operationalized,” could not have been unaware of its usefulness as a catchy promotional starter in every politician’s quest for popularity. Besides, pointing to serious gaps between rhetorical scripts and political reality, while it calls attention to the need for empirical clarifications to avoid massive confusions, does not in itself demonstrate the emptiness of the ideals such scripts espouse. To say this is not to imply that some who wrote the original Greek scripts were themselves altogether unaware of the gaps that separated aspirations from attainments. A wellknown example of an even mixture of support and ambivalence regarding democracy is Aristotle’s Politics, in its critical evaluation of diverse projects or actual realities. Thus, while sharply opposed to democratic schemes in which the poor majority is to rule exclusively in their own interest and to those that incite majorities to do what they like, regardless of set procedures – schemes he describes as perverted forms of democracy – Aristotle fully supports the idea of liberty as the foundational ethos of the rightful democratic state. Among the latter’s characteristics he lists the absence of any discrimination in favour of purely segmental interests within a society and the presence of universal rights. Hence officers should be elected by all out of all, without any property requirements being stipulated for public office, and an assembly should be the supreme authority over all causes or, at any rate, over the most important. In this connection Aristotle stresses also the payment of assembly magistrates and members of the courts. Given that such requirements are met, qualified persons will be elected and serve befittingly, not least because the citizens as a body will call them to account. “Every man should be responsible to others, nor should any one be allowed to do as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is permitted, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.” Aristotle speaks of this type of representative system in which the principle of universal accountability prevails as “the best kind of democracy,” since “the right persons rule and are prevented from doing wrong and the people have their due.”4 I quoted rather extensively, for I know of no “classical” script that prefigures more remarkably the advocacy of political accountability in 4 Aristotle, Politics, bk vi, ch. 4. Richard Mc Keon, trans. 1318 b–1319 a.

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modernity, notably that of Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham, or the circumscribed understanding of “freedom” in society. Jeremy Bentham, for example, almost echoes Aristotle when he demands the responsibility of governors to the governed, and “the right which a subject has of having the reasons publicly assigned and canvassed of every act of power that is exerted over him.”5 Rousseau, who perhaps is closest in his democratic thinking to the polis of antiquity – notably in his emphasis on the city-state and his opposition to representative legislatures – while less known for his views on accountability, was in fact much occupied with magistrates accounting to the cirizens-in-assembly.6 Moreover, not unlike Lincoln, he also insisted, in conformity with the classical model of democracy, on the oneness of rulers and ruled, although, again not unlike Lincoln, he knew that his “normative” theory was at odds with “empirical” reality. This did not stop him, however, from attempting to change reality, for he held that “men as they are” could make a difference to reality by creating laws and institutions “as they might be.”7 Clearly, for Rousseau, as subsequently for Lincoln, the failure of existing societies to realize their democratic vision so far was no proof that they were necessarily unable to translate it into reality by acting as concerned citizens. In their view, therefore, ideas and ideals could guide human strivings in converting potentiality into actuality, given that people observe the laws they themselves have made. Be that as it may, Lincoln’s as much as Rousseau’s message does contain two crucial elements that have not failed to loom prominently in avowals of mainstream democracies. One is that governmental authority is conditional, being contingent on the consent of citizens in and through periodic elections as well as by majority approval in their legislatures. The second element involves the emphasis on collective self-validation by way of procedural mechanisms intended to ensure that only the will of the people, directly or indirectly, ultimately decides what is 5 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, W. Harrison, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 94–5. 6 Rousseau, Emile, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 463. “The chiefs owe to the people an account of their administration and are themselves subject to the laws whose observance they are charged with ensuring,” Rousseau writes in Book v of Emile. For a more extensive discussion of Rousseau’s musings on accountability, see my Reason and Self-Enactment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 160–9. 7 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk i, ch. 8; see also his Letters from the Mountain (1764), Oeuvres Complétes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–69), iii, 809–10.

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and what is not democratic. And however transmuted their versions of civic participation found expression, both elements salvaged the principle of popular sovereignty, at any rate as a foundational myth. For they certainly endorsed the idea that any sanctioning norm of democracy must emerge from a source that is recognizably identifiable with the deliberative space of the assembled citizenry. For only then can one ensure that whatever is done “by and for” the people is not guided by extra-democratic norms; that is, by rules remote, or even estranged, from the truly authenticating source of a democratic polity. Basic to any such version of governmental accountability and popular sovereignty is the conviction that (a) people, on the whole, are by virtue of their possession of practical reason, more equal than unequal; and that (b) people, on the whole, know their interests better themselves than anyone can know them on their behalf, in particular as regards their common needs and basic welfare.8 Valid or not, operationally viable or not, this twofold conviction is still by far the most widely shared underpinning of mainstream democratic beliefs. At the same time, whatever its actual complexion as a political order, democracy, it is broadly conceded, cannot altogether dispense with coercive power, however it may succeed in softening its use. Similarly, it is almost generally recognized that although democracy is said to be typified by the rule of the many, it can in reality scarcely exist without entrusting powers (however circumscribed) to the (more or less) qualified few. Even Rousseau, following in the footsteps of a number of Greek classical thinkers, came to the conclusion that, to make democratic government not only accountable but also effective, professionally trained magistrates have to be entrusted with discretionary power to carry out the task they have been authorized to accomplish. Otherwise, if they cannot themselves do anything, they can hardly, Rousseau argued, be held to account for anything.9 Kant, less taken with democracy (to put it mildly), went further still. Despite his profound admiration for Rousseau’s republican-based lawfulness, he could not go along with his democratism because, like him, he was exceedingly skeptical about the 8 Underlying this position is the ancient Roman adage “omnes homines beati volunt.” See also Joshua Cohen, “For a Democratic Society,” in S. Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 86–138. 9 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy (1755), G.D.H. Cole, trans. The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1913, 1946), 245; see also Discourse on Inequality, ibid., 212.

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authenticity and regularity of political accounting if it was entirely left to the citizenry to ensure. Additionally, he suspected the executive power to be out to usurp the legislative power; and most acutely so if it was done stealthily by artful ministers or ambitious heads of state. Thus, he accused the British of concealing under the surface of an ostensibly parliamentary system and limited-constitutional monarchy an actual regime of absolutist powers.10 No doubt Kant made these rather sweeping allegations in view of George ii and George iii playing an unusually active personal role in government and the conduct of wars, with the help of overly collusive prime ministers. But, apart from Kant’s critique of the British parliamentary system of his time, with its accommodating ministers and bureaucrats subservient to the monarchs, an added circumstance of sociological-political interest lends weight to Kant’s charges: the fact that both opposing parties then represented the propertied classes and the electorate rested on a decidedly restricted franchise. More significantly still, perhaps, Kant’s critical observations almost prophetically point to the dangers to modern and even democratic-liberal regimes from the existence of an executive, whose governing power is backed by a substantial majority in parliament, able to count on the party whips and the support of a well-entrenched bureaucracy. Nor were Kant’s concerns wide of the mark in their applicability to the then new democracy across the ocean, despite its more expressly democratic rhetoric and the formal absence of an aristocracy or a well-established or influential bureaucracy. And, arguably, this might have been so, at least in part, because both the British and the American forms of governance took shape in the liberal-industrial era in which even powerful executives were inherently limited in the effective range of their jurisdiction by the prevalent emphasis by both major parties on “negative” freedom, in which “democracy” was still largely associated with demands for freedom from governmental interference with industry and trade, let alone social services of any kind. This said, the contrast between the democratic tradition in the English-speaking world and the freedom-to-tradition that typified expressions of democracy in continental Europe, with its emphasis on national self-determination and civil rights, must not be overdrawn. For, even 10 Kant, The Contest of Faculties, (1798) in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991), 121, 186–7. That is why Kant insisted that labels alone did not tell the full story in politics.

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after the French Revolution, a distinction was still maintained between active and passive citizenship, although now Frenchmen were understanding themselves as “citizens” and no longer as “subjects.” Also, inadequate attention was still paid to the difference between strictly democratically generated norms and extra-democratic norms, and to the danger lurking in conflating the contingency of the former with the universality and unconditional validity of moral or religious norms. Presumably, it did not occur to many that such a conflation could easily lead to passing over so important a liberal-democratic precept as that which decrees that no party uses law to entrench itself permanently as a ruling political party, simply because such a precept is altogether distinct from intrinsically moral or religious norms. Manifestly, the change of emphasis from negative to positive freedom did not in itself bring forth an insistence on having foundational sanctions that rest on the principle that democratic governance must be the visible work, not of any pre-existing norms derived from the authority of some transcendent rightness, but rather of an ongoing process of weighing what is to be done in and through the verve of public discourse, parliamentary-generated procedures, the casting of votes, and so on. No doubt, if democratic norms were simply the same as universally valid moral norms or, for that matter, like established principles of mechanical engineering, they would be readily applicable, with no need of going through rigorous quests in search of consensus, such as opinion polls, phone-ins, the sounding of interest groups, or the bother of public meetings and regular electoral contests. In short, all the tissues that make up the vital infra-structure of mainstream (liberal) democracies, and give point and meaning to their idea of civic involvement, could plainly be dispensed with. This is not to say that the validation of democracy, in some such terms, must imply the absence of rules or precepts borrowed from extra-political systems of belief. All that the foregoing remarks seek to underscore is what is now widely professed to be the defining characteristic of a democratic civic order as something sui generis and self-sustaining, as distinct from being the contrivance of some antecedent or transcendent authority. And, without implying disdain for other norms, let alone mindless “pragmatism,” it simply amounts to stating what contemporary democratic validation is not, as much as what it is, or seeks to be. Yet, while contingent, self-generated, and limited in application, norms thus validated are nevertheless no less binding on citizens in a democracy than moral precepts are universally.

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Admittedly, a formula of aspired democratic requirements is no roadmap of paths leading to existing democratic realities. Moreover, platitude or not, it is worth keeping in mind that current understandings of democracy, as of other political regimes, are not immune to processes of change over time. All the same, whatever changes occur, and whatever democratic arrangement is appraised as the rightful order, it is nonetheless a political order, and not the same as a theocratic or bureaucratic-organizational order.11 The tendency to blur the difference between these kinds of orders has at times given rise to confusing overlaps between state and society, particularly through the prodigious bureaucratization of political (executive) structures, and also of modes of group mediation and participation. In turn, this tendency has helped to produce an ever more specialized and sophisticated form of agency that has exposed parliamentary democracy to challenges it finds hard or impossible to meet, with scarcely beneficial effects on the augmentation of overall political accountability. Lacking the time and expertise to come to grips with the mounting complexity of processes bearing upon policy decisions, parliamentary players themselves have depressingly come to realize their declining role and importance. Not surprisingly, faith in democracy, as an effective channel for developing popular self-rule, is for many in the doldrums.

the nimbus of organization The trend toward massive bureaucratization is borne out by the evergrowing number of extra-governmental agencies, such as those speaking for the professions, the military, health and educational services, and diverse trades, and also by the bureaucratization of political parties themselves, which closely parallels the bureaucratic expansion in business and industry and the “curse of money” (as John Rawls has put it). Even institutions of higher learning have not altogether escaped the effects of these trends. Coupled with a new language of unabashed self-promotion, comparable to that of commercial establishments, universities now almost generally prefer trained administrators, adroit public relations experts and proven fundraiser managers to the academically renowned as their presidents and chief executive officers.

11 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons, ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 126–32.

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Indirectly, and in part unwittingly, these trends have given added impetus to political sociology, mainly by virtue of the switch of interest from major political institutions to extra-institutional organizations, and also from political parties to social movements. Thus, political sociologists, such as C. Wright Mills, have almost totally ignored the American Congress. Whether or not this amounts to a growing adulteration of politics, much of what they have to say is in many respects indistinguishable from studies of any other type of organization. Yet this is hardly to be wondered at, considering that even political parties, professing democratic-socialist ideals, have emulated bodies characterized by oligarchic structures, bureaucratic red tape, and business advertising methods in competitively garnering votes.12 Conversely, voters themselves have come to discover that democracy, even if it means one person one vote, does not necessarily yield real opportunities for political participation. Not a few of them, as we noted before, have come to have nagging doubts about the role an individual citizen can play in the political process, if divorced from financially secured and bureaucratically well-organized groups or parties. Manifestly, for champions of democracy as the road to active citizenship, the extension of the popular franchise must have, coinciding as it did with these developments, proved sadly disappointing. A good deal of apathy at election times may well be traceable to such disillusionment regarding democratic principles and political ideals generally. Ironically, the disenchantment of the many has encouraged the few, organizationally and financially well connected, to enhance their skills in the use of the communication media and to take advantage of the electronic advances in political advertising. On the other hand, it could be argued that the explosion of bureaucratic organization and the upsurge of fundraising techniques are not bereft of significant values of their own. Thus, bureaucracy, being inherently hierarchical as well as rule-governed, may be counted upon to be an effective antidote to bungling and wilful arbitrariness, while the search for financial support from private or corporate sources may be defended as a means of relieving pressure on the public purse and of reducing dependence on governmental patronage. If so, it may seem odd that, on the whole, democrats have displayed a rather intense 12 See, for example, Robert Michels, “Some Reflections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties, The American Political Science Review, 21 (1927), 753–72.

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dislike of bureaucracy – a dislike most strongly articulated during and immediately following the American Revolution. Max Weber was, I believe, the first major political sociologist to address this issue in some analytical detail. He diagnosed the root of the apparent incompatibility between democratic modes of thinking and bureaucratic modes not only in terms of a clash between egalitarian and hierarchical traditions but also, if not chiefly, in terms of a clash between conceptions of rule-governed action. It is not altogether clear whether Weber shared the view bureaucrats are said to project about themselves, but he did seem to think that there was a crucial difference in the way democrats looked upon the source that validated their operational rules. Democracies, Weber argued, attach prime importance to being themselves the authors of such rules. Democratic legislative assemblies, that is to say, must collectively be at liberty not merely to make the rules but also to unmake or amend them as they see fit and, thereby, be wholly and absolutely in a position to determine what at any time constitutes a rule of the game or, alternatively, fails to constitute such a rule. Bureaucrats, by contrast, are said to understand themselves as viewing rules to have been antecedently fixed and, hence, to be permanently binding. Accordingly, they do not see themselves as making rules (or decisions, for that matter) but solely as following them, so that their origins lie with others than themselves.13 As for the “curse of money” dominating electoral contests as well as the ongoing self-promotion of parties and their leaders in Western democracies, Weber attributed it to essentially two developments: first, the tendency of politicians to live increasingly not merely for politics but off politics; and, second, the pervasive ethos of capitalism within Western political cultures. In a more or less direct sense, therefore, Weber viewed the emerging organizational and financial forms of Western democracies, notably their financing through private and industrial fundraising, as paralleling financial-operational practices of business, and hence as examples of cultural spillovers.14

13 See Reinhard Bendix, “Bureaucracy,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), for a lucid and succinct discussion of Max Weber’s distinction. See also, Joseph LaPalombara, ed., Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 14 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” (1919), in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–87.

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What seems principally at issue, in this argument, is the changing mode of democracy’s organizational expression. Conceptually, this development has brought forth two major clusters of democratic principles regarding the organizational criteria that make for a “truly democratic” regime, which, in turn, rest on two sharply divergent assumptions. Thus, radical democrats usually opt for constitutive oneness, showing little enthusiasm for representative government, checks and balances, or separation of powers; at best, they are rather ambivalent about the matter. Liberal democrats, on the other hand, fear that constitutive oneness would cripple accountable government together with its required organizational mechanisms, impair individual rights, and endanger the plurality of values and choosable ends. Especially if the preference for “oneness” is backed by an emphasis on strong leadership, strict party discipline, and slick electoral campaigns, with maximal “charismatic” appeal, these, together, liberal democrats feel, could remove all principled and institutional restraints on the exercise of governmental power – on the ground that this would be an infringement on a nation’s democratic will – and, thereby, altogether obliterate any kind of conditional political authority.15 Also, if we adopt the radical position – which, Weber feared, might lead to what he called plebiscitary democracy – by rejecting “duality” in favour of “identity” – we could eventually negate the existence of an electoral alternative.16 And whatever we make of Weber’s fear of democratic dictatorship (Führerdemokratie) by way of charismatically coloured leadership authority, whether we think it overdrawn or too fuzzy, his distinction between procedural and electoral ways of validating democracy effectively parallels the distinction between constitutive duality and constitutive oneness. In so doing, it also draws attention to the possibility of profoundly divergent criteria for judging organizational-structural components of democratic politics. For Weber a central concern of democratic government was the extent of procedurally rule-governed continuity in its structures and, in view of this concern, he approvingly commented on bureaucratic forms of organization. Yet, this structural-organizational preference by no means implied the replacement of a political order by a bureaucratic order. As we have noted, he had serious misgivings about such a replace-

15 Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 384–7. 16 Ibid., 387.

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ment.17 Only if the demise of procedural democracy threatened the breakdown of fundamental standards of political conduct altogether did he look upon bureaucracy as a last-ditch attempt to forestall rampant arbitrariness. And, far from thereby disclosing anti-democratic tendencies, Weber was among the first to alert the world to inherent sources of fragility in liberal democracy. Even long-rooted liberal democracies, he warned, were not immune to corruptive forces. Unless appropriate safeguards were built into their organizational structures, the electoral right to rule could easily be mistaken for the rightful exercise of governmental rule in itself. Above all, Weber feared that a situation arising from such a conceptual confusion could encourage politicians, determined to be elected come what may, to make spectacular promises they know they could not possibly keep.18 In essence, the upshot of this discussion is the possibly banal-sounding conclusion that there is more to procedural democracy than procedures. For procedures do contain an ethic that vitally bears on the what and why of doing things, and not only on the how. Put slightly more strongly, the “how” implicitly helps to disclose the legitimating standards of what is proposed or already done. Hence, insofar as democratic procedures definitionally entail standards that a society appropriates as its own, such a society is better able to gauge officially given justifications as well as their claimed applicability to the practical needs in question. Going one step further, one might contend that such societal self-appropriations assist people to uncover the extent to which enlarging electoral provisions may not necessarily enlarge ongoing ways of exercising democratic rule or broaden civic inclusiveness. For while the former focus chiefly on strengthening the majoritarian base of democracy, they might marginalize, if not ignore, ends that citizens, in their individual or shared diversity, cherish and pursue. To be sure, in seeking to do justice to these pluralities, as opposed to dwelling on numerical (quantitative) aspects of electoral democracy, procedural (qualitative) dimensions of democracy may not escape the kind of tensions to which diversity can give rise. On the other hand, by squarely recognizing such potential risks, procedural approaches seem more likely to attenuate their effects, even if they may not succeed in entirely eliminating them. Either way, however, democracy cannot but

17 Ibid., 387–8. 18 Ibid., 385.

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gain by institutionally testing the degree of its pluralist viability. The next section attempts to explore this issue a little further.

pluralist democracy: inner tensions I shall start by making three somewhat negative points. First, affirming plural interests, opinions, and values, is not the same as advocating political pluralism. Rousseau, for example, was fully aware that society was marked by multiple interests. Yet, far from recommending political pluralism as a remedy, he considered it the principal function of politics to transcend the plurality of ends by the promotion of a general good or interest. He knew, too, that this was not an easy task; but he felt that it was the very reason for founding a political union to overcome the resistance of those who opposed the notion of a single common goal. Were this not so, if everything went smoothly of its own accord, there would hardly be a need (as we have noted) for developing utmost skills in the direction of political mediation.19 Second, tolerating, or even encouraging, the expression of plurality, as distinct from uniformity or a shared consciousness of oneness, is surely one thing; but to suggest or imply that plurality and diversity are synonymous is quite another. Clearly, plurality does not demand that every one be entirely different from every one else to count as a distinct person of unique individuality. In other words, we may champion the distinctiveness of individuals, and their right to think and act in their own way, without requiring them to be utterly different from the rest, and having therefore to possess or to acquire characteristics that differentiate them from all other individuals. Nor does it mean that diversity is in itself a “good thing,” or that maximizing diversity maximizes the chance of discovering “truth,” as J.S. Mill argues in On Liberty. Besides, such a postulate also begs the further question of (a) whether there is such a thing as a single truth to be found, notably in politics; and (b) whether, even if there was, that it was obviously worth discovering, for its existence would imply that there was only one single correct course of action in politics and, hence, no room for plural choices.20 Third, and again contra Mill, the existence or promotion of diversity, by way of plural standpoints, does not produce a tolerant society, since it does not make people tolerant. Tolerance, it is true, makes the existence 19 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 3, n7. 20 I argue this point in some detail in Self-Enactment, 130–2.

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of plural voices possible; but, to claim the reverse is surely tantamount to putting the cart before the horse. It may well happen that to elevate diversity to an absolute value can have the opposite effect; that is, make people less tolerant. As Tocqueville has pointed out, encouraging controversy for its own sake frequently helps to polarize positions, and thus reduces the likelihood of tolerance or of bridging issues that divide people, by means of compromise.21 Besides, looking upon tolerance as a desirable and highly cherished feature of pluralist democracy – enabling people to agree to differ – is not the same as running it together with “pluralism” itself. To tolerate others different from ourselves is simply to put up with them, but it implies no necessary liking or respect for what they do or say. Pluralism, by contrast, does mean the recognition of multiple truths and their right to public expression. Unfortunately, tensions arise when many divergent truths vie for legal protection as rights and their formal recognition as such – not altogether surprisingly, since such formal and legal recognition in effect could amount to creating institutionally guaranteed autonomies within a state, conceivably with the moral backing of universal human rights. At least three parallel convictions give cause for worry. The first is the belief that the right to be different is entailed in basic human rights and, as such an entailment, must be democratically respected. The second conviction often coincides with demands for ”self-determination.” And part and parcel of these demands, usually, is the “nationalist” line that plural autonomies are the only answer to the question of how individuals and groups can be truly themselves in accordance with their own nature and destiny. And the third conviction embraces the idea that the celebration of difference – often linked now with the espousal of “multiculturalism” – is in principle fully compatible with calls for inclusive citizenship within “genuinely plural” democracies. Concerning the first conviction, Paul Hirst has drawn attention to seemingly irreconcilable claims, claims that defy inclusion within overarching supra-political principles, akin to those of the Natural Law tradition. Thus, rights claimed by rival segmental groups, such as gays and Christian fundamentalists, pro- and anti-choice crusaders on abortion, or Blacks and Hassids in Brooklyn, are radically different from the tradi-

21 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), 94, 287–93, 289, 435–6, 442.

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tionally claimed “rights of man.” For, unlike these, the newly claimed rights (of difference) cannot be universalized.22 The second conviction commonly finds expression in the combined demand for multiple autonomies and the diffusion of political power. Implicitly, this conviction often denies the absolute need for any central focus of power – a faith it shares with certain visions of Mill, along with J.G. Herder before, and socialist pluralists after Mill. Often, too, this faith includes the by-no-means related or self-evident belief – almost akin to wishful thinking – that diversity for the most part happens to be complementary and, hence, may serve dovetailing ends.23 The third conviction, in its most judicious, or least sanguine, form, is perhaps that of R.A. Dahl. Thinking expressly of pluralistically structured democracies, Dahl makes bridging proposals that seem well captured in his notion of “mutual guarantees” or that of “concessional associations.”24 Such bridging attempts may conceivably be more successful than the application of Natural Law principles, in that they almost definitionally acknowledge that, unlike claims invoking natural human rights, claims in support of segmental rights defy being universalized. However, to maintain as well that, because the issues demanding bridging invariably are fiercely contested by rival groups, governments must refrain from acting as umpires, is hardly a democratically acceptable entailment.25 To be sure, the recommended “hands off” method for dealing with deeply divergent pluralities may sit well with liberal philosophers; it may do so only dubiously, though, with liberal democrats, and not merely or necessarily those for whom the majoritarian canon is the defining characteristic of democracy. It is one thing to declare that there are rival positions that involve incommensurable understandings of what is right; but it is a very different thing to agree that such positions should 22 Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 65–70. 23 For a critical discussion of this point, see my Democratic Legitimacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), ch. 5 (“Political Principles and Plural Ends”); see also Richard Vernon, “Moral Pluralism and the Liberal Mind,” in J.M. Porter and Richard Vernon, eds, Unity Plurality and Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 143–61. 24 Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 120. 25 See n.22 and my Democratic Legitimacy, 85. See also Ralph Grillo, Pluralism and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

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be taken out of deliberative processes deciding upon choices that ought to be endorsed and implemented as democratic choices and political decisions that, as rights and duties, are legally binding upon authorities and citizens alike. It would seem, therefore, that although a pluralist democracy rejects a unitary or monistic structure of society and politics, it can hardly do without locks and dykes that keep the tidal power of multiple divergences within bounds, lest they threaten the very fabric of national cohesion. Rent by segments, each of which demands full recognition, a democratic state may easily find itself on the brink of disintegration. Likewise, while liberal principles, parallel to those of capitalism, hail contestation, in practice it is by no means the most treasured feature in business or democratic regimes as we know either. Evidently, capitalistic enterprises and democratic regimes have come to recognize that, if competition is uncontained, it can prove self-destructive to both.26 All this manifestly poses the problem of balancing the pulls of diffusion with those of centralization or, more simply, of relating parts and wholes. And any form of power-diffusion or power-sharing, as any reciprocal trade-offs, calls for the existence of procedural rules that enjoy broad acceptance as legally enforceable rules, if fragmentation, arbitrariness, and chaos are to be forestalled. Unfortunately, such rule-governed balancing is not easily forthcoming, largely because of two potentially clashing demands: equality of consideration and equality of implementation. Ironically, therefore, bridging rules may not themselves be free from inner conflicts. Despite or because of these inner tensions, democratic pluralism must guard against becoming trapped into a plurality of otherness that is totally unmindful of a common constituency as a demos, that is, of being, after all, a political entity – a realization not all that remote from Rousseau’s profound insight, referred to earlier. By and large, Western pluralist democracies have arguably been more successful than other regimes in meshing divergences of interest and outlook with a degree of solidarity of shared purpose and, thereby, in avoiding civic strife and societal fragmentation. To express such a belief, however, is not tantamount to proclaiming that their sources and levels of participation have ubiquitously managed to prevent the kind of pluralism that allows some individuals and groups far more power than “is good for their country 26 See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, third ed. (New York: Harper & Row), 1950, 80–1.

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or for democracy.”27 For example, in the United States, even though more than 70 per cent of the population is in favour of gun control, little or nothing has been governmentally achieved because a well-organized and well-connected minority has been able to use the institutional brakes of the system before any legislative policy could get under way. If, therefore, such tactics are not to arouse fatal distrust of pluralist democracy itself, they had better be more circumspect, lest they are seen as altogether crippling the aspirations of the popular majority.28 Plainly, in the nature of things, “equal consideration” – as the typifying requirement of a pluralist democracy – and “equal participation” – as the typifying requirement of grass-root democracy – lie within a field of competing tension as regards the range of public choices and their implementation. Directly or indirectly, therefore, the actualization or approximation of plural choices revolves around the extent to which and the manner in which equal consideration and equal participation are at all jointly realizable. And this question, I believe, is an integral part of the broader nexus in and through which democratic players interact in forging some link between segmental forms of participation and forms of participation within the national constituency as a whole – the topic of the next section.

particularism and generality It is easy enough to grant that democracy requires popular participation if citizens are to have an opportunity to have a say in what is decided in their name within the public domain. Clearly, by failing to yield this opportunity as a civic right, or at least to pay lip-service to such a right, any democratic regime would have a hard time validating the source of its existence, no less than of its authority in the exercise of political power. What, however, civic involvement ought to consist in, precisely, is by no means easy to determine. Political sociologists have had to learn in the course of arduous research what Rousseau could have told them some time earlier; namely, the lamentable fact that as regards both the selection of policy issues and their deliberation, most citizens are reluc27 John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London: Longman, 1973), x. See also Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 174. 28 Christiano, ibid., where he writes: “To be sure, pluralist institutions have a place in democratic society, but it must be a subordinate one.” See also ibid., 58–75.

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tant to invest time, thought, or personal commitment.29 Contrary to most classical scripts, accordingly, apparently there is not much support for the view that humans are by nature political animals. Moreover, researchers have found – what perhaps Rousseau did not know, but would have judged no less lamentable – that even those who wish to participate do so with little confidence about the effect of their participatory input. Full and equal political participation, it seems, is a beautiful ideal to behold, but somewhat ephemeral to transpose into practice. Still, some argue that “full and equal participation” could, under changed circumstances, prove more than a merely empty (though possibly useful) slogan. The changed conditions they for the most part have in mind usually consist of a switch of emphasis from participation at the level of the state to that within particular areas that actually are of interest to people. Indeed, champions of segmental participation go further, for they oppose it to the external and indirect participation of lobbying pressure groups. In their view, therefore, any real extension of democratic participation demands instead internal and individual involvement. And, for this purpose, they advocate the creation of multiple self-governing entities, in which women and men can perceive themselves as active individual members, whose participation is of as much value to themselves as it is to the pursuits they help to promote.30 The troubling aspect of this vision of particularist participation is a lack of clarity about the extent to which it relates to politically geared participation, since any link between parts and wholes remains obscure.31 Possibly, mediating links are rendered superfluous insofar as participation within segmental entities is itself considered political or, alternatively, is viewed as a perfect substitute for participation at the “somewhat remote” level of the state or general constituency. Moreover, because it can serve as a perfect substitute, there is no reason why segmental participation could not provide a most useful training experience for participation at the state level. On this argument, the justification for segmental participation seems intended to cut both ways. If so, it not only overstates its case, but also threatens to confuse the issue altogether. For, clearly, claiming the training aspect is tanta29 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, 251; Letters from the Mountain, Oeuvres, iii, 814–15. 30 See my Democratic Legitimacy, ch. 8. I also return to this point in chapters 8 and 9. 31 I elaborate this point of criticism in ch. 9.

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mount to admitting that there is room for participation at the national level, which, in the first part of the argument, was though both unrealistic and unnecessary. On closer reading, however, the “admission” does not amount to much, for it unmistakably implies that the nature of participation at each level is fundamentally of the same kind, one being as political as the other. All that is different, accordingly, is essentially a matter of size. Yet, once the juxtaposition of the two levels assumes in effect the form of a merely quantitative more or less – with the quality of participation at both being thought identical – the idea of a distinctly public or general dimension of the state is drained of all meaning. Moreover, on the assumption of qualitative identity it follows not only that experience gained at the segmental level is eminently transferable to the central level but also that either level is equally capable of validating democracy as a political regime. If anything, it could be (and has been) claimed that segmental participation was in a better position to do so, since its democratic credentials are so much stronger by virtue of the far greater intensity of people’s internal involvement. Normatively speaking, macro-participation (at the national level) is accordingly presented as derived from micro-participation (at the segmental level), which ought to precede the former. In other words, we become better citizens by having been active members of segmental groups or organizations. Despite variations of emphasis, proponents of this normative interpretation of participatory democracy tend to agree that involvement in segmental group decisions, whether on working conditions, health, the environment, or education, simultaneously promotes overall civic virtues. Acquiring participatory proficiency, members of such groups are held to become “more self-confident, politically aware citizens,” and are therefore going to shape a country’s policies “in accordance with democratic ideals.”32 A similar line of argument is favoured by participationists in support of variants of guild socialism and market socialism and, if I understand their argument correctly, appears even more puzzling. For, while the state is withered out and assimilated to micro-institutions, the notion of citizenship at the national level is massively reinforced.33 And, as in 32 D.F. Thompson, The Democratic Citizen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 182. 33 See, for example, David Miller, Market, State, and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 228–45.

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participatory theories that equate the democratization of the workplace in the factory or the office with the democratization of the political domain as a whole, so most proponents of the “citizenship” argument are not so much extending democracy as they are extending politics by extending the latter’s range of application. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear how, and in what sense, this extension of the political democratizes power or intelligibly augments its legitimate exercise. It does, however, clearly enough, signal a radical shift of thinking about parts and wholes that is potentially worrisome, chiefly because it tends to blur distinctions that are of vital importance if conflations are to be eschewed. First, the extension of the political in this context obscures the difference between the internal structuring of the parts and their external location in the whole. So doing, it misleadingly suggests that segmental participation dovetails perfectly with participation at national levels. Second, it blurs the degree to which ends and commitments within the private or business realm diverge from those within realms of public concerns and distinctly political activities. And third, although even more disturbing, perhaps, the shift fails to disclose the nature of mediation between the particular and the general – if it sees any need at all for such mediation. Plainly, once we widen the meaning of the political to include, say, business corporations, because they comprise patterns of hierarchy and power, or because their operations impinge on society at large, there is nothing left needing mediation.34 I concede that there is much to be said for the greater diffusion of participatory power and for the strengthening of plural autonomies. At the same time, I doubt whether democracy benefits from leaving wide open the question of a person’s civic self-understanding, and the manner in which it can find participatory expression within the general constituency of a societal whole. For, however intense participation is at particularist levels, it hardly is likely to be continuous with a sense of overall citizenship, unless such segmental participation is held to displace the general level of civic activity in the projected form of democracy. Nor is it likely that attempts in the direction of a total displacement could escape endless bickering and frequent deadlocks, leading to a situation reminiscent of the demise of democracy in Weimar Germany in the nineteen-thirties. Crises of this magnitude cannot but cumulatively invite further bureaucratic centralization, elitist fixings, and rule by

34 I return to this point in ch. 9, where it forms one of the central themes.

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decrees, producing a variant of democracy that is scarcely distinguishable from autocratic dictatorship.35 Undue emphasis on segmental participation could therefore have the effect that, far from purifying democratic politics – as its proponents think and claim – it could sooner bring about the avoidance of politics tout court.36 Admittedly, the role diverse forms of participation might play within new forms or expressions of democracy is an issue about which there is no lack of controversy. On one end of the spectrum it is hailed as the guardian of inclusive citizenship, without which individual needs as much as group interests would fail to be uncovered and articulated. On the opposite end, however, proliferation of participatory activities and organizations is dismissed as a surplus of democracy, liable to do more harm than good by kindling acrimony, if not militant strife. Hence, instead of bridging differences, massive participation could cause their permanent entrenchment.37 Up to a point, these disparate assessments of intense participation stem from divergent visions of democracy itself, such as those of constitutive oneness of rulers and ruled versus those of constitutive duality or of the total absence of unifying presuppositions altogether. Participation on the assumption of constitutive oneness might then translate into forms of co-determination over a wide area of concerns – especially if it is presumed that experience in any one area is readily transferable to any other. Moreover, “oneness” might be taken to imply a high degree of inherently shared beliefs regarding societal needs, and also of functional complementarity all-round. Critics of the assumption of constitutive oneness maintain, by contrast, that civic participation works best with no consensual ethos being antecedently insisted upon. And, not infrequently, this position is combined with a call for realism that recognizes the limits of what may reasonably be expected or demanded from citizens in a democracy. Notably, the view that passivity should not be taken for dissatisfaction 35 See Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), esp. ch. 1 and appendix 1. 36 I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 233. 37 See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Cf., however David Miller, citing I. Janis, Group-think, in Market, State, and Community, 270; he particularly warns against the danger of moralizing collective decisions in the manner of a “general will” as Rousseau presents it in his metaphysical moods.

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is accorded prominence; in other words, a degree of political apathy should be accepted as normal, and not as a mounting sense of civic discontent. Most people, it is then argued, quite naturally prefer less intense involvement, especially within the general constituency, insofar as its concerns transcend their personal, local, or professional preoccupations.38 While the extension of the popular franchise has understandably raised ample participatory expectations, it seems in reality to have done little to reduce citizens’ uncertainty about what precisely they are to participate in, or how, directly or indirectly, individually or within and through groups, in order to alter the diffusion of political power. What, instead, emerges ever more markedly, distressingly or not, is that there is not much ground for optimism in assuming that preoccupation with segmental concerns is likely to narrow the gap between parts and wholes, and, thereby, cause the overall politicization of society in the form of an augmented sense of democratic citizenship.

repatriating democracy The central thrust of the book so far has seemingly been in two opposite directions. For, on the one hand, it has pleaded for dimming the contrast frequently drawn between normative political theory and empirical political science or political sociology; while, on the other, it has called for a sharper distinction, by putting emphasis on democracy as a political activity in its own right rather than on its existence as an offspring of extra- or supra-political areas of essentially philosophical precepts or theorems. I say “seemingly opposite,” because what I am stressing is not opposition but integral distinctness. The emphasis on distinctness is to make clear again that political democracy involves no direct translation of philosophical principles into policy implementation. Any piece of political enactment, that is to say, is not the work of epistemic, ethical, or theological truth claims, but rather the outcome of forms of deliberation and validation sui generis, inseparable from opinions, felt needs, and preferred values, publicly expressed and procedurally sanctioned, within a forum identified with a political forum, no more and no less. On this view, a politics of indisputable truth or knowledge claims, or of the authorities making them, as distinct from challengeable positions 38 See, for example, W.H. Morris Jones, “In Defence of Apathy: Some Doubts on the Duty to Vote,” Political Studies, 2 (1954), 25–37.

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and conditional authorities, were it at all realizable, could not be a politics of democracy. In essence, this emphasis amounts to a sort of repatriation of politics from where it is occasionally straying to a locale that is recognizably political within common understandings among modern citizens, notably democratic citizens. For only then are political norms the creation of institutions, whose authority is conditional upon recurrent electoral and procedural acts of endorsement. At the same time, neither the democratic repatriation nor the democratic conditionality in the exercise of political power is designed to impugn moral values or to cast doubt on the relevance of an ethical sense of commitment to political kinds of conduct. Were this not so, it would surely be pointless to stress the need for an intrinsic continuum between electoral promises and procedural implementations. Likewise, without the recognition of self-sustaining moral standards, any conception of political legitimacy would be empty and begging for meaning. All that is intended, therefore, by using the notion of repatriation, is to affirm that intrinsic rightness, per se, would not do as a substitute for political rightness. For, whereas intrinsic rightness is definitionally beyond challenge and thus prefigures democratically generated norms, political rightness follows specifically and conditionally agreed-upon scripts and processes – at any rate within a politics that rests on recognizably public acts of authentication. Hence, if intrinsic precepts are to be politically adopted, they must, on this argument, undergo a certain political (democratic) “refraction” in the course of public debate, potential opposition, and acts of discursive challenge of all kinds, before reaching the stage of rightful implementation. In this connection, it may be of interest to mention that Jürgen Habermas has come to recognize that directly translating extra-political precepts and theories into acts of democratic-political “will-formation” could prove “disastrous for political practice.”39 If there is to be any interlacing between philosophy and politics, therefore, what I am calling “refraction” had better be sharply distinguished from “assimilation.” Otherwise, democratic validation might court the risk of being premised on the supremacy of some extra-politi39 Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1997), 42, 61. See also my “Norms, Procedures, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Studies 40 (1992), 659–78.

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cal authority that is democratically non-answerable or altogether beyond public challenge of any kind. In this event, what occurs could be described as a form of “category reversal” of that idea, according to which citizens themselves, directly or indirectly, enact the norms that define, regulate, and justify their membership of that associative political culture known as democracy. To be sure, the outcome of democratic procedures is an inherently contingent rightness, whose discontinuity with any intrinsic or absolute moral rightness is always a real possibility. But such, for better or worse, is the scope and the limit of a political rightness that issues from strictly democratic processes. While this conclusion plainly favours the distinctness of political rightness under democracy, the autonomy and contingency it definitionally entails should not be confused (as I intimated earlier) with the apotheosis of nihilism or some variant of unprincipled ad hocism. Precisely for this reason, I do not wish to exclude refracted ethical-philosophical theorems as sources, by way of evaluative prisms, from the assessment of competing claims or the appraisal of the extent to which there is a recognizably ethical continuum between ends and means in the choice of projected policies. By the same token, while refracted standards, pressed into the service of democratic processes, are not the same as strictly moral standards, they must nevertheless possess qualities of sanctioning or “consecrating” force to be at all operational as democratic standards by way of normative justifications of political agency that aspire to acceptance as broadly principled conduct. It follows, therefore, that democracy, as a normative doctrine, is confronted with two chief dangers. One is the tendency to super-moralize it to an extent that, by stretching its participatory requirements beyond the politically attainable, undermines its operational credibility. The opposite danger is the tendency to exmoralize it, by claiming that civic relations are in essence, like market relations, self-regulatory and, as such, perfectly viable, without principled constraints or regulatory standards of any sort. Patently, both dangers demand to be taken seriously, for they have been known to imperil the very foundations of democratic regimes. Finally, but, I feel, no less fundamentally, the question presents itself whether democratic participation needs to be tempered with democratic vigilance (by way of multiple checks and balances) to make governmental accountability at all workable. Given that the answer is in the affirmative, there arises at some point the necessity to weigh the virtues of full and equal participation against the abandonment of

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watchfulness and “distance.” Fellow citizens may be buddies, but personal friendship does not define citizenship.40 Civic relations involve a mutuality that is neither personal nor direct, but, at heart, institutionally mediated. And just as the presumed oneness of rules and ruled is liable to impede the working of political accountability, so the presumed oneness of public and private relations is liable to negate the integrity of political governance. Political participation should certainly be guarded as a democratic civic right; it should not, however, entail the discarding of civic vigilance, if mistakes and wrongdoings are to be exposed early enough to forestall massive disillusionment with politics as such. Above all, the guarding and the exposing are to serve as a constant reminder to the visible governing players, as much as to the less visible, but no less influential, ones within government bureaucracies, that the right to exercise power is a contingent right. All in all, regardless of its conceptual or organizational variant, democracy presents a formidable challenge that calls for assorted balances if it is to be viewed as a passable road to an equitably inclusive kind of citizenship and a discursively open society. The foregoing pages touched on a number of such balances, notably those between electoral and procedural validation, monism and pluralism, participation and accountability, and trust and distrust. Undeniably, striking any of these balances is like walking a tightrope. However, a salient point of these concluding remarks has been to reiterate that insofar as democracy (no matter how defined precisely) is a mediated institution of the many, and not a friendship club, marked by the directness and intimacy of the few, it cannot do without formal safeguards intended to prevent rampant nepotism and reckless irresponsibility. And, in turn, such safeguards cannot dispense with legal constraints or with retaining elements of adversariness, associated with the we-they syndrome entering the relation between the governed and the governing. It is because of this seeming necessity that “duality” rather than “oneness” has been put forward as the preferred characteristic of a democratic regime.

40 For a fascinating discussion of this point, see Richard Vernon, Friends , Citizens, Strangers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), esp. 4–14, 81–97. Regarding the emphasis on “equality of consideration” and “equality of participation,” see E. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality,” Ethics 109 (1999), 287–337, esp. 312–13.

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Therefore, as long as no better method of governance that manages to combine the existence of political rule with the conditional exercise of power seems available, a degree of adversariness may have to be the price that has to be paid for an overall political climate of lawfulness that preserves a predictable measure of reciprocal rights and freedoms amidst a nuanced expression of majoritarianism. Similarly, the problematically democratic attempt to reconcile “equal consideration” with “equal participation,” calls (we have found) for intricate mediating forms of nuanced majoritarianism, tempered with no less judiciously selected types of plural balancing; and all the more so should we come to aspire to a democracy that seeks to combine a plurality of aims and interests with the mindfulness of a cohesive societal purpose.

8

Hidden Powers and Odd Allies: Lobbyists and Bureaucrats

Allies: Lobbyists and Bureaucrats

before going into the meat of this chapter’s twofold concerns, I should like to make sure that its title is not misconstrued. For one thing, by “hidden” I am not implying that leading lobbyists and top bureaucrats engage in practices that are routinely devious or stealthily sinister – even though suspicions of that nature are not unknown, notably among those identifying democracy with an open society. For another thing, linking them is not to suggest that, in themselves, they are functionally related or operationally interchangeable. However, what segmental lobbyists and national bureaucrats do have in common is that they are a good deal less visible than politicians, despite being potentially in a position of exercising a political influence that is by no means negligible. Furthermore, insofar as advocacy groups of special interests are not infrequently the creation of the bureaucracy, they are not only thus connected, but form a close network that, alas, is also commonly hidden from the public eye.

interest groups and democracy In continuity with the previous chapter, I may start by asking why the emergence of interest groups has met with a less than sympathetic reception by many democrats. I believe that a large part of the answer must be sought within the prevailing norms and values among the Western societies in which modern notions of democracy first came into being. For here it has chiefly been associated with the formation of a common will, whose origin was seen to rest with the many. Participation in this formation has, in turn, been viewed as a matter of right by each citizen as an identifiable individual. Even where the majority principle was invoked as a sufficient political sanction for governmental deci-

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sions, a majority was taken to mean the aggregate of individuals in numerical superiority. In essence, this conception of democracy underlaid the constitution of the American Republic. James Madison, in his often-quoted Tenth Essay in the Federalist, while conceding the inevitable existence of what he called “factions,” nonetheless hoped that the constitution would “break and control the violence of factions,” describing them as a dangerous vice and one of the most serious threats to popular government. In short, sectional factions were held to be incompatible with a viable democracy. This was the prevalent public philosophy in the United States and, for the most part, in Canada, throughout the nineteenth century, which found reflection in many official pronouncements and in enactments such as the anti-trust laws, judicial verdicts, newspaper editorials, and political rhetoric generally. To be sure, there were variations of emphasis and motivation, but underlying them was a common hostility to special interest groups. Collectivist democrats shared this revulsion toward organized segmental groups intervening between the people as a whole and its representative government. It was firmly held that such groups could only damage, or at least impede, the expression of the popular will. Subsequent developments of pluralism, affirming the need for the interaction of diverse special interests, were therefore equally repugnant to individualist and collectivist-populist democrats alike. It could of course be argued that some form of group-democracy had to emerge, quite logically, out of its individualist predecessor, insofar as individuals are deemed to be free to band together to further those individual interests that they (consciously) share with others. After all, the freedom to associate with others has always been claimed as a major credal principle, at least within liberal variants of democracy. Authoritarian and conservative views of government, on the other hand, have displayed a somewhat more consistent aversion to sectional pressure groups, since they typically viewed political authority as impervious to, as well as inherently transcending, any sectional pressures from outside. All the same, the twentieth century has witnessed a thorough reappraisal of the place and function of segmental groups in mainstream democracies. Not surprisingly, perhaps, American studies have led the way. I say “not surprisingly,” because, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in the preceding century, Americans are almost compulsive joiners.1 A no less plausible reason for sectional diffusion may, however, 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), i, 193.

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have been the party system peculiar to the United States, and the legaloperational ramifications of the American Constitution. Moreover, the idea of individuals wanting to associate in the pursuit of shared interests was not unfamiliar, a good deal earlier, to leading writers of the European Enlightenment. For, with all their emphasis on self-enactment and self-thinking, they never lost sight of the fact that individual selves were needy (bedürftige) creatures who, without the help of others, would achieve very little indeed.2 Even Rousseau, who intensely disliked the diffusion of sectional interests, conceded that human interests were diverse and sharply divergent, acknowledging that “there are a hundred thousand whose interests acutely conflict, for every two men whose interests coincide.”3 He knew and stressed, therefore, that, were this not so, the central problem of politics would either not have arisen at all or would have been resolved long ago.4 Furthermore, whereas the liberal conception of democracy generally put a premium on minimal government direction, the economic depression preceding World War ii has given rise to budgetary economic intervention and direct public works policies, such as the New Deal in America and the Depressed Areas policies in Britain. The experience of War Economics has further helped to intensify governmental intervention by price support policies, central planning, redistributive taxation, and other fiscal measures and monetary policies. In short, there has been a marked change in the nature and scope of governmental activity, with the result that government action has begun to impinge on an ever widening spectrum of social and economic concerns; this was not the case when democracy took shape in the nineteenth century and before. This growing intrusion of governments into the field of social, professional, and business activities could not fail to trigger reactions by affected private interests, encouraging their articulation and organized aggregation. The question that particularly concerns us in this section is how this mounting articulation and aggregation of segmental interests has 2 This was certainly evident in the thinking of leading philosophers of the German Enlightenment, such as Thomasius and Kant. For more on this point, see my Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), esp. 130–1 and 182–3. 3 J.-J. Rousseau, Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau (New York: Burt Franklin, 1767, reprint 1972), ii, 138. 4 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 3, n7.

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assisted or hampered the democratization of (industrial) society. No doubt, to pose the question in this way begs the more fundamental matter as to what critical weight is attached to which component of democracy. For example, if popular representation is viewed as a crucial ingredient of democracy, should we regard lobbying groups of affected interests as functional or disfunctional? Surely, if such groups make fully manifest what so far has only been a latent but unrepresented interest, they should be welcomed as serving a positive function. The trouble with this kind of answer is that it tacitly assumes that democracy invariably benefits from more prolific representation, but diversity (we have noted) may involve disintegrating, as well as integrative or complementary, functions. Alternatively, given that democracy is conceptually identified primarily with a majoritarian system, should interest groups resting on a large membership be seen as most functional in promoting democratic practices? As we know, this is not necessarily the case. A trade union, for example, with an impressively inclusive membership, may seek to promote ends that only remotely, if at all, can be interpreted as economic ends, and that sharply conflict with what the majority of people seem to want. It is true that, particularly in a democracy, numbers as such may be far from insignificant, especially before elections, and especially if they can tip the balance of a ruling party’s fate; but, broadly speaking neither the size of membership behind lobbying agents nor even the actual content of what they are pressing has as much bearing on the fortunes of a democratic regime as the methods that lobbyists use, and these, arguably, have more to do with the extent that accepted “rules of the game” are observed or the overall political ethos of a democracy is upheld, than with sheer numbers. And, if so, it seems that, in the final analysis, “functionality” is itself a dependent variable, hinging on evaluative criteria that in reality are strictly external to the issue of lobbying interest groups per se.

locating interest groups Evidently, to assess the validity of the last statement at all calls for a closer characterization of the “what” of segmental interests and their place within society at large. I might therefore begin by distinguishing a group’s internal goals from its external role. Political functions, we have noted, may sometimes be closely related to political purposes, especially by the members of an interest group,

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although, viewed objectively, a group’s function in the political system may turn out to be quite different from that envisaged or indeed intended by its members. Moreover, what is involved are not purposes, intentions, causes, or interests, as such, since any and all of these take on in this event the form of specific organizations; they are, that is, group aggregations, with registered offices, their own constitution, executive committees, public spokespersons, and so on. So what complicates the issue of the relation between internal goals and external functions is the existence of such organized and officially recognized entities together with the existence of purposes and interests that assume no organized form. For it poses the additional problem of how to assess their representative force vis-à-vis that of organized lobbying groups, as well as their own functional role within a pluralist democracy. Surely, it would impair the credibility of plural representation as its principal political justification if it denied representative consideration to interests because they fail to coincide with such organized pressure groups. And it would hardly help to invoke the notion of a “potential interest,” at any rate in the sense that it has been put forward by group theorists, such as David Truman.5 since it offers no criteria as to the circumstances under which latency becomes actuality. There is, however, the possibility of another discrepancy, such as that between a group’s original purposes and the nature of the lobbying activity in which it happens to get involved. In this event, though, the group would implicitly be an organized, as well as existing, interest group and not a merely potential one. For example, an organized natural history association may make it its purpose to feed birds during the winter – clearly, not a recognizably political goal. Yet to achieve its goal, it may have to demand that a path is kept free, and this demand could bring it face to face with regulations, bylaws, and possibly even institutional opposition by other interest groups, or legally recognized and publicly sanctioned organizations. Thus, while it had not the slightest political aspirations, such an interest group may become enmeshed in various forms of political undertakings. In a sense, they might qualify for the application of the concept of latency, but it would be a decidedly 5 I am referring to David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), 37, where he defines an interest group as “a shared attitude” that makes certain claims upon other groups in society; and a political interest group as one “that makes claims through or upon the institutions of government.” But it is far from clear what “potential groups” are.

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political latency within an actual interest group, and hence again, an altogether different one from that envisaged in Truman’s “potential interest” group. Perhaps it also needs mentioning that lobbying groups seeking to exert political influence operate not only outside government bodies but also within them. There may be interests that particular government departments wish to have formally endorsed. At times, such interests overlap with essentially administrative concerns – something to be revisited in the second part of this chapter. I mention it here because it highlights a central problem common to both parts: the degree of neutrality of the state as a public authority, if not its definitional status as a transcendent “interest” that surpasses all segmental interest groups – a claim that is generally denied by interest group theorists.6 The reasons for it being a central problem are not hard to envision. Organized lobbying groups within and outside the governmental domain frequently clash, and not rarely to an extent that renders bargaining or mutual trade-offs operationally difficult, if not impossible; all the more so when groups claim to fully conform to the public interest to justify their lobbying activities. And while such claims may be made in good faith, more often than not they are in truth self-serving. Still, the very fact that they are made rather strongly suggests that, notwithstanding interest group theories about the unreality of a “public interest,” lobbying groups find it inopportune to stake claims wholly in the form of sectional demands. Public support, they evidently know, is more likely to be forthcoming if they do not appear to be seeking benefits purely for themselves. Nevertheless, practically all organized interest groups do perform some function within the overall social system, whatever their particular purposes are, so that, broadly speaking, lobbying organizations are also special function groups. Among them it is not uncommon to distinguish between so-called “spokesperson” groups, such as those of farmers or autoworkers, maintaining permanent lobbying agents, whose task is to represent and defend their sectional concerns, and “promotional” groups that foster causes sporadically by seeking to influence public

6 In the denigration of the notion of a public or national interest Arthur F. Bentley, in The Process of Government (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1949) and his followers lead the way.

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opinion as, for example, nature conservation organizations or those protecting civil liberties.7 Another way to classify interest groups may be in terms of either numerical or financial strength. Thus, we could contrast groups rich in membership, yet poor in funds, with those that have few members but ample funds. Or, again, we could point to groups that have good elite connections as opposed to those having no such links. The range of combinations is formidable, whether or not such classifications ever provide much analytical insight into the inner workings of groups or the external methods of lobbying they employ. And this would be true of employers as much as of employee organizations, the professions, such as lawyers, physicians, or accountants, or essentially non-economic (cultural) organizations such as those of writers, artists, and church officials. Contexts are of relevance here insofar as interest groups in different countries or social systems may carry the same name even though they are differently structured or differently oriented toward the political system in which they operate. Trade unions in Britain, for example, are strikingly different from those in the u.s.a., France, Germany, or Israel. Or, again, cultural organizations, such as those of the churches, play quite significant political roles in certain systems, at times even directly around or within political parties. Unfortunately, the precise locating source of any group interest is as ambiguous as its “social basis” or, for that matter, its exact impact on other groups or the political process as a whole. And simply to apply the concept of “interaction” to group interrelations yields no more light, whatever heat it succeeds in engendering in most group interest theories. Presumably, this might be so because a number of often heterogeneous, overlapping, and even conflicting elements comprise the range of particular group interests. A worker, as a trade union member, undoubtedly shares in this capacity a number of tangible interests with his fellow workers; but this does not stop a variety of his other interests to differ or even to clash. Every classification in terms of a group’s principal locating source will, therefore, inevitably involve simplifications of varying magnitudes. Many interests, we observed earlier, do not find expression in formalized groups, while those that do need not seek political ends by way of representation, pressure, or influence. In most cases they are associa7 See, for example, Allen Potter, Organized Groups in British National Policies (London: Faber, 1961), esp. chs 5 and 7.

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tions pursuing specific goals for a limited time, and dissolve once their objectives have been attained. By contrast, groups sharing religious, ethnic, or economic characteristics, having an abidingly compelling reason for being heard in the political councils of a nation, will choose to establish long-lasting organizations. Commonly, their members will pay regular dues and display a marked loyalty to their leaders and their official objectives. So-called “political action groups” can be placed somewhat in-between, and thus share the transient character of singlepurpose groups, yet differ from them in being less confined to a single objective and, thereby, usually have greater permanence. Not rarely, however, any type of group, once formed and having attained a degree of membership cohesion, will tend to maintain its organization by adopting new goals or causes to pursue. Sociologists refer to this tendency as the impulse for goal replacement, and ascribe it to the trait of any organization. As with organizations as a whole, so operative terms such as “consultation” are interpreted differently in different political systems. Consultation, prevalent in the American system, for example, means that government authorities will find out the views or concerns of relevant interest groups before making a decision that is likely to impinge on their members’ vital pursuits. And while the response of the groups is not binding on the authorities, their advice, if accepted and turned into formal policy, is then in its enactment and administration fully the responsibility of the particular government department. In the practice followed in Britain, on the other hand, to take the example of its National Health Service, enacted in 1946, consultation with the British Medical Association ensued only after the bill was already safely under way. Yet, the British government called upon the medical profession to share in the administration of the law and assume responsibility for its implementation together with the government.8 Despite such differences, governments in both cases are actors in their own right, taking or ignoring advice tendered to them and, as a result, may influence the influencers as much as being influenced by them. If so, it is surely misleading to project governments, subject to 8 See in particular on this issue, Harry Eckstein, The English Health Service (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958) and Pressure Group Politics: The Case of the British Medical Association, and a succinct discussion of the issue in Salvatore G. Rotella, “A Note on some Limitations to the General Theory of Pressure Group Politics,” Il politico, 26 (1961), 154–9.

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pressures by lobbying agents, as “victims,” being routinely pushed and shoved about by powerful interest groups, however hidden negotiations between groups and governments might be in particular instances. Clearly, as long as governments are expected to provide guidance and leadership, they must retain the authority to act independently. Otherwise they will cease to be perceived as governments, in the democratic or any other recognizable sense. This said, it must nevertheless be admitted that governments that pursue policies that run altogether counter to articulate and highly influential interests, and do so over stretches of time, court a risk that, in reality, is rarely, if ever, taken lightly, especially by democratic governments.

interest group theorizing This part of the chapter is intended chiefly as an overview of lobbying practices, and makes no claim to analytic depth. Besides, anything of that nature would, apart from demanding more space, entangle the reader in a mass of definitional controversies which, while of possible interest to the specialist in this field, would impose an undue strain upon students seeking to explore above all the linkage between public servants and private-interest promoters, and the potentially problematic effect of this linkage on principles of political governance. The theoretical study of interest groups is commonly traced to the appearance of Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908). Bentley’s book received relatively little attention until several decades later when it was resurrected by a number of political behaviourists, notably David Truman. Bentley’s view was that the political process is correctly understood as the interaction of interest groups continuously pressing against each other. “The whole social life in all its phases can be stated in such groups of active men, indeed must be stated in that way if a useful analysis is to be had.”9 Ideas, ideals, feelings, or reasoning Bentley calls “spooks,” without denying that they may have a role to play in other disciplines, notably psychology. Political science, however, in its present state, may either ignore them as of no account or take them to be reducible to groups and their pressure.10 He has little more use for the notion of statehood, regarding it to be “no factor” in his investigation which, he claims, is exclusively concerned with the processes within what is known 9 Bentley, The Process of Government, 204, 218. 10 Bentley, ibid., 445.

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as the state.11 Similarly “government” is for Bentley just another group, albeit one that holds “the balance between conflicting interests … enforcing restraints on their activities in the political field.”12 He offers three views of what sort of group government is, but it is not easy to discover which view he ultimately settles for, apart from demarcating its operational function within the political process as a whole. As a political theory, despite its quasi-methodological sophistication, its sweepingly reductionist thrust seems a rather gigantic goad to muddled thinking. David Truman, who saw himself merely “elaborating … Bentley’s pioneering work,” fortunately did little of this sort, except in reiterating that interest groups are “very important” in the political process “in terms of group patterns.”13 The divergences from Bentley are too frequent and too important to be easily discounted. His book, in view of this, can claim considerable merit as an account of the role of organized groups in American political life. If it is a development of Bentley’s work at all, it is merely that of its appendix, in which Bentley succeeds in being less fuzzy about his basic theoretical concepts. Apart from Truman’s revival of Bentley’s treatise, the study of organized lobbying and the role it plays in politics has engaged political scientists who questioned the purely formal-legal approach to political institutions. Among these, George Catlin, G.D.H. Cole, Harold Laski, Robert MacIver, and Harold Lasswell figure most prominently. Few, however, were as successful in meshing lucid theory construction with empirical findings as E. Pendleton Herring in his deservedly influential Group Representation Before Congress (1929). Above all, it pioneered in its study of some hundred formal group organizations an approach to lobbying methods that viewed the “how” aspect as part and parcel of the cultural matrix of a society and its source in and through the dimension of historical habits of thinking and acting. In so doing, it avoided exaggerating the power of pressure groups in their dealings with governmental decision makers. For, viewing the subject from a broader perspective, Herring provided ample evidence that lobbyists are a great deal less influential than they are often made out to be and, instead, a great deal more dependent on the good will of the elected politicians, their administrative apparatus, and “what is done” per se. 11 Ibid., 263. 12 Ibid., 235. 13 D. Truman, The Governmental Process, 14, 47.

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No doubt, there may be situations in which the negotiating powers of lobbyists diverge from Herring’s portrayal. Yet, to concede this possibility manifestly does not invalidate the view that, in most actual instances, it is the overall pattern of traditional manners of social and political acting, within which pressure groups operate, that matters most. In other words, the methods lobbyists use are to a significant extent a reflection of the general public ethos in which they are enmeshed. Hence, societies in which governments are habitually inefficient, unless bribery is resorted to, will virtually demand that lobbying agents use methods that, not to put too fine a point upon it, are utterly corrupt. Finally, too, it may need stressing once again that, in the absence of effective interests groups, interests may be overlooked. Governments are not omniscient; if interests fail to take on a form in which they are tangibly perceivable, they may well be ignored at the drafting stage of a bill, in its passing into law, or in its implementation when passed. Clearly, there is little point in speaking of countervailing pressures, or of their ensuring a balance of conflicting interests, if interests simply have no voice. At the same time it should be borne in mind that whatever balance government organs are able to produce is not necessarily tantamount to a resolution of existing conflicts. Furthermore, if the assumption of the determining importance of environmental culture-elements is valid, governments, too, cannot be isolated from the overall social climate or given culture in which they operate. Hence, their ability to effect compromise solutions, for example, is sizably contingent on prevailing attitudinal characteristics, which, analytically speaking, are extraneous to governmental efforts in this direction as much as to the task of conflict resolution itself, for both critically depend upon people’s readiness to make concessions in one form or another. Not rarely the holders of conflictual interests are themselves so imbued by the widely prevalent conciliatory mode of thinking that the degree of such internalization induces them to adopt an accommodating stance. Presumably convinced, as a result, that single-minded ruthlessness simply does not pay off, their culturally generated dispositions and plain material selfinterest closely interlock. Funeral directors, for example, although interested in keeping busy, would, given such an ethos, be most reluctant to advocate the poisoning of crops or the mercy-killing of chronically ill patients.

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I return to the issue of governmental balancing in the next chapter, and to that of the “how” of political mediation generally, to underscore the thesis that any such practices are doubtfully detachable from broadly societal culture patterns at any time. Evidently, normative parallels are involved here.

the proliferation of bureaucracy The preceding chapter touched on the growing bureaucratization of social and political life and, with it, the emergence of a highly professionalized Public Service. In doing so, it hinted at the functional demarcation problems between politicians and bureaucrats, to which the mounting degree of administrative specialization, in conjunction with the ever-widening extent of bureaucratic rule application, managed to lead, notably within regimes that uphold democratic norms. Now, to the student new to the subject, the immense literature on the nature and development of modern bureaucracy cannot but be dauntingly bewildering. To him or her, Reinhard Bendix’s overview of the subject, together with its comprehensive, yet select, bibliography, will therefore prove richly rewarding.14 In what is to follow I focus essentially on two things: first, an account of its beginnings in modernity as an academic discipline; and second, though most centrally, on Max Weber’s analysis, with its particular emphasis on the potentially enigmatic ambivalence within modern bureaucracy: its liberalizing side, on the one hand, and its (often hidden) coerciveness, on the other.15 I say “enigmatic” because this ambivalence at times prompts the question of how public or serving the Public Service really is.

public administration as an academic discipline The systematic study of modern bureaucracy is generally (and justifiably) associated with the name of Max Weber (1864–1920). Its very origin as a (learnable) university discipline is, however, of older vintage, in 14 Reinhard Bendix, “Bureaucracy,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan & Free Press, 1968), 206–19. 15 See Bendix, Max Weber (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962), 423–7.

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that it is traceable to a now little known political jurist, Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Frequently acclaimed as the father of the German Enlightenment, he closely linked the epoch with the emergence of a Public Service, professionally qualified to act within a framework of performative rules sui generis. Thomasius’s ideas on public administration took shape within an essentially secular atmosphere, created notably by Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli (1625) and Samuel Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium (1672). He had become one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the latter by the time he acquired his doctorate in 1678. Pufendorf, in turn, thought no less highly of Thomasius. “You have the courage,” he wrote to him, “to put in print views which I wholly share, but which I did not have the nerve to express publicly.”16 Pufendorf also assisted Thomasius, persecuted for his “heretical views” at the university of Leipzig, to be invited to come to Halle (in 1690), which, as a newly created university, became the chief training centre for the emergent civil service in Prussia – soon to be known as a model of public administration,17 In particular, the reputation of Thomasius’s teaching and his publications largely helped to make Halle famous at the time for its department of administrative studies. However more profoundly Leibniz’s philosophy was to determine the intellectual orientation of the age, its mountingly critical temper of thought owed its existence before Kant largely to Thomasius. And whereas Leibniz addressed his ideas chiefly to the politically mighty and influential through the channels of scientific journals and learned societies, disregarding the as yet virtually inarticulate sphere of public opinion, Thomasius employed the weapons of wit and satire in his journalistic attempts to arouse a critical awareness among a broader cross-section of the population. And contrary to what some “realists” might have expected, it was Thomasius who achieved the more tangible results in combatting prejudice and the fog of ignorance that was enveloping the majority of his contemporaries.18 Free enquiry was his first demand. The search for knowledge must not be impeded by undue concern for estab16 Emil Gigas, Briefe Samuel Pufendorfs an Christian Thomasius (1897). The letter is dated Berlin, 25 February 1688. 17 Dernburg, Thomasius und die Stiftung der Universität Halle (Halle, 1865), 4. See also G. Schmoller, “Preussischer Beamtenstand unter Friedrich Wilhelm i,” Preussische Jahrbücher, 26 (1870), 148. 18 Regarding the points of contact and divergence between Leibniz and Thomasius, see Karl Biedermann, “Zwei berühmte Leipziger,” Westermann’s Monatshefte 56 (1884), 363–70.

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lished beliefs and traditions, or religious dogmas and authorities, or by intolerance and the marginalization of those bent on thinking for themselves.19 Part and parcel of Thomasius’s understanding of “enlightenment” was to break down the barriers that separated the world of learning from that of everyday life, and especially from civil life.20 Hence, in this direction, Thomasius put forward highly radical proposals for the reform of university education. In particular he urged the teaching of economics, political science, and public administration as academic disciplines in their own right, as well as the replacement of the customary Latin by the native German.21 No doubt the use of German, coupled with his habit of writing in a manner intelligible to the layman (especially in the first popular journal in Germany, which he published) did much to account for the popularity of his writings. His scholarly works, serious and entertaining as they were, were republished in several editions, and he was constantly pressed to write new books. Not since the days of Martin Luther were the works of a German scholar so much in demand by people of all walks of life.22 In most respects Thomasius remained a rationalist, imbued with considerable optimism regarding the powers of reason. Only toward the end of the century did his writings start to disclose ambivalence about the capacity of reason (in the Cartesian interpretation) to serve as the universal and infallibly supreme arbiter of truth. As a result he now tended to qualify it by the adjective “sound” (gesund) and to make its objective validity contingent upon conformity to empirical observation in and through the senses.23

19 Christian Thomasius, Ausübung der Vernunfft-Lehre (Halle, 1705), 16. “Never rely in the discovery of truth upon the authority of any one person, whosoever he may be, if you yourself lack the inner conviction that what has hitherto been generally believed is founded upon principles of undoubted validity,” he declares there. 20 Thomasius, Einleitung zu der Vernunfft-Lehre (Halle, 1691), 84–8. 21 Thomasius, Historie der Weiszheit und Thorheit (Halle, 1693), 1–59. 22 Thomasius’s deliberate cultivation of the German language unquestionably helped to restore self-confidence among the rising bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the Frenchified nobility. See on this point Andrew Dickson White, Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (New York: The Century Company, 1910), 113. 23 Thomasius, Versuch vom Wesen des Geistes (Halle, 1699), 7–8. Thomasius was one of the first major thinkers to depart from the prevalent Cartesian mode of Rationalism and to introduce Locke’s ideas into Germany. Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais, which also transmitted Locke’s ideas to Germany, were not published until 1765.

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However, Thomasius’s principal concern was not with epistemology. His chief interest was “practical philosophy,” the study of human action in vita civili. And it was primarily within the sphere of public life that, to his contemporaries, Thomasius was above all the intrepid philosopher of the deed, a man who scorned academic pedantry and boldly challenged the intellectual status quo of his day. All the same, his views on the administrative and political components of national governance embody a uniquely original fusion of traditional and strikingly new ideas. Just as his ethical works insist that activities made subject to compulsion would lose their intrinsic value and meaning, so his political works are concerned with areas of human pursuits in which enforceable (justum) and rule-governed notions of appropriateness (decorum) surpass in importance the voluntary source of intrinsic (moral) rightness (honestum). And whereas one’s “inner peace” is properly a person’s own individual affair, one’s “outer peace,” by involving a person’s welfare and security, is the responsibility, and the sole responsibility, of a body specifically instituted for that purpose. And such an instituted body is subject to no laws other than those it has itself created as the representative of society as a political whole.24 Unlike his immediate precursors, Grotius and Pufendorf, Thomasius accordingly sharply distinguishes a moral or religious community from a political society, just as he sets apart Divine Law from Natural Law. Consequently, although they have no more coercive force for him than divinely inspired moral laws, natural laws, in his practical philosophy, command more general validity in social relations insofar as they are subject to evaluation in the light of “sound reason.”25 Also, in contrast to Grotius and Pufendorf, Thomasius is unwilling to recognize individual rights as other than conditional claims, unless they are backed by positive law. Hence, they cannot be invoked to justify an individual’s resistance to the command of the instituted political authority; such resistance is as categorically ruled out by Thomasius as it is by Hobbes.26 On the other hand, in his account of humans in the state of nature, Thomasius is as much at variance with Hobbes’s image of a war of all 24 Thomasius, Institutiones jurispredentiae divinae (Francofurti et Lipsiae, 1688), lib. ii, cap. 2, para. 7. 25 Thomasius, ibid., i, ch. 1, para. 30; also Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium (Halle, 1705), lib. i, cap. 6, para. 21. 26 Thomasius, Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae, lib. iii, cap. 6, para. 63.

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against all as he is with Grotius’s hypothesis of an instinctive human sociability. There is no ground, he feels, for postulating either. Humans in the state of nature are neither furious wolves nor gregarious sheep. Instead they are weak, isolated, lonely creatures, in constant fear of disasters; victims of conflicting impulses, they are a danger to themselves and to others. And, inclined to appropriate more than their due share of the scarce things in life, they are forever courting the risk of clashes with their fellows. Although aware of an inner “law” that bids them to respect the “rights” of others, they are simultaneously conscious of its insufficient compelling force. Mutual dread and distrust are therefore the inevitable outcome, making social relations precarious if not altogether impossible.27 In essence, accordingly, Thomasius arrives at the same position as Hobbes, but he arrives there by a different route. Individuals are not necessarily at war with their fellows; they are simply incapable of forming social links, since they can see no common basis on which they can make them endure. For Thomasius “society” is therefore inconceivable prior to the institution of civil authority and the administrative means of asserting it. It follows that Edmund Burke’s notion of a society bound essentially by shared beliefs and common traditions has as little meaning for Thomasius as has Grotius’s idea of a biological “community.” In other words, civil society does not simply evolve; it is the product of a conscious and deliberate political act within a framework of legally binding commitments, to wit, a social contract. Only it is capable of bringing together individuals, whose prior existence is that of isolated atomistic units. They are therefore in need of a supreme authority and a civil state that Thomasius, following Hobbes, calls a commonwealth.28 For only it can ensure “civil happiness” by way of “external peace,” provided that individuals subordinate their private interests to the public interest – as interpreted by the government authorities – regardless of whether they think that it coincides with their own.29 While Thomasius concedes that any type of government may undergo crises owing to changing and often unforeseeable exigencies – not least because of ineffective public administrators – he insists that in some types political diseases are particularly endemic. Among these he includes all forms of mixed regimes in which not only specific functions 27 Ibid., para. 12. 28 Ibid., paras 22–4. 29 Ibid., para. 23.

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but also overall decision-making powers are shared between different, though coordinate, bodies.30 Thus, for a government to be healthy, the concentration of supreme power must be in the hands of those whose responsibility it is to rule. Thomasius does not deny the need for persuasive power in addition to physical power; indeed, he considers the former vitally important for the smooth administration of a state. Nonetheless, the “advisers” must be kept clearly apart from the rulers, whose supreme authority must never be called into question. For otherwise the enacted laws and their enforceable sanctions cannot operate effectively.31 Still, having made the strictly constitutional position clear, Thomasius warns the ruler or rulers that politics is not the same as administrative legalism. There is as little connection between a bureaucrat and a politician as between a politician and a physician.32 Hence, notwithstanding the law, the subject’s consent is as important politically to the ruler as is the ruler’s ability to provide protection to the individual subject.33 What matters principally to Thomasius is that political authority, to be truly supreme, is inherently autonomous and, for this purpose, essentially secular. At the same time, such sovereign authority should be strictly confined to a realm of clearly specified ends, lest the enforceable justum wholly displaces the moral honestum and the aesthetic decorum. Thomasius’s political absolutism, therefore, was evidently a highly circumscribed absolutism as regards the wielding of coercive power – in effect, a nuanced monism of political governance. His major concern appears to have been to firmly establish that the modern state was something sui generis, requiring to be entrusted to the services of a professional class of politically trained administrators, since it could no longer be left to the jurist, philosopher, or theologian, however well-meaning any one of them might be.34 Not surprisingly, Thomasius had little use for philosopher-kings or for the belief in divinely ordained kings. The task of the modern ruler, as of the modern administrator, was no less

30 Ibid., para. 39. 31 Thomasius, Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium, lib. i, cap. 4, para. 77. 32 Thomasius, Der Politische Philosophus (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1724), esp. the preface (Vorrede). 33 Thomasius, Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (Halle, 1696, 4th ed., 1699), 12. 34 Thomasius considers it “one of the oldest errors in Christendom … that the zealots of good morals attempt to talk the Christian princes into enforcing Christianity by legislation.” Erinnerung wegen zweyer Collegiorum (Halle, 1702), 32.

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different from that of Cicero than positive law was from that of the Law of Moses.35 Thomasius’s conception of government as a device for achieving limited and clearly defined ends became the widely accepted political philosophy of leading writers on public administration in Germany – the Cameralists, as they came to be called – during the first half of the eighteenth century. They favoured a form of centralized absolutism because it offered, in their view, the best chance of an effectively functioning public service, without interference by the non-professional outsider. For the most part paternalistic in outlook and, by liberal-democratic standards, rather overbearing, the Cameralists were nevertheless genuinely convinced that an administrative system of integrity, operating within a framework of fixed rules, could not but promote the well-being and security that most people need and long for. Far from seeking to justify the political status quo, as Otto Gierke has suggested,36 they believed that an administrative regime of strictly specialized functions would minimize the risk of arbitrariness and maximize the opportunity for fair and impersonal rule.37 Admittedly, the Cameralists were more concerned to strengthen the power of administrative rule than to restrain the personal designs of absolutist monarchs. In actual effect, however, they had a liberating influence over time, mainly, perhaps, because monarchs themselves increasingly realized that a strong bureaucracy, with officials of high individual probity and a professional ethos of public-mindedness, was in their own best interest. As a political theory, Cameralism is undoubtedly inadequate, if only because of its monolithic and mechanistic conception of governance, but in its emphasis on administrative professionalism and sound public finance, it correctly anticipated, as did Thomasius before it, the growing role that bureaucracy was to play. All in all, it may be no overstatement to assert that Thomasius’s teaching and writings had a good deal to do with Prussia under Frederick ii 35 Ibid., 34–5. See also I. Hunter, T. Ahnert, and F. Grunert, eds and trans, Christian Thomasius, Essays on Church, State, and Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). 36 Otto Gierke, Natural Law and Theory of Society, E. Barker, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), i, 144. 37 For a more detailed account of these administrative theories, see Albion W. Small, The Cameralists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909); see also Geraint Parry, “Enlightened Government and its Critics in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” The Historical Journal 6 (1963), 178–92.

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being one of the best administered states in eighteenth-century Europe.38 No less impressive was Thomasius’s success in turning future public servants into fervid supporters of legal reforms. In 1728, the year of his death, Prussia witnessed the last witch trial, and just over a decade later (in 1740), Frederick ii, publicly acknowledging Thomasius’s contribution to the Prussian Civil Service, abolished torture as a legal practice.39 And, despite the absence of a recognizably liberal or democratic foundation, Cameralism, together with Thomasius’s pioneering ideas, may well be regarded as significant landmarks in the history of modern bureaucracy, which, in their emphasis on the rule of law as an impersonal authority, strikingly point in the direction of Max Weber’s stipulated requirements of an effective public administration that combines political power with political legitimacy.

weberian highlights Max Weber’s contribution to the study of governmental bureaucracy, monumental though it was, did not, it is true, evolve in isolation. After Thomasius and the Cameralists, others explored the growing role that public administration was to play.40 Weber was, however, one of the first political sociologists to link the emphasis on procedural democracy with the value of an impersonal, rule-governed tradition of bureaucracy. At the same time, unlike his German predecessors, Weber sensed the danger of a conservatism that would favour procedural inflexibility by its sole use of established routines and disclose an inveterate distrust of any 38 Not the least significant general reason for this was Thomasius’s skill in combining an emphasis on freedom of thought and speech with that on the rule of law in his writings and teachings on public administration, the essence of which was that a well-trained bureaucracy constitutes an important safeguard against the infringement of individual liberties. 39 Frederic ii, Oeuvres (Berlin, 1789), i, 376. 40 The issue of bureaucratic organization had been engaging the concentrated attention of a number of writers for some time, especially in Prussia. Although Prussia was by no means the state with the longest experience of bureaucracy, it made the earliest start to make it an academic study. Especially Gustav Schmoller and Otto Hintze substantially contributed to its study after Thomasius. What, however, Schmoller’s and Hintze’s writings lacked at times was a certain detachment, insofar as they tended to glorify the monarchical system as being closest to bureaucratic legalism rather than parliamentary constitutionalism. Nevertheless, they stressed, as Weber was to do, professionalism and a high sense of duty, together with administrative impartiality based on “rational” principles.

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innovations. Furthermore, he made no secret of his fears that unduly elevating the role of bureaucracy in the modern state could threaten the supremacy of an elected political body, once it was directing it instead of being directed by it. In particular he felt that, not being effectively subject to any civic control, “an administration, however competent and honest, may fail to meet the political requirements of civic freedoms, on the one hand, and of a state’s autonomous leadership, on the other.”41 Nevertheless, this did not stop Weber from maintaining that modern democracies could not function without the aid of bureaucracy. He came to this conviction after tracing the transition from the feudal to the centralized state, and from an economy based on smallscale industry to one operating on capitalistic lines within large-scale industrial and commercial organizations. Moreover, implicit in this transition, he saw a major transformation in the mode of operation, insofar as now impersonal regulations replaced personal preferences, and such “rational” elements as maximal calculation of means and ends, based on objectively measurable data, replaced subjective and potentially non-rational judgments. Hence, economically, the transition implied for him a considerably heightened degree of predictability and business efficiency. Politically, he likened the change to the replacement of a patrimonial regime, that is, of rule based on customary ways of doing things or of wholly arbitrary rule.42 Weber was by no means unaware, however, that, by its impersonal and uniform rule-application, bureaucracy may meet with obstacles, as well as create individual hardships. He knew, therefore, that his “ideal” norm of depersonalization was open to criticism, if decisions invariably fail to make adaptations where necessary, and that such excessive rigidity may lead to the lampooning of bureaucracy. All the same, he was unwilling to view strict performative rules as mere outside boundaries in order to yield scope for more “creative” actions by officials. Instead, he maintained that fixed rational standards were not irreconcilable with acts of bureaucratic discretion, so that there was no need for returning to pre-bureaucratic ways.43 He dismissed, accordingly, more radical alternatives, for fear of disrupting developments in both the economic 41 M. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), 320. 42 Bendix, Max Weber 426–30. 43 Ibid. Bureaucratic discretion was, however, often claimed in order to protect interests of state when, in fact, it was a matter of protecting top bureaucrats and top ministers – creating images evidently seemed more important than giving authentic reasons.

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and political domains. These developments, he felt, demanded a clean break with the past. Yet, rather than offering an all-inclusive definition of this new mode of management and organization, he put forward an “ideal-type” construct comprising a number of crucial components. To this end, Weber singled out seven basic characteristics of modern bureaucracy, which include matters of structural organization and of the occupational status and orientation of its incumbents. Although some of these characteristics overlap, he wished to keep them discrete: (i) The principle of fixed jurisdictional areas, which implies the demarcation of competence and of duties by officials, as well as the distribution of regular tasks within delimited fields in which authority and supervision may be exercised. (ii) The principle of office hierarchy in terms of levels of graded authority. (iii) The basing of office procedures on written documents – “files” – which are preserved in their original or draft form, to ensure continuity. (iv) The provision of administrative training, involving the differentiation of functions within the overall political system. (v) The existence of full-time employment, which is to promote vocational devotion to what needs to be done, even though office hours are nominally fixed – often combined with the denial of the right to strike. (vi) The management of the office follows more or less stable, more or less exhaustive general rules, the learning of which forms an essential part of any administrative training cognizant of the supremacy of the overall legal system – on the implicit assumption that such general rules can be learned. (vii) Finally, all officials are supposed to be compensated for work by a regular salary, security of tenure, pension provisions, and a certain social status, all of which are to ensure a high degree of independence and impartiality. In its source and its working, this system, comprising (i) to (vii), is meant to contrast sharply with authority structures of the “eternal yesterday,” that is, a form of domination resting on traditions, and with those resting on the gift of grace or “charisma.” Taken together, these characteristics were to make modern public administration superior to any other form of organization, virtually in the same manner in which a machine – to which Weber held bureaucratic mechanisms broadly comparable – was superior to non-mechanical modes of production.

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This “technical” superiority translated for Weber into precision, speed, non-ambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, strict subordination, and maximal reduction of friction as regards material and personal costs. Once established, the bureaucratic machine was supposed to be indestructible, if only because it contained basic components that could be neither stopped nor reversed. Likewise, its personnel could not be easily replaced in view of its special training and experience.44 There can be little doubt that several salient points of Weber’s theoretical construct of bureaucracy give rise to problems of demarcation as between the distribution of power exercised by administrative bodies and legislative-political bodies respectively. Nor does it require undue sophistication to grasp that such boundary problems are able to cause serious tensions, whose resolution calls for a degree of discipline, selfrestraint, tact, and mutual understanding which, Weber knew, is not easily found. He certainly was under no illusion that, in practice, the nominal control of the politician over the bureaucrat could always be maintained. He went as far as to concede that political control was “possible only in a very limited degree;” and he feared that “the trained permanent official is more likely to get his way in the long run.”45 The next section attempts to draw attention to the more or less hidden roots of boundary problems of this kind and the inner tensions they can generate.

44 My presentation of Weber’s ideal types of bureaucracy is largely indebted to H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. & ed., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–244. 45 M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons and A.M. Henderson, ed. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 128. On this point, see also Charles Frankel, “Bureaucracy and Democracy in the New Europe,” Daedalus (1964), 479–81; further, Seymour M. Lipset, “Bureaucracy and Social Reform,” Research Studies (Washington: State College of Washington) 17 (1949), 11–17. Reinhard Bendix, in “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” Public Administration Review 5 (1945), 207, questions the assumption that impartiality invariably operates, in the sense that administrative officials would serve any and every government equally well. Moreover, as Frankel points out, officials know that political leaders, who are theoretically in charge of the administrative services, are not in fact in charge, since “they depend on giant organizations staffed by people who do their work under conditions more or less hidden, and have their own esprit de corps;” they know also that they will be around when the political figures go.

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evident problems and hidden traps Perhaps one of the most obvious sources of boundary problems in Weber’s characterization of modern bureaucracy is his simultaneously urged requirement of (independent) neutrality of officials vis-à-vis the political party in power, on the one hand, and of (submissive) loyalty toward politicians of whatever partisan stripe, on the other. Understandably, a prominent Weberian scholar speaks of this tension-ridden combination as a glaring paradox. This paradox, he remarks, “is even greater when it is remembered that all administrative experts are agreed on the necessity of policy considerations within the administration for the purpose of making it efficient.” Bureaucracy, he therefore concludes, is “all-powerful and at the same time incapable of determining how this power should be used.”46 As we have noted, Weber himself knew that the almost invariably more efficient organization of executive power could be used to invade or even to appropriate the authority of the formal decision-making and policy-setting power of the elected government, so that the former could almost be viewed as the real power behind the ostensible power of the ministerial head of a given governmental department. Yet, only the latter is publicly (and visibly) held accountable for whatever actions ensue. In other words, the “discretion” that Weber confers upon the higher public servant implicitly demands the absence of close political control, which, in turn, may result in any real ministerial surveillance becoming practically non-existent. Paradoxically again, such a result may be not at all attributable to a bureaucrat’s conscious desire to usurp the de jure authority of the politician but rather to the fact that the politician, as the head of a department, simply lacks the long-standing experience on which to base policy decisions. Also, the superior knowledge of the bureaucrat, upon which of necessity a minister leans heavily, is backed by the administrative esprit de corps within the department, which hardly reduces the danger of de jure authority being in fact a sham. Clearly, formal lines demarcating boundary competences are then severely blurred, if not altogether eliminated, and the rule by “red tape” becomes not only a likely risk but also one that may frequently escape public awareness. Especially in some newly developing states, where the administrative hierarchy fails to be balanced by a well-established political leadership, the bureaucratic elite may well be the policy-making 46 Bendix, “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” 205.

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organ and thus the de facto ruling group.47 Likewise, since “discretion” not rarely involves secrecy, bureaucratic processes are hidden from the public eye, and not only from the nominally superior minister who is expected to render account for the outcome of such processes. Even if it is granted that governmental administrators have the “public interest” at heart in applying discretion, by regarding it, like “neutrality,” as a public trust, it is still a matter of how officials happen to interpret the public interest or how firmly they have formed a belief in “political legitimacy” as a guiding criterion. In the final analysis, therefore, it is up to the officials to decide what to disclose and what to conceal. And, as Weber astutely observed, any such discretionary freedom is inherently a by-product of their expertise – the bedrock of their own sense of “authority,” which they are loath to endanger by not keeping their superior knowledge to themselves.48 The problem of administrative secrecy is often aggravated by the tendency of officials to turn political problems into problems of administration.49 And, as Philip Selznick has pointed out, officials, by claiming superior technical knowledge and extensive administrative experience, are in an opportune position to hide behind their professional neutrality and discretional expertise an unmistakably political judgment.50 The combination of political bias with discretional secrecy is singled out especially by writers portraying the frequently hidden dealings between administrators and interest groups. Precisely because of the incidence of secrecy in such dealings, political bias of officials is frowned upon, particularly when at the same time they strenuously seek to convince citizens of their impartiality. And, not surprisingly, incongruities of this kind have added fuel to recurrent requests that officials in a special posi47 Joseph La Palombara, ed., Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963, 1967), 15, states this particularly to be the case in developing nations and their new states. 48 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 233. 49 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, cited in Bendix, “Bureaucracy,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 214. 50 Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957), cited in Bendix “Bureaucracy,” 217. See also Selznick, “An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy,” American Sociological Review, 8 (1943), 51. Further, Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 197, where Merton remarks that “bureaucracy is administration which almost completely avoids public discussion of its techniques.”

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tion of public trust should be subject to certain restrictions of the rights ordinarily enjoyed by private citizens, such as to stand for election to public office or engage in any partisan-political activities, notably those opposing the government of the day. It is only fair to add, however, that, due to the continuing expansion of government services, the practice of involving the active participation of leading public servants in political decisions in one direction or another has become practically unavoidable. Also, coupled with this expansion, demands for the recognition and authorization of advocacy groups have proliferated, together with the needed addition of legislative committees for this purpose. And, because such committees call upon the advice of administrators, they serve to induce the promotion of more advocacy groups by administrative officials. The outcome has been policy formation at manifold levels of government, so that on issues of policy, no less than on matters of procedure, contacts between administrators and groups of a varied nature of interests have become frequent. A close network between the bureaucracy and organized interests has therefore emerged, making political control over the bureaucracy increasingly problematic. Also, since officials have often encouraged interest groups to form, their support and advice could not but strengthen administrative prestige and competence for and among these groups.51 The effect of these trends has been a continuous “drifting away” from legislatures in which, according to traditional democratic doctrine, fundamental decisions about national policy were supposed to originate.52 Such drifting away, stimulated as it has been by administrators seeking to create their own clientele associations, has only helped to undermine governmental authority as well as its credibility qua democratic authority. Even if public officials formally continue to view themselves as neutral and purely instrumental in their role, they in fact cumulatively usurp the role of democratically elected representatives, notably when they also start to assume the functions of mediators in the relationship between lobbying group interests and the “public interest.” For then advocacy groups can no longer fail to realize that many administrative decisions are in truth the most decisive and that they therefore can safely bypass the politicians and de jure lawmakers. Furthermore, this realization in due course encourages a process 51 Bendix, “Bureaucracy,” 215–16. 52 Frankel, “Bureaucracy and Democracy,” 484.

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whereby groups acquire a special status and, with it, privileged access to administrative decision-making.53 Taken together, these developments have helped to spread fears of “bureaucratic domination,” notably in industrially advanced societies. And, if nothing else, such fears have added impetus to a renewed search for ways of controlling administrative activities, in conjunction with a thorough reappraisal of the relation between bureaucracy and democracy as such – an issue touched upon earlier. As we then noted, throughout the history of political thought the two concepts have not proved the happiest of bedfellows. In part this was probably because as concepts they acquired, like many words, certain meanings through the feelings they evoke. And while such emotionally charged meanings do not always coincide with dictionary definitions or with experienced reality in some particular contexts, they are nevertheless often widespread and by no means entirely groundless.54 As a result, bureaucracy, especially if conceived as the rule of officials, has in the thoughts and sentiments of many people been associated with rigidity, stuffiness, conservatism, and the domination by a select minority, whereas democracy has been hailed as openness, progress, and, above all, as meeting the cravings of the many. J.G. Herder, in his philosophy of history, stressed the role of sentiment in language as such as a “democratic” characteristic, in that, in its common use, it is a “companion since the dawn of life,” and hence a powerful emotional force in most people’s practical thinking. He bemoaned therefore the failure of writers to recognize how intensely emotional associations permeate words, social cultures, and “all the political contracts and systems devised by the philosopher.”55 Arthur O. Lovejoy, one of the most outstanding scholars in the history of ideas, virtually echoed Herder in what he called the “metaphysical pathos” of concepts, a pathos that he saw embodied “in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, evoke through their associations and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feelings.”56 53 La Palombara, Bureaucracy and Political Development, 51–2. 54 See Bendix, “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” 194, and his “Bureaucracy,” 217. 55 J.G. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language (1770), Works, B. Suphan, ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), v, 118-19. 56 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 11.

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Interestingly enough, however, while writers on bureaucracy readily concede that pejorative perceptions of the word are deeply ingrained in the popular mind, they for the most part deny that there is an inevitable antagonism between modern bureaucracy and modern democracy in matters of day-to-day organizational orientation. To be sure, there are diverse meanings, emphases, and interpretations of either concept, but there are doubtfully as many discrepancies between their workings in the modern industrialized world. In more general terms, in both bureaucracy and democracy we can trace, they maintain, parallelisms between the historical-cultural conditions of their conceptual origins and their subsequent structural development. Schumpeter, a highly influential writer in his time, speaks of their mutual complementarity.57 Another kind of parallelism often commented on is that between “democratization” and “bureaucratization.” For, insofar as an intensification of democracy is taken to imply “universal” access to education, health, and welfare facilities of one kind or another, this clearly demands the simultaneous augmentation of bureaucracy. No doubt it would be facile and mistaken to attribute the vast expansion of public administration to the emergence of the welfare state alone. It would, however, be no exaggeration to state that the arrival of the welfare state has considerably increased the need for publicly funded institutions and personnel.58 On the other hand, there is a total absence of parallelism between bureaucracy and democracy when it comes to accountability, as Weber has already remarked upon. He found this absence of parallelism not only a problem in itself but also all the more serious because it was mostly hidden from public notice, let alone public scrutiny. He thought this might be so largely because leading administrators projected themselves as merely carrying out policy decisions. However, instead of tracing the problem to a basic institutional defect, Weber saw it as a structural-functional weakness, arising from the tendency of officials to enhance their profes-

57 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, third ed., (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 206, 293; see also Frankel, “Bureaucracy and Democracy,” 473, 476–9, and Bendix, “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” 194. 58 La Palombara, Bureaucracy and Political Development, 28, 58; see also ibid., 26, where he points out that central planning also greatly aggrandizes bureaucratic power. See also Richard A. Chapman, “The Real Cause of Bureaucracy,” Administration (1964), 59, and Richard A. Chapman and Michael Hunt, eds, Open Government in a Theoretical and Practical Context (London: Ashgate, 2006).

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sional superiority by keeping their special expertise as well as their political leanings (which rarely favour democracy) secret.59 The question of accountability – surely an important aspect of democracy – is further magnified when (as we have found) government ministers almost entirely depend on their officials’ advice. I cannot, I am afraid, see a ready solution to this problem, since even the aid of an ombudsman, expected to screen complaints against administrators, has so far proved a doubtfully effective escape route.60 And yet, despite Weber’s justified reservations, the establishment of modern bureaucracy has been welcomed by some democrats as a step toward the democratization of government and as an advance toward a more open society. Many nineteenth-century liberals also hailed this development as wholly in keeping with the achievement principle of meritocracy, said to open a career to all talents, independently of birth, wealth, or the influence of patronage. Weber himself suggested that bureaucratic professionalization could have democratic implications, although (as I observed in an earlier chapter) it is a moot point whether, or to what extent, meritocracy generates a democratic ethos. Besides, it has also been commented that most competitive entrants into the public service come from the “better-placed classes and groups in the nation and tend to be the informal and inadvertent representatives of these classes and groups.61 Bureaucratic professionalization, accordingly, could “just as easily have been non-democratic” in its outcome, as Bendix has remarked.62 Ultimately, however, differences in historical retrospect enter most arguments about the alleged link between “professionalization" and “democratization.” Both conceptions, therefore, are to a certain degree (slanted) extrapolations of (perceived) historical trends. This is not to deny that there often is a good deal of truth in broad generalizations about the directional thrust of ideas identifiable with particular periods. In the context under discussion, for example, one can, I believe, validly single out two major questions that have aroused assiduous controversy ever since the sixteenth century. One is whether and how much government policies and their financing ought to be subject to the delibera59 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 233. 60 For a detailed analysis of the ombudsman system, see Donald C. Rowat, “An Ombudsman Scheme for Canada,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (1962). See also Frankel “Bureaucracy and Democracy,” 481. 61 Frankel, ibid., 487. 62 Bendix, “Bureaucracy and the Problem of Power,” 206–8.

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tion of some representative body; and the other is the (related) question of how representative of the people as a whole such a body should be. It may well be the case that it was against the historical background of these two questions that the modern idea of democracy arose and took shape.63 Weber’s sociological approach to modern bureaucracy undeniably appears to have been crucially influenced by these controversial questions. At any rate, Weber scholars are largely in agreement about this. And, however they disagree about this or that aspect of his analysis, few challenge the view that his “ideal types” serve as an indispensable guide and “point of departure.”64 This verdict seems both apposite and fair, not least because Weber himself stressed that his ideal types of modern bureaucracy were intended as normative constructs, and should therefore not be uniformly applied without taking into account the historical background of a society’s cultural-economic development.65 This self-professed tentativeness, in combination with his way of seeing social and political issues from the perspective of the cultural historian, as I see it, qualifies Weber as an exceptionally useful source of counsel. To be sure, notwithstanding his tentativeness, Weber was unbending on one central point: the functional setting apart of political and administrative roles. Even where under some conditions in a nation’s development these roles could overlap, he firmly denied that they could ever be wholly substituted for each other on a permanent basis. For no political authority could, he insisted, be legitimized by being exclusively bureaucratic.66 Rewording it slightly, whatever makes a bureaucratic system legitimate, in and for itself, is not enough to legitimate a political system. It follows that to depict democratic regimes of modernity as necessarily bureaucratic is one thing; but to find them, therefore, unavoidably in conformity with standards of political legitimacy is quite another. Under these circumstances, what is, once again, called for is the exis63 Bendix, ibid., 195. 64 Bendix, ibid., 204. 65 M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, T. Parsons, ed., 109–11. As Parsons rightly comments, “Weber insisted on the very great importance of the cultural significance of a problem.” (109, n33). 66 M. Weber, “The Three Types of Legitimate Rule,” Hans Gerth, trans., Berkeley Journal of Sociology (1953), 6. It appeared posthumously in the Preussische Jahrbücher in 1922 (187), 1–12. This exposition was not included in the original edition of The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.

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tence of bridging organs capable of serving as mediating links. This, it may be objected, is easier said than done, especially if such mediation is expected to be the outcome of recognizably democratic choices. For, as historical experience sadly suggests, discontent with any status quo does not readily translate into effective alternatives, let alone into instant and generally acceptable reforms. Nonetheless, attempts in the direction of devising formulas for the restructuring of modern bureaucracy have been made.67 Only time will reveal how far new formulas, however appealing in themselves, will operationally succeed in strengthening the political-democratic dimension of public administration. Likewise, it remains to be seen how far they will assist in resolving recurrent boundary problems as regards the proper domains of bureaucratic and political authority over diverse areas of civic rights and civic obligations.68

67 See, for example, Jack H. Knott and Garry J. Miller, Reforming Bureaucracy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1987). 68 For a captivating discussion of boundary problems in diverse associative contexts, see Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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Political Mediation: Parts and Wholes (An Overview) and Wholes (An Overview)

like several concepts in the vocabulary of politics, “mediation” is notoriously ambiguous. This chapter, in surveying the discussion of this central theme, is therefore mainly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff. Above all, it seeks to sound a warning against mistaking blind alleys for directional paths.

two contrasting conceptions The problem of bridging the gap between “society” and the “state” has, we have noted, a fairly chequered history. For the most part, however, the gap has been perceived as separating a realm engaged in the pursuit of private gain from one concerned with distinctly public affairs that transcend essentially personal or segmental goals. Even Marx, while pouring scorn on Hegel’s consecration of the state, contrasted (in the Jewish Question) the particularist egotism of the bourgeoisie with the universal interest of the proletariat. So what he denied to the state he readily attributed to a purportedly universal class. Even so, not unlike other political sociologists, he refused to oppose the state to society, because he considered the state likewise to serve particularist ends. Far from transcending such ends, the state, for him, merely acted as a cloak for what, in truth, were the interests of the ruling class. However, although many political sociologists agreed with Marx in rejecting the state-society dichotomy, they held that sectional goals do not necessarily coincide with the pursuit of private gain – as, for example, the majority of environmental groups – and hence, presumably, should be aligned with, rather than opposed to, the state. In either case, though, the state was denied a special status sui generis over and apart

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from civil society. Comprising the total of overlapping interests, it was said to be inherently no different from society, in that, as a cross-current of diverse forces, it was likewise bound to generate multiple tensions rather than to serve as the source of unity, embodying a uniquely single voice of its own. Additionally, and especially since the growth of nationalism and political romanticism, there has been a marked tendency to merge state and society by bridging the duality and overcoming the tension of political liberalism, essentially by importing cultural elements of mediation into the political arena. Henceforth, developments were, accordingly, characterized mainly by two opposite conceptions. One insisted that the state was no longer to be looked upon as the mere servant of society; the other strove to wholly emancipate the state from society, declaring it, in effect, to be increasingly superfluous. Any sign of its continued existence was, in this view, diagnosed as a symptom of a profound alienation between social activities and political processes. Also, parallel with this second view, demand has been growing for diversifying political structures in order to approximate them more closely to social reality. Arguably, this demand was at heart the outcome of a spreading impatience with the “narrow formulas” of political-legal sovereignty and their unduly “monistic” portrayal of associative endeavours. Yet, by trying to come to terms with the relation between plural associations and the single association of society as a whole, “pluralists” of all shades have helped, paradoxically perhaps, to accentuate, rather than diminish, the problem of societal unity. Although most variants of pluralism that have avowed the restructuring of the status quo have done so by claiming to extend the principles of democracy, they have in truth, I believe, called for the extension of the category of politics per se. Moreover, what has been put forward in the name of “pluralist democracy,” has drawn chiefly on the kind of literature associated with what has become known as “interest group” and “mass society” thinking. For, within it, diverse attachments and objectives are supposed to find political expression in and through groups specially organized to bring pressure to bear (positively or negatively) in the shaping of public policy. This, however, is not the only variant of pluralism espousing the vision of an extended politics. This “pressure-group” vision has found itself challenged in due course as being too external or indirect a model of political participation. In its place, its critics favoured the mediation of more internal and individual participation within entities in pursuit

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of shared social interests. Nevertheless, what is common to both models is the demystification of the state, and its substitution as a sovereign allinclusive body by multiple allegiances within more closely related organizations that are better able to act as instruments of political mediation. Underlying this common thrust was the conviction that it was a fundamental fallacy to presume that the state alone could be the medium through which people were able to pursue common ends. According to this conviction, there is as much politics in evidence in a baseball club, wrote Harold Laski, as in any state government.1 From this standpoint it is held to follow that active participation by individuals in specialized intermediate organizations is far more likely to be forthcoming than in the remote and abstract “state.” And it was by this line of argument that Laski and G.D.H. Cole, as leading English pluralists, significantly anticipated what has become a highly influential doctrine of modern participatory democracy, mainly through such exponents as Peter Bachrach, Carole Pateman, and Dennis Thompson.2 That direct participation within the immediate context of an individual’s life has important political implications is seen by these writers as a self-evident truth. Bachrach, for example, although he is not indifferent to the question of power as typifying patterns of relationship within business corporations, nevertheless focuses on their political relevance rather than on their political structure.3 Corporations, as people’s immediate context, are political in their significance because their activities impinge on members within the community as a whole.4 If corporations, therefore, are to be democratized, steps must be taken to bring the opinion of the community to bear on whatever decisions corporations make that crucially affect its life. Unfortunately, Bachrach does not appear sensitive to the difference between the political-structure argument (stressed by Pateman) and the political-relevance argument figuring most prominently in his own ver1 Harold J. Laski, “The Personality of the State,” The Nation 101 (1915), 116. 2 Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Dennis F. Thompson, The Democratic Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Albeit with differing emphasis, all three argue in similar vein against theorists of democracy who have confined their attention to formal political institutions and, as a result, have ignored the immediate and actual context of an individual’s life. 3 Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism, 102. 4 Ibid., 77–8.

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sion. I say “unfortunately” because the difference implies (as I see it) two basically distinct conceptions of politics. For, whereas the political-structure argument regards corporations as microcosms of the wider political system involving conflicts of purpose and the use of power, the political-relevance argument regards corporations as political, not so much because they wield power over their employees as because they form macro-political institutions in themselves. Clearly, from these two conceptions of politics two different mediating prescriptions emerge. One concerns itself with internal control instruments confined to a business, while the other envisages some wider form of interest group management that, in its mediation, involves the corporation’s customers as well as its local neighbourhood; that is, all those immediately affected by its decisions, even though they are not members of its formal organization.5 Whatever restructuring is projected, therefore, diverges quite radically in each case. Unlike Pateman’s call for transforming the internal power relations of an institution or corporation, Bachrach’s idea of democratic politicization envisions a particular location, and calls for subjecting this broader context to more public control. One conception, accordingly, leads away from any notion of the public and toward a mode of mediation that presumes society to be a set of segments that demand distinctly internal forms of regulation. The other conception, by contrast, leads toward the notion of reinforcing the public by drawing attention to a considerably expanded range of concerns and activities. Interestingly, albeit indirectly, these opposite notions of mediating proposals for politicization recall Rousseau who, while perfectly aware of the existence of partial associations within political society as a whole, saw in their existence the source of perplexing difficulties. For nothing could be more detrimental to the operation of a general political will than the persistence of partial organizations with partial claims. “A particular resolution may be advantageous to the smaller community, but pernicious to the greater.”6 Hence, he only half-heartedly accepted the inevitability of intermediate groups, provided they were roughly equal in terms of size and power, to render them less dangerous. On the whole, however, Rousseau, unlike both Pateman and Bachrach, prefers to present us with a choice between mutually exclusive alternatives: we 5 Ibid., 96. 6 G.D.H. Cole, ed. and trans., The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1913), 237.

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can either reinforce partial attachments and efface the public, or reinforce the public and efface partial attachments.7 Possibly, Rousseau exaggerated the irreconcilability of the alternatives; but it is precisely the extended definition of politics that provokes a reaction such as Rousseau’s, for it misleadingly distracts attention from the problematic character of the state as a general constituency. Possibly worse still, the extended definition invites us to imagine the make-up of this constituency as a harmonious nest of complementary polities that merely differ in scale. For, thereby, it explains away exactly those questions that demand the most critical probing.

redefining the political Several of these questions – posed also by contemporary theories of participation – are prefigured, on a somewhat broader canvas, by ambiguities typifying the school of (socialist) pluralism that originated in early twentieth-century England. To be sure, it was clear enough about one thing: it firmly and unequivocally denied the universality of a sovereign “state.” What was never clear, however, is whether the point of the denial was to eliminate universality altogether or, on the contrary, to relocate it in “society.” On one plane it assumed the form of plural devolution, while on the other plane it expressed a desire for relations to mark a degree of integrated political consciousness that was almost indistinguishable from consensual oneness. This ambivalence is illustrated to perfection in the Webbs’ brand of socialism, despite its standing virtually at the opposite pole from the pluralist vision of the Guild Socialists. For, although the Webbs favoured a highly centralized type of administrative socialism (in their Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth), they nevertheless followed the Guild Socialists in proposing to exclude the state from social and economic disputes, since these were to be settled by negotiation, and not by coercion.8 At the same time they tried to suffuse a whole range of social and economic pursuits with the esteem and dignity hitherto reserved for strictly political concerns linked with “the prestige of the Crown.”9

7 Ibid., 235–8. 8 S. Webb and B. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Longmans, 1920). 9 Ibid., 77.

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Evidently, “the prestige of the Crown” should be eliminated from high matters of national security, but extended to mundane, yet vital, tasks such as health and education.10 The prestige of the Crown – an English locution for the state – in thus being relocated, starkly reveals the Webbs’ own ambiguity about political mediation. As an institution, it seems, the state is to be stripped of its universal and comprehensive role; but as a transcendent ethos it is (as with the Guild Socialists) to be massively enhanced. In one important respect, this odd combination recalls traditional political thinking linked with the name of John Locke, insofar as it opts for a narrowly instrumental role of government and confers primary eminence upon voluntary activities within society. In other respects, however, the collation with Locke is wholly out of place, since any kind of state consecration smacks of a metaphysical mode of thinking with which Locke would have had no truck. Laski, on the other hand, was quite willing to consecrate the state as an object of supreme allegiance, provided it was identified not with government but with the general and permanent interests of society – not unlike Cole, who similarly identified such an allegiance with the “community as a whole.”11 In switching the focus of political mediation from a country’s government to its social configuration, which Cole called “the complex of organized associations,” with its own “organized will,”12 English socialist pluralists came remarkably close to the “complex of institutions,” which T.H. Green equated to “the state.”13 For, implicit in the switch is the belief in a totality, identified with society or community, that moulds the habits and aspirations of its members. By way of such moulding, this totality itself mediates a political consciousness that is foundational and sui generis. This line of thought is unmistakably close not only to Green and Bernard Bosanquet but to Hegel as well, and as unlike as anything could be to what Locke ever wrote, despite Cole’s expressed hostility toward

10 Ibid., 130. 11 Harold J. Laski, “The Pluralistic State,” Philosophical Review 28 (1919), 568. See also his Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 29; G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory (London: Methuen, 1920), 83. 12 Cole, “Conflicting Social Obligations,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series) 15 (1915), 158, 140–2. 13 T.H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans, 1941), 122.

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Hegelianism.14 The outcome of this conjunction of Lockean and idealist impulses toward political mediation seems a curious conflation of ideas, amounting to a formidable incongruity of cerebration. Clearly, in denying the existence of anything overarching the multiplicity of social purposes and in rejecting anything but a narrowly instrumental role of government, the English school of socialist pluralism was squarely in the camp of Lockean liberals, who envisioned society as a complex of rights that guaranteed immunity from governmental interference. Laski went so far as to describe these rights as “natural.”15 On the other hand, when Laski insisted that “the state” was a wider and more dignified entity than “the government,” embracing the totality of institutions in society, or when Cole repudiated the notion of a supreme political obligation, only to prescribe that one’s highest duty was to “the community as a whole,” or, again, when the Webbs argued the case for extending “the prestige of the Crown,” each one put forward a profoundly anti-liberal philosophy, which demolished all traces of the Lockean conception of political mediation. For, once government has to make way for an inclusive doctrine of common ends, such a political philosophy is scarcely congruent with a theory of natural (individual) rights since, as T.H. Green has demonstrated, it is absurd to speak of having rights against a state that is identical with the common good.16 Although the bearing of these observations on the question of redefining “politics” may not be obvious, it is, I believe, quite significant. That the scope of the political is wider than is commonly supposed, and that the state is not a unique institution in society are themes that are frequently held to be crucial in demands for a fundamental reappraisal of political mediation and civic participation. Yet, the simultaneously implied denial of the conventional distinction between the political and the social introduces a novel notion and an additional problem. Admittedly, the view that social and economic institutions are “political,” because they are engaged in purposes common to their members, may be pressed into service as part of an argument for devolution and federation. The denial of the uniqueness of the state, by itself, however, can 14 See Bernard Bosanquet, “Note on Mr. Cole’s Paper,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series) 15 (1915), 160, in which Bosanquet expresses surprise at Cole’s animosity toward the Hegelian school, wishing “to be more in agreement with Mr. Cole than I think he desires to let me be.” 15 Laski, “The Pluralistic State,” 572. 16 Green, Lectures, 148.

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form part of another and quite different argument. For now options generally thought to be exclusive alternatives are brought together as though they were continuous, if not identical. Surely, once organized segmental groups and attachments are imagined to be permeated by an ethic of public responsibility that entails an understanding of the requirements of “the common good,” any “government” may be thought redundant; not because “the community” exists only in a marginal sense (if at all), but because, on the contrary, concern for the whole is presumed so widely diffused that any central authority becomes otiose. Apparently, no ambiguity is seen in this merger of the social and political within a theory of mediation that contends that segmental groups offer not only an intrinsically valuable experience of participation in themselves but also provide a form of political education for overall “citizenship,” and, thereby, strengthen the links between the individual and the contextual macro-political system. Thus, while “government” is stripped of its universalist pretensions, the idea of an inclusive “state” or an all-embracing “community” is buoyantly put in its place. Could ambiguity be more glaring? Similarly, a higher degree of commitment by individuals to the goals of particularistic organizations is viewed as a means of reinforcing commitments to the general constituency of society as a whole. Perhaps this brand of theory contains a mysteriously built-in unifying presence which, even to its proponents, is hidden beneath their understanding of plural-social diversity. To say this is neither to deny that within any broader context of human relations there will be room for different partial and universal attachments inside and beyond states, nor to affirm that the existence of one kind precludes the existence of the other. What, however, is less easy to fathom is why these attachments should be continuous or why the mediating link should be designated as “political,” when, as it appears, the nature of the linkage is left perplexingly unresolved. Patently, a mediating relationship is not warranted by simply viewing diverse attachments as identical or as possessing significant characteristics in common. Hence, describing them as political can hardly amount to more than offering stipulations, insofar as their internal mediacy yields no basis for attributing to them linking properties, notably of a social or political character.17 Handcuffing people, by joining them, will 17 William Kornhauser begins his discussion of intermediate groups by saying that “we can conceive of all but the simplest societies as comprising three levels of

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indeed secure their captivity, but it scarcely links them as members of a political union. Putting it somewhat differently, a category produced by such stipulations renders no intelligible evidence of its mediating force, solely by virtue of external affinities, capable of serving as explanation or justification of interrelations in society. For, to do so, forms of contextually recognizable inner causalities seem necessarily called for. Nonetheless, the supposed mediating properties of intermediate groups play a central role in all varieties of pluralism – a Protean role. Mass-society theorists view these properties qua insulating devices for the social and the political respectively, while interest-group theorists see them as both articulating and linking agencies. But it goes without saying that, in the light of these diverse functions claimed for intermediary groups, the type of mediation assumed is radically different. In all three cases, however, although political mediation of one kind or another is assumed, it is far from demonstrated. Thus, if “pluralism” is to denote political pluralism, it must be shown not merely that diversity exists but also that it somehow relates to, or at least is compatible with, a measure of unity. And, to do so, any mediation, to be recognizably political, must bridge the inherent hiatus between the particular and the general. Much the same applies to mass-society and interest-group theories, despite their divergent functional claims, if they seek to establish insulating or linking agencies in either case, with respect to the social and the political. Perhaps the best illustration of requiring a bridging operation on the lines suggested is in Cole’s discussion of purpose and function as regards pluralist society, even though, in effect, it reveals the hiatus rather than closes it. Cole maintains that groups are constituted by the purposes common to their members. Yet, it is not purpose but function, he says, that is “the paramount principle of social organization,” for the true raison d’être of a group, and the basis for its overall legitimacy, is that it makes a specialized contribution to the community at large. The group must therefore see itself as “a factor in a coherent social whole,” and is thus obliged to “scrutinize” its purpose “in the light of its communal value in and for the whole.18 social relations” … and between them intermediate relations. But then he adds: “These intermediate relations function as links between the individual and the state.” The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 74. However, Kornhauser fails to explain why and how they should form political links. 18 Cole, Social Theory, 48–50.

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It follows that a group’s constitutive purpose – which makes it what it is – is one thing; but, strictly, it is not the same thing as what makes it of necessity conform with socially required purposes, the sort of thing Cole dignifies as “functions.” Nor does it help to say – as Cole also does – that such overall societal requirements will be determined by “the groups acting collectively,” and not by an additional, distinct or external, authority.19 For the source of linkage would be just as external to any particular group (and no less problematic) as any government authority could be. Moreover, “functional roles” as such within a societal whole are not necessarily linking roles. It is precisely the lack of mediation that is most striking in Cole’s argument. Clearly, we may think of groups as purposive – in which case their purposes are indeed their particular reason for being – or we may think of them as “functional” – in which case they are no longer particularistic, or even groups anymore – in that they are now components or “factors” of a general constituency. However, if they are to be both self-sustaining purposes of their own and complementary sectors, then (as I have suggested) the relationship between them, as two distinct aspects or entities, is unmediated and, at bottom, enigmatic. At best, any such mediation must rely on sheer coincidence between the thrust of group purposes and the thrust of societal functions. Even then we can hardly properly speak of mediation, for the view that the group serves as a link would need to rest on the added supposition of complementarity characterizing all human purposes, and not on any specific properties within groups as such. Although the doctrines of mass-society pluralism derive from a rather pessimistic and skeptical notion of the political aspirations (or even capacity) of the average person, and, unlike Cole’s vision, in support of fundamental social change, seek to inhibit fundamental changes, their conception of group mediation is equally striking by its inherent ambivalence. Intended first and foremost as insulating devices, groups are to contain particularistic demands and, thereby, to protect the political system from an excessive degree of pressure. In effect, groups are envisioned as instruments of depoliticization, insofar as their segmentation is to shelter society from the potentially totalitarian dangers to which mass-democracy is said to be fatally prone. At the same time, however, groups are presented as instruments of political education, and designed to produce qualities conducive to the fostering of responsible citizenship. Thus, we find in William Kornhauser’s Politics of Mass Society 19 Ibid.

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the following passage, quoted approvingly, from Edward Shils: “The pluralistic society keeps man’s sentiments from flying towards fixation on those remote objects which unsettle equanimity and disturb the pluralistic equilibrium”; and on the next page we read that “a greater proportion of people with few proximate concerns as compared to people with many such attachments tend to be apathetic and uninformed on public matters.”20 Pluralism, in this context, is defended as a system that contains individuals in their immediate locale and, simultaneously, as a socializing medium that leads them beyond their immediate interests to a broader and better understanding of public matters. For Kornhauser, no less than Cole, accordingly, particular purposes prove functional for the societal system as a whole, with Kornhauser favouring system maintenance and Cole favouring system change as built-in types of their dynamics. From neither is it convincingly apparent that group mediation determines political outcomes. In fact, both theorists suggest the reverse. For in both variants of pluralism we find that the political role of a group’s activities is defined prior to and apart from its own set goals. Cole’s and Kornhauser’s arguments in support of their respective mediation claims are therefore suspect. At any rate, the evidence they advance simply fails to demonstrate that the outcome of segmental group activity is the mediating source. On the other hand, as far as the socialist pluralism of Laski and Cole is concerned, students of the history of ideas may be rather impressed by the extent to which their version represents a remarkable, if odd, convergence of the archaic and the modern, in addition to its quaint nostalgia for a quasi-medieval society, with its multiple arenas of self-sustaining activity. And what makes the convergence even more remarkable is its pointing within its modern application to an essentially behaviourial conception of politics as process. For it not only denies that politics is to be uniquely identified with the domain of the state but also affirms that politics occurs wherever processes involve power, bargaining, and manipulation of one sort or another, despite occurring at different levels and in different sites. In effect, this (process) conception seeks to establish that the similarities of what is done at different levels and sites are such as cannot be described as other than typically political. For instance, what is done by way of mediating processes in a baseball club, corporation, university, 20 Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, 63–4.

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and comparable settings and institutions can do much to significantly mould attitudes and techniques that are of considerable relevance to public decision-making as well as to political participation generally. This is claimed to be so because members thereby acquire a feeling of mutuality, a sense of duty, the ability to dissimulate, and so on, which are bound to produce an extraordinary “efficacy” (as it is called) applicable to the realm of civic affairs. Even if members do not acquire all the claimed skills, whatever they do acquire is supposed to have some impact on their political behaviour. Whatever the impact, though, it would hardly suffice to mediate the civic consciousness of a particularist group’s members in accordance with the intended direction into which the general constituency is to move. For to do so, it would have to be evident that the nature of the change produced in the individual citizen was one that affirms this direction rather than one that, in truth, altogether negates it. In an “interestgroup” system, for example, any commitment to transform the political status quo – as in Cole’s pluralist system – would constitute a hindrance to what this system seeks to bring about functionally (in Cole’s sense). Similarly, Arend Lijphart’s model of consociational democracy regards a heightened form of participation by non-elites in public decisions as dysfunctional, because it jeopardizes the operation of strictly exclusive elite accommodation.21 Clearly, both examples demonstrate striking types of self-defeating mediation, in spite of behavioural similarities. We can, therefore, hardly assume direct continuity between processes, levels of group participation, and overall system-orientation, since the criteria of effectiveness, functionality, and societal appropriateness need not be the same. Hence, to put the case as cautiously as possible, it is difficult to see how a theory of political mediation could be derived from a process conception of politics, since such a conception allows us to focus on and examine behavioural similarities only.

the recovery of purpose For the most part, as I see it, the inability of a process conception to render a theory of political mediation seems to lie in a neglect of the telos, or end, of political strivings, as distinct from its instrumental-behav21 Arend Lijphart, “Consociational Democracy,” World Politics 21 (1919), 207–25. Integration is supposed to be achieved by processes of elite accommodation which, in turn, presupposes a high degree of elite autonomy.

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ioural characteristics. Surely, where a state, as a nation’s general constituency, is taken to exist, there is as a rule a framework of norms, principles, symbols, collective memories, and feelings of transcendent loyalty, which relates in an integral and essential way to the notion of a common good that surpasses or overrides purely sectional interests. This overriding ambience of a “common good” stands to particularism – if I may hazard the comparison – as faith, in theology, stands to works. For then, and then only, is the telos something profoundly distinct, and neither comprehensible by, nor reducible to, whatever is done or left undone within any other context. Thus, when politics is redefined in terms of process, it definitionally includes particularist and general contexts of aims and activities, on the ground that whatever is done is inherently so similar as to qualify for having political or general implications. And yet, despite this view, a variety of paraphrases are often introduced, presumably to account for the stubborn existence of a specific telos, epitomizing or symbolizing the general constituency: Laski’s “state”; Cole’s “community”; the “citizenship” of participation theorists; or, in the notable case of Robert Dahl – who, perhaps, has done more than anyone to extend the purview of politics – “the public’s business.”22 Possibly, such paraphrases are designed to deflect from the persistence of the uniquely general dimension of politics. On the other hand, it may well be that because, in many instances, people are enmeshed in a series of highly related, if not intimately concentric, attachments, the implicit and irrepressible telos is virtually hidden from themselves. Somewhat indirectly, this presumed probability rather remarkably recalls the medieval conception of “Mediate Articulation,” by virtue of which “smaller groups” are taken to stand in a (hidden) “graduated order, between the Supreme Unit and the Individual.”23 No less interestingly, perhaps, the contention not infrequently made by modern participationists, that we become better citizens by taking an active part in the organization of the factory or the running of the university, echoes Althusius’s idea of being led into “the universal symbiotic association” of the state through membership in “the symbiotic life of families, kinship associations, collegia, cities, and provinces.”24 22 Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 120. 23 Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 28. 24 F.S. Carney, ed. and trans., The Politics of Johannes Althusius (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 202.

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Against this “evolvement” approach to political mediation, I contend that we can hardly ever assume “Mediate Articulation,” which, as Althusius so transparently reveals, entails the denial of any basic differences between levels of association. Hence, the concept of bridging put forward in the preceding chapters categorically rejects this form of (graded) replication as a mode of political mediation. Instead, it proposes a type of transcendence that, while not celebrating differences, seeks neither to deny nor to eliminate them, but to assimilate them. Above all, the preferred approach seeks to keep the social conceptually distinct from the political, and therefore firmly resists the idea of deriving political attachments from resemblances in behaviour processes or “symbiotic” relationships. In truth, it goes even further, in that it questions the attribution of mediation itself to groups merely by virtue of such similarities. It does so because it considers this attribution to rest on a mistake or an illusion. It is mistaken if it relies on affinities, since these tell us little or nothing about their inter-causality. It is illusory if mediation is thought to be demonstrated by reading into a group the very properties that are presented as its products. Just as we cannot thus assume one level of group activity to replicate the other or be reducible to the other, so we cannot take it that similarities between occurrences at general and segmental levels point to their common genesis or to inter-relational causalities in producing certain outcomes, notably political ones. Thus, in that Aristotle sharply distinguishes between “institutions of a common social life,” and “the end and purpose of a polis,” much speaks in favour of Aristotle rather than Althusius, at any rate in this context.25 Also, if any inference in general terms can be drawn here, it is that the life of the polis defies being viewed as a mere epiphenomenon that somehow results from other and more real forces and, consequently, is determined rather than determining, with “society” being seen as more basic than the “state,” or the state as being solely the “servant” of society.26 It is difficult, therefore, to understand why we should regard participation at the level of the state as arising from participation at the level of 25 Ernest Barker, ed., The Politics of Aristotle (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 120. 26 Cf. G. Sartori, “From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology, in S.M. Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 65–100. See also F.M. Barnard and R.A. Vernon, “Pluralism, Participation, and Politics,” Political Theory 3 (1975), 180–97, and F.M. Barnard, “Norms, Procedures, and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Studies 40 (1992), 659–78.

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social, professional, or economic groups, or as simply following the transfer of segmental group experience of any kind to the general constituency. For, if there is any transfer taking place at all, it would have to be the other way around, from the general to the particular. In this event, however, any idea of a group’s political mediation presupposes a prior conception of what the state as a political system must be like. And it would be this prior conception that would define the particular group’s functional role as an instrument of “generality,” as well as that of a political system’s further maintenance or transformation. In other words, its impact would not be detachable from its assigned place within the political configuration as a whole. By the same token, when segmental political parties and clubs are classified as instruments of political mediation, and correlations between membership in these and participation at the national level are put forward as evidence of their educative political function, the paucity of the transfer argument becomes starkly obvious. For, manifestly, such types of group membership are already a political phenomenon by any standard of comprehension and, accordingly, cannot be viewed as facilitating political mediation. Clearly, the very idea of “mediation” would make no sense. Furthermore, whatever balancing such political entities are supposed to bring about is unlikely to succeed in mediating between sharply conflicting interests, by way of blending or resolving the issues dividing them. The best one may expect them or, for that matter, governments themselves, to achieve, is the creation of publicly protected spaces that allow citizens to disagree without having to face each other as outright and permanent enemies.27 Any further and persistent mediating attempts by institutional bodies, such as political parties, may meet with resistance, especially whenever most people feel that politics exists precisely because of a lack of consensus. In part this may be so because citizens differ not only about ends as such, but also about their implementational urgency. To an even greater extent, perhaps, obstacles arise because people not infrequently resent interference in matters in which they want to be their own personal masters, although they may in truth be torn by doubts or inner conflicts.

27 For an elaboration of these points, see F.M. Barnard, Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 7; and Democratic Legitimacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), ch. 10.

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Evidently, the idea of self-direction is rather deeply ingrained by now in most adults (especially in liberal democracies), and intervention in what they consider a maximally important space of their own may aggravate discord rather than assuage it. Moreover, in concerns about which a considerable number of people strongly differ, any such intervention may court the danger of over-extending the boundaries not only of the politically attainable but also of what is widely considered the politically legitimate. Viewed from the other end, any mediating body, overly determined to cope with a whole gamut of ends and values, may find that it makes too crushing demands all around. And, by so doing, it may, however unwittingly, come to threaten the most minimal requirements for the existence of personal freedom and public civility, if not to fatally undermine the telos of “self-direction” itself as a society’s cherished principle.

the concept of self-direction Unfortunately, the idea of self-direction, not unlike that of mediation, is, in its multiple dimensions, anything but simple. It is a rather peculiar notion, conjuring up an eerie image of an internally programmed robot, acting out its appointed tasks as though they were routine processes. Luckily, this mechanical image is thoroughly misleading since the “robot” in this case is the possessor of consciousness, will, dispositions, and purposes, whose internal causality is radically different from that of a mechanism. Not surprisingly, in view of this basic difference, the celebration of “self-direction,” in its political usage since the European Enlightenment, was expressly intended to serve as the very opposite to mindless submission, notably to the rule of hereditary princes, and, generally, to any form of abject servility. More specifically still, the concept was to replace the belief that humans needed a master to lord over them with the novel persuasion of self-mastery. At the same time, and most significantly, this novel creed was not intended to give birth to a social order of anarchic rebels or masterless drifters.28 Not serving a dynastic overlord simply did not mean lawlessness. Self-mastery, that is, no more than self-direction, was not to imply a normative wasteland. Nor, for that matter, was it to imply absolute free28 For a most perceptive treatment of the mediation between conscience and coercion, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1976), esp. 42–7.

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dom for individuals to do as they please. Rather, like freedom itself – within society – self-mastery and self-direction are concepts demanding to be markedly circumscribed within set contextual boundaries. And these boundaries broadly indicate to free agents both the scope and the limits of self-chosen and self-accountable human actions. Additionally, as self-directing agents, humans are assumed to have the capacity to use reason, will, and judgment, enabling them to fashion their own lives, stand up for their actions, and take responsibility for them. Consequently, by virtue of this assumed capacity, self-direction is linked with self-mastery, which, in the context of humans living with others of their kind, is expected to entail taking into account, and being bounded by, concern for the freedom of others. And both, the taking into account and the contextual boundedness, signal the entry of a distinctly normative dimension into self-direction, the dimension of mutual reciprocity. This entry confers upon “self-direction” its novel, but no less problematic, meaning within a telos conception of politics. As an integral part of this conception, self-direction, in its modern understanding, is no doubt properly located within the age of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, its inspirational roots lie somewhat farther back. Thus, without going back to more ancient sources, it may not be far off to attribute its modern meaning to the Protestant heritage, principally to the idea of lay priesthood, which proclaims believers to be in conscience their own judges of what divine commandments demand of them. Alternatively, the twofold fusion of a circumscribed variant of self-direction with self-mastery, and of self-mastery with law, might be safely domiciled in the tradition of “civic humanism,” especially in the sense in which it conformed with the Italian city-state humanism, in its emphasis on cultural belonging coupled with active citizenship, and its resting on the nobility of merit rather than on the nobility of birth.29 Admittedly, there are snares in traversing such (notoriously) expansive concepts as self-direction and civic humanism. However, taken together, they rather uncannily disclose a central problem facing “mediation” that spans times and spaces: the paradox that we need others to be fully ourselves as humans and citizens, while the mediation designed to humanize and civilize us also corrupts us, in that it makes us

29 The political sense of “civic humanism” is well captured in J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 85–90.

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dependent on one another in onerous ways.30 This paradox poses the question of whether we can retain or attain optimum individuality and integrity as associative members of a distinct political entity without harming, or being harmed by, that of others. For the most part this problem, at heart, also bears upon the achievable degree of overall legitimacy exercised by institutional powers in regulating our lives as humans and citizens. In an extended sense, the issue of legitimacy manifestly affects the mediating force of self-direction itself within the telos of associative strivings and, all the more so, insofar as it is confronted with social and political change. For, as Herder’s theory of displaced alternatives keeps reminding us, change rarely yields gains without losses.31 Rousseau went further still, by warning us that time, per se, harbours the possibility of corruption and, with it, causes the decay of that which makes and unmakes the life and rightfulness of the self-mastering republic: the existence and survival of political virtue as a state’s founding principle and founding spirit.32 In this view, evidently, the true function of political mediation is to ensure that the founding telos of the self-mastering republic is preserved by being protected from the corrosive elements that change carries with it. In the light of these dangers, it is not surprising that “balance” figures so prominently in Rousseau’s philosophy of nature and politics, or that it so powerfully structures the political meaning of self-direction in modernity. Nor is it surprising that this meaning entails not only “will,” but also “restraint.” For will, while it creates law, at the same time enjoins obedience to its commands. Such is the required thrust of will, if it is to direct the fusion of freedom and law. Clearly, will is an essential component of any human agency: yet, to generate and sustain civic mutuality and, with it, responsible action, will must contain judgment as well. For, without judgment, there can be no weighing or balancing of alternative options; thus, although mere impulse will undeniably causes 30 I have touched on aspects of this paradox – the central problem of achieving legitimacy in society and politics for Rousseau – in Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 31 J.G. Herder, Works, B. Suphan, ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), xiii, 182–93, 316, 371. 32 J.J. Rousseau, Social Contract. G.D.H. Cole, trans. (London: Dent, 1913, 1946) bk i, chs 8, 9, n5; bk ii, chs 3, 7, 8; bk iii chs 1, 2, 11, 15; bk iv, ch. 1; Geneva Manuscript, R.D. Masters, ed. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), 161–2; Political Economy, G.G.H. Cole, trans. (London: Dent, 1913, 1946), 243, 247, 251–3.

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things to happen, it just as undeniably fails as a causality of responsible civic conduct. Even then, however, to act responsibly in this direction, will demands the contextual existence of appropriate standards and these, in turn, call for an institutional setting that transcends the sphere in which nothing but individual concerns and interests matter most.33 Self-direction, then, defined in terms of willing and balancing in society, represents a highly circumscribed form of free agency. For it combines at least two distinct dimensions of willing: one typified by its subjective source, the other by its objective content. and, through the blending or balancing of these two dimensions, rightful mutuality as political mediation acquires its conceptually intelligible meaning. At any rate, it has to rest upon this kind of balance if, as an instrument of mediation, it may conceivably succeed in simultaneously attaining two objectives: the protection of the individual citizen from the capriciousness of other wills, on the one hand; and from capriciousness of one’s own will, on the other. In each case, mediation has to cope with the excessive egoism causing both. The idea of balance thus informs the conception of associative freedom as much as the conception of individual freedom. Ideally, therefore, the blending of freedom and law should produce a degree of mediation in civic life, by means of which institutional rules of conduct would not face individual citizens as a hostile force. Rather, once objective laws or rules are freely appropriated as virtually subjective maxims, individuals would, in obeying them, feel that they obey themselves alone. To be sure, whether or not this degree of interpenetration between the objective and the subjective could ever be fully achieved, or even considered desirable in a so-called “politics of difference,” some form of extended selfhood – as the outcome of judicious balancing – seems necessary to render the choice of a rightful mediating telos within the political realm at all possible.34

33 Rousseau, Political Economy, 236–7, 244; Social Contract, bk iv, ch. 8. 34 See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 73. Although Rousseau was a universalist at heart, he has little, if anything, to say on women in politics, almost in the way he dismissed cosmopolitanism as an empty formula. He held it to be part and parcel of the inherited Natural Law tradition which, however ethically motivated, rested for him on the mistaken belief that individuals, per se, simply by virtue of their common humanity, were capable of feeling a sense of belonging within so vast a habitat as the world, in which they could partake as citizens, women or men. There were, in short, limits to a

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It should be noted, however, that the notion of extended selfhood, as used here, is not itself a strictly moral category. For, not unlike Kant’s idea of an “enlarged mentality,” it implies neither ethical duty nor, for that matter, a sentiment of intrinsic love. All the notion is intended to mean, notably within political context, is the consciousness of a common interest, by virtue of which individuals would wish to associate with others and be parts of whole. This craving for “belonging” would not, however, necessarily require them to cease remaining individual selves, with interests of their own in addition to those they share with others. The “whole,” that is, would still be perceived in this case, as extraneous to their own selfhood, despite having been chosen as something that, in a sense, is virtually integral to themselves. All the same, as extended selves, individuals abandon “atomistic” individualism and accept the principle of interblending selfness and otherness. Furthermore, they come to realize that, with this acceptance, they have taken an irreversible step; there is simply no going back. Even the chance that self-direction may turn into self-destruction can make no difference. Any thought of isolation from society is now a mirage, an acutely foolish self-deception.35 It follows that whatever else “selfdirection” can be said to mean (or, for that matter, its legally bounded expression within “autonomy”), in its application to social and political relations this meaning cannot be divorced from a pattern of multiple interactions. And, thus situated, its operative locale is comparable to a field of balanced tensions, in which opposites jostle with one another, in and through the bipolar relationship between self-mastery and self-vulnerability, or that between a sense of personal independence and one of dependence upon others.

person’s fellow-feelings. Even a postulated sense of “extended selfhood” could not be stretched that far. 35 Rousseau feared that, prompted by the disguise of words, people would (in the course of wishful thinking) no longer see what stares them in the face, but rather believe what they want to see, although he did not go quite as far as Hannah Arendt, who spoke of self-deceptions as “lying to oneself.” See Rousseau, Emile, A. Bloom, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 237–43; see also his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, G.D.H. Cole, trans., The Social Contract and Discourses, 120–3. On Arendt, see Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), ch. 7. For comments on the phrase “lying to oneself,” see my “Hannah Arendt in Retrospect,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 69 (1955), 546–69, and Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 208–39.

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Moreover, despite all kinds of conceptual distinctions, boundaries between contending forces remain blurred, notably within self-direction as a political category. For here “selfness” and “otherness” inevitably overlap, so that if self-direction manages to assert itself, it does so despite such overlaps, limits, obstacles, and interferences. A comparably puzzling situation might arise also from uncertainty as to whether “self-direction” principally serves as a justification for protecting individual freedoms and, thereby, as the sanction for depoliticizing society or, alternatively, as a justification for creating institutions designed to guard and protect mutuality, in the pursuit of common interests and, thereby, as the sanction for the more intense politicization of society. Clearly, the concept of self-direction lends itself, as the mediating telos, to diverse interpretations. And, as in the interpretation and implementation of “civic humanism” itself, whatever answers are variously put forward, at particular times or in particular spaces, must needs be highly qualified answers. Especially in view of the frequently conflicting options that vie for recognition in the political realm, arriving at answers or making choices is rendered far from easy. Involving, as they typically do, the bridging of the given and aspired in translating political visions into the politically attainable within the here and now, the demarcation between what is to be discovered and what created may get blurred to an extent that all but obscures where “nature” ends and “culture” takes over – their respective roles becoming increasingly hard to fathom. Mediation, as the bringing into relation of these perplexingly diverse elements, therefore, is no predictable datum, especially if its intended function is that of convergence, rather than total mergence, the filtering or screening of components, rather than their dissolution.

bridgings and conflations The recipe for bridging, thus understood, evidently is no simple, single, or magic formula. Still, implicit as it is in the kind of mediation I am putting forward as a major concern of this book and as the central theme of this chapter, I have attempted to explore approaches to political mediation that, in and through somewhat nuanced categories of thinking, might possibly uncover promising guidelines, as opposed to distressingly blind alleys. At any rate, they might increase the likelihood of arriving at a political telos that, in its mediation, would combine a measure of convergence with a measure of contrast and thus produce diversified balance rather than (enforced) uniformity.

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To be sure, such an outcome would fall short of achieving instant, total, or final solutions. But then, within the context under discussion, any such attempt to strive for unity or oneness, regardless of its entailing cost, seems a doubtful alternative, especially if it is combined, as it often is, with a rhetoric of rampant conflations. For then it usually delights in lumping together citizenship with personal friendship, or political pluralism with societal fragmentation, or, worse still, any form of contestation in politics with warlike strife. I have touched on similar conflations before, and shall briefly return to them below. Here I merely want to suggest that a less ambitious (or ruthless) approach to bridging may protect us from mistaking parts for wholes, or the particular for the general, and, thereby, from assuming that participation within segmental groups is an adequate substitute for national participation. Likewise, it might prevent us from taking for granted that experience gained in particularist groups is directly relevant, or fully transferable, to the general level of national pursuits. Besides, such pitfalls may make us realize that even if more people are willing to engage in areas of particular personal interest, the maximization of participation in these need not coincide with the optimization of political participation or with forging effective (or even credible) links between the unmediated personal and the mediated political. For, clearly, the analytical distinction between the personal and the political involves an inevitable abridgment of reality. Mediated and unmediated forms of human relationship do not exist in isolation. Especially if we want to allow for overlaps, as well as to avert serious threats to associational cohesion, we have to grant that additional linkages are not rendered superfluous. Therefore, throughout these pages, a good deal of emphasis has been put on blending and balancing, with a view to achieving (unifying) convergence without entirely abandoning (multifarious) contrast. Manifestly, political mediation poses the alternate spectres of hope and tribulation. Not least so because in its path it encounters, in any but the most despotic contexts, sources of resistance. Even where voluntariness dominates, there is also coercion, if only because law-observance can scarcely manage without law-enforcement. Political mediation not infrequently involving also the transmission of visions into action, calls for multi-level modes of interpretation, including those comprising symbols, myths, metaphors, and images of one sort or another. And while many of these are rather elusive, they nonetheless powerfully mould the character and vigour of political

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choices and commitments. To be sure, no infallible recipes or manuals are available for coping with them, but adopting a broader range of cultural-historical perspectives can make a difference, for it might enable us to take into account the complex amalgam of motives and intentions, embracing not only rational-logical ways of thinking but also diverse emotional impulses. Moreover, the latter, although often less explicable, permeate deeply felt quests for almost a kind of embedment within a particular political whole. A number of political sociologists have ably drawn attention to these wider motivational perspectives, whether or not they would go so far as to see in them historical helpmates of the “cunning of reason,” or some other transcendent phenomenon.36 Be that as it may, there can be little doubt about the need for some such broader approach. Political mediation simply resists being accommodated within one method or discipline. I have speculated, therefore, whether “political sociology,” as an open-ended form of methodological enquiry, would not be able to demonstrate that the language of political discourse is not so irreducibly different that bridging avenues might not be found, by somewhat blurring boundaries of disciplines.37 If nothing else, it could help to endorse the almost bewildering degree of variation among motivational and justifying sources. Many are undeniably “rational,” such as legal rights, while others are closer to “reasons of the heart,” which, we have observed, structure and enliven expressions of loyalty and attachment that, not infrequently, typify the most abiding manifestations of political allegiance and belonging. That affections of this kind mediate remarkably abiding bonds of political fidelity is not unduly surprising. For, no less than other causal reasons, they generate meanings that, because or in spite of their proneness to ambiguity, are particularly different from reasons associated with mechanical processes. Their causality as linking instruments, that is, unlike those of such processes, essentially comprises intentions, convictions, or commitments, with a directional propensity uniquely of its own. And this difference clearly invites the distinction (in analytic terminology) between reasons for, in a purposive sense, and reasons from, in a dispositional sense ( such as psycho-physical conditions), with the former “giving cause,” in a more indirect way, and the latter “being cause,” in a more direct way.

36 I have enlarged on these points in Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 37 See my introductory remarks to this book.

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In this connection, the earlier point raised about “language” as a bridging avenue bears extending, insofar as the intelligible causality of mediating reasons, notably in political discourse and political action generally, is not solely a matter of being familiar with a particular language, such as English, German, or Russian. Rather, its effective mediating force within human relations rests on the existence of a certain sensitivity to moods, gestures, tone of voice, and other non-linguistic forms of expression that shape modes of explaining or justifying conduct and occurrences. In turn, such sensitivity is to a considerable extent the product of experience gained in the course of observing interrelations of people and things. To be communicable as intelligibly causal, mediation, once again, has to draw on a variety of requisites, among which language forms only a part. Most of these requisites have commonly been discovered by reflectively taking in what usually goes with what. At least that much can safely be said about mediating reasons functioning as instrumental causalities in daily life, including those characterizing much of its political discourse.

obligations and boundaries Unlike instrumental reasons, intended to account for means-to-ends relations, intrinsic reasons do present problems, especially in a political system that demands regular governmental accounting. For, in such a system, actions claimed to have been done for their own sake could defy challenging by being presented as (self-evidently) carrying their justifications wholly within themselves. Modern democracies, at any rate in their public professions, shun this kind of self-justification, and therefore opt for less consecrated sources of governmental actions and for more accountable and conditional forms of governmental authority. And however they welcome loyalty and dedication in members of a democratic state, such appreciation is as a rule mixed with profound fears and understandable anxiety. Why? Because, as we noted earlier, democrats have learned that to demand such a degree of categorical allegiance is liable to confuse citizenship with unmediated love or friendship, and thus to involve an illicit transfer of sentiments, perfectly appropriate in personal relations, into a sphere in which elements of coercive power can neither be ignored nor blithely argued away, except, perhaps, in the kind of discourse resting on an entirely Utopian vision of politics.38 38 See Richard Arneson, “Perfectionism and Politics,” Ethics, 3 (2000) 37–63; and also Isaiah Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in J.M. Porter

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Supposing, then, that fears of, or distaste for, unconditional political authority, hallowed by intrinsic reasons, are not unjustified, should political relations be viewed as no different from market relations with their trade-offs and pay-offs? This raises one of the most critical issues of political mediation, both in themselves and in their bearing on demands for envisioning the realm of politics as something altogether sui generis.39 Unfortunately, despite its importance, there seems no ready or irrefutable answer to this question. Not unlike Weber, I do, however, hesitate to abandon a line of thought that puts emphasis on intrinsic reasons as sanctions for the unconditional honouring of procedural standards. Thus, while I agree that such standards of political morality must be clearly distinguished from strictly moral principles, unbounded and unconditional in their universal validity, I nevertheless think that political principles, as principles, must resist wilful or all-toofrequent change.40 For, without any institutional “sticking points” there can be no rule-governed safeguards, able to protect political mediation against abuse and the loss of its self-imposed civic integrity. In every political system, other than that of brazenly despotic rule, the preservation of mediated procedural standards of lawfulness and civic mutuality calls, accordingly, for some institutionally protected normative continuity. And to ensure that such standards are observed demands, in turn, a certain degree of their indisputable consecration; for most likely it is only then that certain procedural standards will be seen as an indispensable requirement of a lawful regime’s on-going identity. Not altogether surprisingly, we find that, in liberal democracies, the holding of regular elections is regarded as an unquestioned normative standard, designed to ensure that citizens are given the choice of an alternative party’s governance. Democracies reared within the fabric of and Richard Vernon, eds. Unity, Plurality, and Politics: Essays in Honour of F.M. Barnard (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 120–42. 39 Few writers, to my knowledge, have raised the question I pose more forcefully than Edmund Burke. While accepting the idea of “contract,” he nevertheless refused to go along with the view that the state was “nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco.” Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), W.B. Todd, ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1962), 117. 40 Although Max Weber stresses “habituation” and “institutionalization,” he generally implies normative elements, by maintaining that people most willingly obey when they feel a moral obligation to do so. See his The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, trans (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 324–7, 386–7, 387–8.

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such mediated standards are expected to “consecrate” their binding validity as evidence of their integral authenticity. Similarly, this kind of intrinsic, self-sustaining quality, and not an extrinsically apparent plausibility alone, is meant, as an “ideal type,” to validate political mediation as a generally acceptable standard and operative norm. Likewise, too, its telos would, almost definitionally, be expected to telescope means and ends, as an intrinsic purpose, beyond which there is no other purpose, in order to claim general acceptability. To be sure, so consecrated a political telos could be judged contrary to the idea of conditionality or to that of openness to political change. Conceptually, it could be found to negate contingency as such and, with it, the (implicit) distinction between directly causing and indirectly “giving cause.”41 Possibly, a comparable risk of ambiguity lies in putting forward historical-culture perspectives as aids toward more circumspect paths of political mediation, especially in view of post-modernity’s emphasis on human self-direction, lest such perspectives are liable to confuse human purposes in history with supra-human purposes of history. Moreover, any such confusion incurs potentially serious political dangers, by inducing rulers to claim to be the instruments of supra-human (providential) designs – as Adolph Hitler certainly did. All the same, such risks and dangers could, I fear, be unduly exaggerated, in which case the faith in human self-direction and the possibility of imaginative self-projection would undoubtedly be appreciably weakened. And this, albeit somewhat indirectly, might put people off seeking to retrace the past, with a view to plumbing its depths, in search of earlier instances of human creativity. In turn, should this happen, it would surely deny them the opportunity for feeling the pulse of its varied creative forms of expression, by means of which they could detect possible guides into the future – emulating some and abstaining from others that they fear or distrust. In effect, therefore, the indicated broadening would help to widen the range of people’s creative choices at any given time or place. We might do worse, therefore, than pursuing the suggested approach. After all, far from inviting political abuses, it essentially amounts to extrapolating from Hobbes’s account of the “two faces” of human 41 “Hallowed authority” could undeniably be taken for a pleonasm, but something of this consecrating quality surely enters into reasons as ends in themselves, rendering them unsuitable for bargaining or the striking of deals. See my Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, ch. 2 for further comments on this point. See also ch. 10, n1.

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freedom: one, looking backward to historical antecedents; the other glancing ahead to what is yet to be brought about. The first informs us about the boundaries of human agency in the past; the second prompts us to weigh prospective ends. At the same time, however, and by no means less significantly, Hobbes is urging us not to take contexts for causes, by insisting that historical antecedents do not determine the ends or purposes on which we decide to act.42 By the same token, we might extrapolate further by adding that while possessing the capacity to choose between ends or purposes, the capacity itself provides humans with no warrant for being able to translate action-promoting sources of mediation into action-compelling sources. There simply seems no generally valid formula for bridging this potential gap, no way for pinning down the requirements that under all circumstances would enable it to achieve the intended mediation. Militant alternatives, using beguiling slogans and “totalitarian” types of “mediation,” have recurrently failed as political trajectories, possibly because their proponents have been trapped within the wheels of their rhetorical excesses. Despite their frequently moralizing currency, such forms of mediation forfeit in their implementation the chance of their effective purchasing power. What they demonstrate instead, to a highly alarming degree, is that mediation, having become the victim of selfentrapment and self-deception, is fast moving toward its own self-annihilation, within the context of bogus political grandeur – a context both Rousseau and Kant dreaded most. For it is as boundless as it is lawless. Rousseau’s and Kant’s fears were by no means exaggerated, just as their implied belief that political creations, to be at all viable, require normative elements in their structures, is by no means ill-founded. Although political obligations constitutionally imposed, are not the same as moral obligations, individually self-imposed, they are (in constitutionally sanctioned regimes) nevertheless not altogether different, insofar as they are then an integral part of some normative framework. In other words, there are undeniable parallels amidst pronounced asymmetries. “Reckoning with consequences,” undoubtedly a virtually defining characteristic of political commitments, is not, for all that, devoid of normative caring among “pragmatic” calculations, and hence not entirely different from moral and personal commitments – despite possibly creating dilemmas in the minds of those who confine morality to strictly Kantian interpretations. For do we not normally likewise expect, in personal relations, that 42 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1950), Part i, ch. 14, and Part ii, ch 21, esp. 106, 177.

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(minimally rational) adults care about outcomes? Similarly, choosing between conflicting obligations is no more a stranger to the personal sphere of conduct than it is to the political (public) sphere. Thus, there are situations (especially in dark times of despotic lawlessness) when individuals are faced with having to opt between telling the truth at all times and saving people from unlawful arrest (or worse), often at the cost of endangering their own lives. Surely, such dilemmas are every bit as trying as choosing between one’s pledged commitment to a political party, its leadership, and its policies, and one’s subsequent sense of party-political obligations, as in the case of Gyorgy Palaczi Horvath, who took an active part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1957. No longer able to skate on the thin ice of combining his horror of the system he helped to create with inaction, he decided that he could not but stop being unmindful of what he had known all along.43 Interestingly, the switch of obligatory consciousness was not principally a cognitive change, whereby Horvath suddenly came to see what he had not seen before, in the manner that a biologist discovers new data under the microscope. Rather, it was a change in minding what he had known for some time. And this “minding” assumed therefore a form of reminding, comparable to that in Plato’s Meno, in that Horvath recovered a meaning that was there all the time, but so far had not stirred him into acting. Unlike additional information, or the more rigorous application of logical inference, what evidently triggered the switch in Horvath’s obligatory sense of commitment was not a case of knowing more, but of knowing differently. Possibly, elements in the overall context had a hand in it, on the assumption that contexts play a significant role in the causality of such transformations, positively or negatively. (I am thinking here of the failure of the Spartakist rising in Germany, which one of its leaders, Karl Liebknecht, attributed to the context’s negative causality, commenting that “the period did not rebel.”)44 But, whatever precisely generated

43 G.P. Horvath himself reported that he knew for quite some time of the lying and corruption in the Communist Party, the methods of extracting confessions, the terror and the camps, and the elimination of whole nationalities by the Kremlin leaders. See his remarkable The Undefeated (London: Secker and Warburg, 1959), esp. 191. 44 The context was Germany after the end of World War i, which turned against a group of committed socialist radicals and what they sought to accomplish. I touched on the “fickleness” of contextual causality in “Accounting for Actions: Causality and Teleology,” in History and Theory 20 (1981) 291–312.

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Horvath’s change of obligatory consciousness, it seems hardly reducible to the causality of contexts or, for that matter, to purely opportunist subjective calculations, bereft of objectively normative constituents. All the same, granted that in this turn-around unmistakably normative-moral obligations played a crucial role, there are undeniably asymmetries governing standards of praise and blame within political obligations vis-à-vis standards governing moral obligations. Quite apart from the fundamental distinction between the moral and the political, the asymmetries under discussion may be such that what in the moral realm is considered right and proper may altogether fail to meet with approval politically. A former leader of the Conservative Party in Canada (Robert Stanfield), for instance, who, in an attempt to transplant individual morality into public (political) morality – maintaining that speaking the truth was at all times paramount – had to learn to his cost that honesty may not pay, and that the risk of dirty hands is not easily escaped in politics. In short, adherence to truth, highly commendable in moral obligations, receives little credit in political obligations, however sincerely it is upheld and publicly declared. Evidently, such high-mindedness rates markedly lower than actual outcomes that the majority of people expect. It seems, therefore, that once we change private hats for public hats, the standards on which we are judged are no longer the same. Yet, even if it is acceded that this conclusion is not unwarranted, it does not necessarily follow (we have found) that consequentialism as such, although it for the most part characterizes political standards, invariably opens the floodgates to the waves of unbridled relativism, and thereby establishes the most obvious rationale for the dirty-hands syndrome. On the contrary, if paradoxically, it is because of the risks associated with the dirty-hands syndrome that not rarely greater care is taken over consequentialist standards of public conduct than over standards of private conduct, where the focus usually is on the sincerity of motives and intentions. All the more so, since political obligations, publicly declared (typically by party or administrative functionaries), often involve people being held responsible for outcomes they themselves neither intended nor initiated.45 45 Max Weber’s distinction between an ethic of faith and an ethic of responsibility is of relevance here. John Rawls’s attempt to apply Kantian criteria of morality, notably in terms of the sincerity of motives, to political obligations, suffers, I fear, from the same lack of realism as his interpretation of “public reason.”

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Besides, political obligations cannot persistently afford to fall short of delivering results, without being found normatively empty. And, if this is so, the political architects involved had better have enough political judgment to know that political obligations, capable of being honoured or, indeed, demandable at all, call for intelligibly normative boundaries and contextually appropriate limits. Most likely, considerations of this nature induced Rousseau and Kant to view limits as safeguards of intrinsically normative elements within political standards, both in the creation and the upholding of a lawfully civic order. Hence, rather than identifying limits with obstacles, they looked upon them as potential guides in the given as much as in the aspired, helping to shape its ordering or re-ordering. Accordingly, the normative telos of a political order – be it inclusiveness, mutuality, balance, or “constructivism” – demands boundaries for its reciprocal norms and organizational structures, whether or not these normative contours are adequate in themselves to provide the foundational sanctions of a society’s political fabric. Still, it is highly doubtful whether any conception of order could exist in the absence of demarcating limitations of one kind or another. Putting it slightly differently, an order, per se, carries with it no ideal of a good society; it merely, though essentially, constitutes the minimal requirement for political associations to form at all. Even revolutions, as Marx stressed (in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), occur within some contextual orders, and whatever new order they generate calls likewise for boundaries that delimit its norms and structures. This is not to apotheosize limits as such, but simply to correct the (widespread) belief that every plea for boundaries is tantamount to a defence of a given status quo. Surely, we may not have to go so far as to reject any radical changes, or to fully share Jürgen Habermas’s view that “we have lost our confidence that conditions can be changed by revolutions,” without believing reality undisturbable.46 Far from being a hindrance to change, a consciousness of limits could yield assistance in gauging the scope of the realizable and, thereby, help prevent the kind of bogus political grandeur that Rousseau and Kant so fiercely despised.

46 See Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in Bohman and Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: mit Press, 1997), 39.

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It appears, however, that even here qualifications are called for, if statehood, as the general constituency and the space of civic belonging, is not to lose its meaningful function in at least this twofold capacity. I find it encouraging therefore that Paul Hirst, in his theory of associationism, while advocating a variant of Guild Socialism, is not bent on making the state redundant. Nor would he employ limits to an extent that would render the state incapable of exercising any effective control or authority, thus denying it the possibility of actually doing anything for which it could be held accountable. Hirst agrees that once segmental associations take over public functions, they would be answerable only to “their own membership … for the administration of these activities.”47 He can see that under such circumstances, no state, let alone a democracy, could be responsive or function at all; indeed, their viability would become highly questionable. Perhaps then, it is not unreasonable to conclude that limits, too, may need limits of their own. Their regulative task, that is, may have to include self-regulation, the acceptance of boundaries upon themselves. And, conceivably, accepting such inner limits may, in the final analysis, prove one of the major challenges confronting political mediation, in order to create, preserve, or restore a people’s overarching sense of civic belonging.

47 Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 24. See also Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown, 1960), 6–16, where Wolin stresses the importance of delimitations and boundaries in the creation of a measure of order that mediates between us and our “political space.” Likewise he points out that the creation of such a structured space was most strikingly illustrated in Hobbes’s political thought as the essence of political mediation.

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Concluding Reflections

in attempting to demarcate the contours of political mediation, the preceding chapter focused on “bringing-into-relation” parts and wholes, on the one hand, and the given and aspired, on the other. The concluding reflections, while returning to these mediating concerns (particularly the second) in passing observations, principally dwell on a number of broader themes touched upon earlier, which seem to me of relevance to cultural-political justifications associated with doctrines of the modern nation state – the preferred space of civic belonging, notably in Europe after World War i.

i As distinct from the bogus grandeur that Kant attributed to the work of “political moralists,” I have no wish – anymore than Kant – to decry a genuinely moral telos in political commitments. Rather, in sharing here Kant’s negative sentiments about the bogus morality of political opportunists, I mean to draw (renewed) attention to dangers arising from escalating the moral pitch of political rhetoric, lest it manages to blur the coercive dimensions of any political governance, if not to surreptitiously screen the use of state-sanctioned terror. Furthermore, an unduly close identification of political mediation with moral mediation courts the risk of massive disenchantment with political ideals as such. In this connection, once again, Weber’s distinction between an ethic of faith and an ethic of responsibility is clearly not without merit. For the distinction unmistakably pays heed to just such a risk, insofar as politicians not rarely raise expectations that cannot possibly be met. As a sort of safeguard, therefore, I urge a highly selective use of

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mediating or bridging components, designed to counteract the temptation to ignore the limits of a political system’s implementational means as well as the boundaries of (desirable) governmental intervention. Moreover, overextending political promises could not only give rise to the dangers Weber was concerned about but also might, by unreasonably augmenting the plurality of political choices, in effect negate whatever unifying goals mediating or bridging efforts were intended to bring about, often, alas, without preventing the overconcentration of political power or achieving its multiple diffusion. No less counter-productive than overextending promises and overly pluralizing alternative choices might be the presentation of partisan ends as though they were unquestionable principles over a wide range of implementational policies. For, while they might well be designed to defuse conflicts, they could actually intensify them, since, as principles, they are inclined to resist bridging by compromise solutions. All that may therefore be said with a degree of assurance is that bridging, under conditions of multiple tensions, had better focus on methods likely to promote convergence rather than substantive unity, if it wants to avoid manifold clashes, the marginalization of minority concerns, or worse still, enforced consensus. Especially on the high ground of supposedly self-evident determining principles, this kind of “mediated” consensus seems the least promising path to coming-into-relation. Rather, a more likely outcome might be a complete loss of sight of the distinction between necessity and contingency, that is, between causing and giving cause, as paralleling the difference between “mergence” and “convergence,” adduced earlier.1 As the reader will recall, this line of differentiation is a central part of the main argument. Here I wish to extend the parallel in essence to the difference between contingent blending and inexorable determination. And the point of making this distinction has become particularly apparent since the rise of nationalism, insofar as valid statehood became a matter of “national self-determination” – a terminology that met with little enthusiasm among those for whom political association was above all the outcome of choice rather than genetic determination. Such misgivings did not, however, stop others from welcoming the nationalist double infusion: the mergence of culture with political content, and of the political with cultural content. 1 For an elaboration of this distinction, see my “Accounting for Actions: Causality and Teleology,” History and Theory 20 (1981), 291–312; see also my Reason and Self-Enactment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 164.

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For them, the double infusion could not but assist in deepening their sense of civic self-location, in that never before (they claimed) could they feel so intense a continuity in time and a contiguity in space with those they came to live with as fellow-citizens. It was, in short, a wholly new experience. With these new foundational moorings forming a cultural-political matrix of their own, it was almost to be expected that self-understandings underwent a transformation from those of being subjects to those of being citizens, and from being subject peoples to becoming self-mastering nations. Nor was it surprising that, with these changes, a new sensitivity arose, chiefly in two directions: by way of inner relatedness; and by way of contextual structures. Awareness of this twofold development heralded for many the quintessential difference between membership of a nation-state and membership of any other state. The latter, to them, was now closer to being part of a herd or, at best, the rank and file of an army. J.G. Herder, voicing these sentiments of national belonging, intimately connected them with the possession of a common language. Through it, he argued, shared concepts are made possible, together with associative normative standards. And since he viewed civic actions to be mediated chiefly by such standards, they are, Herder insisted, fundamentally different from the determination governing natural processes in the world of plants and animals. In his theory of language, the possession of the ability to speak offers a unique opportunity to humans for the enjoyment of freedom and the exercise of choice, on the one hand, and the possibility of self-reflection – of “mirroring oneself within oneself” – on the other. In conjunction, they are therefore said to yield the essential conditions for purposive creativity and “culture,” and, thus, for the emergence of humans’ understanding themselves as self-directing agents.2 By contrast, for the sociologist Robert Michels, writing shortly before World War i, the “one language, one nation idea” had little attraction. Regarding it as a fateful illusion, he felt that “not one of these solutions is so far-reaching in its effects as the respective discoverers imagined in 2 Herder, Werke, v, 126–35; for a fuller discussion (as well as translation) of Herder’s theory of language, see my Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 17–32, 117–77. For a shorter treatment, see my Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 150–5.

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the days of their first enthusiasm.” He thought much the same about the allegedly necessary coincidence of nationalism and democracy.3 Accordingly, whatever new ingredients enter the transformed context of civic belonging, they do not prevent it from having to cope with limits of its own. And these limits have a way of defying being stretched, bridged, or transcended, both by their very existence and by pressing into service cultural-political types of justifications. In short, limits can no more be ignored now than before.

ii There is little need to rehearse here the apprehensions that have been expressed over nationalist claims on the lines of these justifications.4 Plainly, it is highly arguable whether states not thus justified fail to be legitimate states. Even if it were granted that a national culture is indispensable to modern statehood or to being fully human, this would hardly resolve the issue of deciding what, in a particular case, constituted the crucially distinctive political culture. Hence, any such nationalist claims are surely open to questioning, whether or not the questions posed are at all answerable. The marriage between culture and politics may conceivably prove a true source of lasting bliss, leading to more abiding civic relations than relations of non-culturally based states. However, no logical, historical, or analogical argument seems convincing enough to warrant wholesale generalizations one way or another. The brief (inconclusive) comments I have put forward on relations within nation-states might, accordingly, safely be extended to relations between nation-states. Potentially, external relations could be more peaceful; but, just as potentially, they could be more strained, and wars between nation-states could be more violent and long-lasting, in that gains and losses in cultural terms might be viewed to be far more serious than those in pragmatic terms. When the sacredness of a language, a religion, a tradition,

3 Robert Michels, Political Parties, E. and C. Paul, trans. (London: Jarold & Sons, 1915), vii. Especially in extra-European contexts, the languages spoken are frequently too diversified and too numerous for any one language to gain predominance as the national language. 4 The most incisive critique, I believe, is still E. Kedurie’s Nationalism (London: Hutchison, 1960); see also A.D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 1971); and David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

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or the very soul of a people is at stake, compromises by way of “interest” bargaining do not easily suggest themselves. It appears, therefore, that national cultures, taken for consecrated, unchallengeable grounds in support of legitimizing the modern nation-state, are nevertheless subject to the same range of contingencies as other legitimizing principles.5 And possibly even more so, because in view of their remarkably intense persuasive force, they are apt to conceal the fact that political legitimacy generally involves at least three levels of applicability: the who, how, and where of a national government. Thus, by tending to focus on ethnic-cultural characteristics, nationalist doctrines either disregard the first two levels or collapse all three levels into one. Consequently, even if “culture” is taken to enrich the texture of politics, or possibly enlarge its very meaning, it hardly renders generally acceptable legitimizing criteria otiose. Whatever way we look at it, therefore, we have to be prepared, as I suggested earlier, to face an impasse, and be more or less content with the creation of institutionally safeguarded spaces, in which humans are able to differ without inviting warlike strife or despotic regimes of one kind or another. This may sound like resignedly accepting some such escape route, some face-saving way of testifying to the sheer inadequacy of bridging skills. If so, in the final analysis, we may simply have to concede that limits to political mediation will remain inescapable or unalterable, as long as there are limits to the humanly attainable. We may, that is, have to acknowledge the validity of Kant’s dictum that politics is only as good as its practitioners. A strategy of small steps, of gradual constructivism, may help, but it may also prove to be nothing but optimistic speculation, if not the artful “humbug talk” of political opportunists who know that humans, being what they are, are simply unable ever to craft anything straight.6 Others, perhaps somewhat less pessimistic, nevertheless also went beyond the political by planting the roots of mediated fellowship in the soil of an enhanced sensitivity, combined with the cultivation of a gener-

5 For a sophisticated elaboration of this point, see J.S. Fishkin, Tyranny and Legitimacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 6 Immanuel Kant, The Contest of Faculties, in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991), 188; see also Kant, Perpetual Peace (Reiss), 121.

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ally “extended selfhood” or “enlarged mentality,” in the direction of a revived faith in “civic humanism.”7

iii Possibly, these and similar proposals point to bridging avenues, of which the present age has unprecedented need. Still, few, if any, would challenge the admission that, regrettably, there are no known signposts instructing us how to get from here to there, no ready-made road-maps to guide humanity out of the “wretched situation,” as James Madison put it during the constitutional debate of 1788 in Virginia, since “no checks, no form of government, can render us secure.” But, more hopeful than Kant, Madison expressed a qualified faith in the future, provided “there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community.”8 Interestingly, Madison, not unlike Rousseau, puts maximum emphasis on dispositions and motives of will, rather than on constitutions, forms of government, or checks and balances. Even legislation, as such, while the “non-transferable right” of the “sovereign people,” seems not the decisive issue for him. For, to succeed at all in cultivating in a community “sufficient virtue and intelligence,” conditions must be propitious.9 Yet, if they are, legislation, as such, may be less needed, whereas, if they are not, legislation, as such, is least likely able to bring about effective or lasting reforms. It appears, therefore, that in attempting to get from the given to the aspired, we face an almost paradoxical situa7 For example, Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961, 1968), 5–6, 197, 219, 242–3, 262–3; The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1951, 1966), 474; The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 31, 38–9, 61, 197, 200, 202–4; On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 58, 269–72; The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), i, 180; and Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), 181, 232–3. See also Maurizio Passerin D’Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 90–2. 8 The Federalist, No. 49. Madison’s speech started the debate. The quote has a distinctly Rousseauian ring; throughout the speech there are a number of parallels between them. Incidentally, Rousseau offers an interesting comment on the word “virtue” in Emile, 444. The word, he writes, “comes from strength.” And strength is a strictly conceptual-volitional category. Hence, “virtue belongs only to a being that is weak by nature and strong by will.” We do not call God virtuous, “because it requires no effort for Him to do good.” 9 A beginning could nevertheless be made, Rousseau maintained, provided balance and “scale” were firmly kept in mind. See his Emile, 194. Hence he believed that the great monarchies of Europe were doomed.

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tion: the outcome would have to be the cause, in that the new spirit to be produced, by transforming contextual institutions, would have to preside over their creation. Thus, before laws could come to exist, ushering in a new community, its members would already have to be what they are to become by means of those same laws. In other words, not the drafting of laws comes first, but the cultivation of customs, manners, and habits of thinking and feeling, for they are the “unshakeable keystones,” while specific regulations are only “the sides of the arch.”10 It follows that, to bridge the gap between what is and what might be, the soil must be suitably prepared. Only then is there a chance for the foundations of the aspired transformation to be truly rooted, so that “culture” is able to connect with “nature.” So viewed, the creation of what is to be calls as much for historical continuity with the past as for envisioning goals projecting into the future. And, if so, “making” cannot altogether dispense with “unfolding,” or “mediation” with “cultivation.”11 Unhappily, the transformation, we have noted, appears to demand a virtual reversal of cause and effect, since what is to be accomplished at the same time constitutes the necessary condition of its coming about. And it is this deeply enigmatic conundrum that bedevils the realization of reform aspirations as an ever-taxing challenge, even when it fails to daunt bolder spirits from making a start, or those brave enough to defy the corruptive influences that are said to emanate from change or from the mere passing of time, per se.12 Besides, there is invariably the question of the cost at which the transformation is to be brought about. And this cost pertains not merely to what is lost in whatever is gained – the cost of displaced alternatives, as Herder formulated it – but, more worryingly still, to what may be irretrievably lost.13 Also, if this were not enough, there is a comparable uncertainty about the respective force of “culture” and “nature” upon 10 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, chs 7, 12. 11 Herder, Werke, xiii, 382–3. Although Herder acknowledges the need of “making,” of bringing about action guided by a preconceived purposive design, the break with nature is never a total break for him. Even a nation cannot simply legislate itself entirely into existence without unfolding components, and therefore is never a matter of making only. 12 Rousseau, Emile, 82, 194; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, G.D.H. Cole, trans. (London: Dent, 1946), 188–91, 196–7. 13 Herder, Werke, xiii, 182–93, 316, 371. Rousseau, Letters from the Mountain, Oeuvres Complètes, Pléiade, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–69), iii, 809–10.

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which political mediation is to rest. In essence, this uncertainty lies in not being clear how far their connection is chiefly a matter of discovering what is latent, as against creating something entirely new, on the basis of an a priori (preconceived) purpose. Admittedly, the issue of boundaries between culture and nature is not necessarily political at heart. For the question of the relation between “making” and “unfolding” is definitely not relevant to the inwardness of the private self only. The cultivation of dispositions or the deliverance of judgment and will from delusion and degradation can and does have public implications, if and when any one of them affects the structuring of civic life. In that event, extending the space of application beyond that of the individual self seems surely called for, as well as, probably, a measure of politicization, although then, if in the form of direct governmental intervention, less often means more, insofar as the optimally achievable is usually closer to creating a degree of mediated balance than to the attainment of absolute perfection.14

iv Moreover, in view of the inherent limits and tensions, the existing gap separating the given and the aspired may only doubtfully be wholly or permanently closed. This being so is what Rousseau, in most of his moods, acutely dreaded. Intensely aware of the odds facing mediation in politics, he therefore questioned even the likelihood of achieving some sort of balance in civic life, let alone perfection. Hence, in the absence of any certainty of attaining the recovery of the kind of balance he associated with the state of nature, Rousseau sadly came to the conclusion that judgment may for ever remain clouded and vision blurred. The prospect of injecting “virtue and intelligence” into politics may thus, together with bridging the gap between the given and the aspired, continue to be distressingly slight – an outcome that Madison, likewise, by no means entirely excluded.15 14 As we noted in chapter 9, “balance” virtually dominates Rousseau’s philosophy of politics as much as his philosophy of nature. See especially ch. 9, 287–8 and n33: Rousseau, Political Economy, 236–7, 244, and Social Contract, bk iv, c h. 8. 15 Few original thinkers are wholly consistent, and Rousseau, perhaps, is no exception, judging by the most frequently expressed views by commentators. But it does not demand exceptionally close reading to discover that underlying many of his writings there is a recurrently pessimistic mood. See, for example, on the transformation of the given into the aspired, Social Contract, bk i, ch 8; bk ii, chs 3, 8, 12;

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Finally, an added problem faces mediating attempts at bridging, arising out of situations in which there is joint agency, notably in the public domain, which greatly disturbed Tocqueville. What worried him most was the potential loss of individuals’ ability to perceive any continuity between such actions and their own relatedness to as well as responsibility for them.16 As a matter of common experience, people do find it difficult, if not impossible, to accept responsibility, if they cannot appropriate reasons for whatever they have apparently brought about as reasons of their own. The only reasons they might then be inclined to concede are dispositional ones from which they could have acted, as opposed to reasons for which they consciously and purposively acted. Yet, in the former case, people do not really mind – in the sense of “intend” – what “made them do,” possibly because they were under emotional stress, intoxicated, or simply absent-minded. But, whatever it was causing them thus to act evidently rendered them unable to relate to or account for their actions in recognizably purposive terms. So, unless we accept the thesis that humans routinely act under some “veil of ignorance,” we can hardly rest political deeds on motivational or justifying grounds that are utterly devoid of the causal category of intentionality.17 Even more worrying are situations in which there is a marked discrepancy between shared intended purposes and actual policy outcomes. People then, acting jointly toward ends they happen to cherish, find that the politically implemented action is totally at odds with what they sought to bring about. Although they knowingly and purposively participated in framing policies, they nonetheless fail to see any continuity between their civic strivings and the ensuing results. “More worrying” because the failure to make such connections may easily give citizens bk iv, ch. 7; Emile, 79, 104, 460, 464; Political Economy, 235, 240, 251, 254; Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau (New York: Burt Franklin, 1767, reprint 1972), ii, 138; Rousseau’s letter to Mirabeau, in C.E. Vaughan, Rousseau’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), ii,159, 160–1; Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 120–1, and, indeed, throughout the most part of the Discourse. Likewise, Madison makes no secret of his profound doubts: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea,” he declares in the same speech of 20 June 1788. I am indebted to Professor J.M. Porter for sending me this additional information in The Founders’ Constitution, i, ch. 13, no. 36. 16 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, i, Part ii, ch 2, 4, esp. 192–5. 17 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 12, 19, 136–42.

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the feeling that any expression of their sense of civic belonging is made a prey to manipulative techniques of skilful political opinion-makers. I have no wish to deny the seriousness of this risk, aggravated as it is by the increasing opportunities opinion-makers have, not only for the fabrication of ersatz purposes but also for the vastly mounting techniques of making them widely plausible. But I would nevertheless hesitate to concede that, despite the success opinion-makers have had in fabricating purposes, resistance to such practices has ceased. Nor would I advocate, as an alternative, that levels of purposive meaning be confined to the parsimonious boundaries of exclusively individual goals. All the same, the threat to authentically mediated joint purposes in politics is real enough, if not depressingly ominous, since fabricated purposes often prove as effective as do genuine ones, with “damage control” taking the place of candidly truthful acceptance of responsibility. “Ominous” because, as a result, actions and reasons could become discontinuous to an extent that rendered purposive reasons, even if genuine, incapable of serving as justifying grounds in any authentically causal manner. Actions would then not only speak louder than words; they would speak in an altogether different language.18

v Creating an authentic as well as generally pervasive sense of civic belonging, together with advancing forms of politically motivated bridging, is beyond doubt an undertaking not short of troubling quandaries. Not surprisingly, quandaries multiply in a politics of plural values and conflicting interests, especially if, in addition, “belonging” as much as “bridging” may then in themselves comprise highly divergent understandings. And this could well be the case, despite broad agreement on the overall goal of “self-mastery” as such, and its rejection of any kind of external homogenization. However, the alternative, by way of internal blending, faces problems of its own. For, trying to blend such potentially clashing categories as individual self-direction and associative mutuality, or those of strictly private concerns and wholly public ends, might unduly stretch the bounds of demandable civic commitment and 18 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” has in this connection a fair degree of pointed relevance. See his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinnes, trans. (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.

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civic reciprocity; and all the more so since these blendings have to be superimposed on self-obligating ordinances under “self-mastery,” the new political-legal context. Admittedly, within this new context, both “blending” and “belonging” would be undergoing simultaneous reappraisal, together with other political constructs, particularly as regards the distance and relatedness between the largely unmediated social and the largely mediated political. Any attempt, however, to create anew a (redefined) “bringing-into-relation” cannot altogether escape the issue of narrowing or entirely closing the gap between the given and the aspired. And this issue, in turn, of necessity calls for coming to grips with the kind of virtue and the kind of intelligence demanded to establish and maintain the desired balance between a measure of convergence and a measure or contrast – the recurrent theme of the book and undoubtedly the most challenging task facing a societal pluralism that, at one and the same time, wants to be cultural and political. What can be said about combining convergence with contrast, to lay the foundations of political pluralism, is no less applicable to the combination of “balance” and “measure” in laying the foundations of the political itself. Interestingly in this connection, Max Weber made a sense of measure an integral part of political vision, considering it a vital source of political judgment – something no statesman can dispense with,19 for it implies that serene awareness that grasps that to act politically is to act amidst possibilities as much as amidst limits. Perhaps, in the final analysis, this is merely to redescribe the perpetual search for ways of maintaining the conceptual boundaries between the realm of social relations and the realm of political relations, without losing sight of possible obstacles and overlaps. Similarly, as indicated earlier, “awareness” of the kind mentioned would have to take into account the legal implications of political mediation, to remind us that any system of governance, upholding the rule of law, inhabits spaces of coerciveness as well as spaces of voluntariness, to provide a modus vivendi for humans to coexist without harming each other. And such coerciveness, plainly, seems indispensable even in the self-mastering republic, if mutual obligations are to be legally protected and effectively observed.

19 In his Politics as a Vocation, a sense of measure or, more precisely, a vision containing measure (Augenmass) is the indispensable tool for the vocational statesman or politician. See also ch. 7, n14.

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Legal coerciveness apart, another question faces legal self-ordinance, possibly the most problematic of all. It is the question Madison raised in the speech adduced earlier: “How,” he asks, can “a people incapable of governing its appetites in its private life possibly be capable of self-government in its public life?” His own reply, unfortunately, does little to render the question any the less exasperating, since it calls for the cultivation of an entire people’s moral habits within the civic realm.20 This answer, as Madison well knew, makes demands that will hardly ever be met. Hence, once again not unlike Rousseau, he sadly concedes that to expect otherwise is no more than wishful thinking, virtually bordering on another chimerical idea, no less politically futile than the one he himself has roundly dismissed – the idea, that is, of producing a people’s liberty or happiness in and through some form of political rule only. Futile, because this route, not unlike other glib variants of political mediation, seems exceptionally qualified to lead to practically nowhere – another blind alley, in short. What is more, a significant part of Madison’s own awareness of the futility of that answer had its origin in his fully realizing the additional blunder of expecting the political virtues of “self-mastery” and “self-ordinance” to be capable of applying to a whole sub-continent, such as the United States of America. For did it not totally disregard Rousseau’s pronounced emphasis on “scale” as the indispensable condition for attaining balance in a field where, as in politics, perfection simply was not to be had? Ultimately, therefore, Madison’s despondency was possibly the result of himself falling victim to his own irrepressible perfectionism, inducing him to view and portray alternatives in too exclusive a manner and thereby to invite an almost “either-or” determinism. Moreover, by so doing, he clearly went counter to the contingent gradualism that Kant recommended, according to which a strategy of “small steps” unmistakably discloses that less can mean more, at any rate in trying to bridge the many obstacles confronting political mediation. This presupposes, no doubt, that Kant’s suggested constructivism is not a mere ploy (or “humbug talk”) of deceptive politicians, but a genuinely honest undertaking designed to generate trust and a sense of civic belonging. Possibly, though, this strategy presupposes also a lowering of political expectations, with a focus on degrees rather than absolutes. In this direction, strict logic may likewise have to be tempered with practical judgment, without abandoning, however, that measure of vigilance 20 See n8 and n15. Clearly, this overrates common morality.

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that helps us to bear in mind that any mediated coming-into-relation is not mistaken for unmediated, unlimited, or “natural” expressions of human relatedness. Yet, however extensively we may succeed in lowering political expectations, we could still fail in coming to grips with the taxingly difficult problem associated with political self-mastery that Madison has raised. It is one thing if anti-democrats maintain that the bulk of humanity needs to be led and mastered; but it surely is a different thing, if those professing to uphold democracy (in one sense or another) altogether distrust the people and their political judgment, or, like Rousseau, proclaim that the people cannot be trusted not to harm themselves by their own self-enacted laws – virtually echoing Plato’s thesis that giving the people the freedom of making their own choices does not ensure that they will choose what they ought to choose.21 Hence, if people cannot be relied upon not to make a mess of things, and if, moreover, democrats of various shades agree that people, on the whole, need guidance and shaping, it plainly does look as though our belief in political self-mastery might be suspiciously illusory. No less perplexing is the (implied) assumption (among many) that somehow political self-mastery and variants of elitism are not inherently discrepant. Presumably, the root of the perplexity lies in wanting to set people free and, simultaneously, to protect, enlighten, and (possibly) moralize them as well. As a result, merging self-mastery with security, intelligence, and virtue to create a politics of “moral freedom” seems no less suspiciously illusory, in that it highlights right-acting rather than free-acting, unless people subjectively internalize what, objectively, they ought to do, not merely because they thus gain moral freedom, but also, if not chiefly, because it is, in fact, the best for them and, thus, in their own best interest. This presupposes, however, that people commonly know what is best for them, something Locke, among others, profoundly doubted, as well as Kant after him. Certainly, Locke saw no (demeaning) paternalism in laws that “hedge us in only from bogs and precipices,” just as Kant showed little hesitation in recommending “civic constraints” to counteract egoism, anarchy, despotism, and servility.22 But no one, to my knowl21 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 12. Plato, Republic, vi, 493. 22 John Locke, Second Treatise (1690), ch. 6, para. 57. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht (1800), M.J. Gregor, trans. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 190–1.

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edge, portrayed the core problem involved more lucidly and succinctly than Tocqueville: “Our contemporaries,” he commended, “are ever a prey to two conflicting passions: they feel the need for guidance and they long to stay free.”23 All the same, the idea of combining liberty with law is not necessarily an unrealistic move within the political conceptualization of self-mastery. For one thing, since free choice and rightful choice cannot be depended on to coincide, legal sanctions are not easily dispensable in politics and society. For another, joining liberty with law has the benefit of reminding people that self-direction frequently affects others, as it is itself affected by others. Some blurring of boundaries between liberty and law, as between selfness and otherness, seems therefore almost unavoidable, to make living among others at all possible. No doubt, such blurring carries with it the danger of turning “self-mastery” into an even more problematic concept than it already is. At the same time, however, it potentially acts as a useful warning. For, if nothing else, the blurring cautions us against thinking of selfmastery, self-direction, or autonomy in wholly absolute terms and, thereby, counsels the kind of circumspection urged in the previous chapter. Evidently, qualifications of one sort or another cannot be escaped, since in their absence we might conceivably be unable to draw any lines between making things happen and being made to do things, especially when hard and fast types of criteria are not to be had or, if available, might prove misleading rather than helpful.

vi Now, to complicate matters further, the idea of “self-legislation,” generally viewed as a defining characteristic of political self-mastery, presents ambiguities of its own. While, purely semantically, self-legislation points to political implications, it is in essence an ethical notion. As such, it seems closer to being an imaginative metaphor than to an indisputably accurate portrayal of political reality. Surely, it does not follow that acting on maxims of individual self-direction in itself satisfies requirements of political selfmastery. Put simply, why should individuals who impose binding obligations on themselves hold these to be binding upon others? Con23 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 693.

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versely, why should individuals accept for themselves the self-created obligations of others? Moreover, whatever answers suggest themselves to these (troubling) questions are unlikely to be unequivocally convincing that obeying laws because we have participated in making them exemplifies a special kind of freedom, even though it may well justify certain forms of action. Unfortunately, Rousseau somewhat fudged this distinction in making “moral freedom” a constituent of civic self-legislation.24 Besides, this kind of rhetoric notoriously lends itself (we have noted) to political abuse, commonly by way of mendacity, cover-ups, evasions, and other specious arguments, which, if routinely practised, risk proving counterproductive, since they tend to undermine whatever trust a government originally enjoyed. Highly moralized language of this sort, evidently, like inflated currency, ceases, after a while, to make any purchases, especially if, as in the case of “moral freedom,” its sheer intelligibility is seriously in doubt. There is, clearly, a cut-off point to the misuse of language. If freedom, therefore, is to be combined with (enforceable) law, without people’s wills being “softened, bent, and guided,” as Tocqueville feared, citizens had better be on guard to ensure that the limits of legitimate governance are observed; so that their rights and freedoms are duly protected.25 In essence this requires that, if there is extraneous guidance, such guidance does not assume the form of underhand manipulation, notably by top ministers, top bureaucrats, or other opinion makers. To be sure, regulating freedom (or freedoms) by the enactment of laws may enhance values no less precious than liberty, but such diverse values are plainly distinct from the possession of liberty. Precisely, however, because modes of political justifications almost invite manipulatory devices, chances are that people’s consciousness is skewed and their minds are twisted without their noticing it. Safeguards are accordingly called for, particularly to prevent reasons publicly given from being utterly devious stratagems. This in the main demands, I suggest, that political rationality be seen for what it frequently is, rather than taken for some ideal “public reason,” as though it generally were a cognate of unquestionable truth. I am therefore inclined to view it as a Janus-like modality, which, known as such, would nonetheless doggedly 24 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk i, ch. 8. 25 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 692.

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remind those who govern that they cannot get away with what they otherwise might try to do. As we have noted, Tocqueville was not unaware of the various traps in the space of political agency. But, like Adam Smith, he also expressed the hope that, by inserting ourselves into a world in which, apart from countless interactions in the market, and the few humans we can number among our friends, we also come to learn what distinguishes us as citizens. Thus, despite its hazards, the realm of citizenship was nevertheless, for Tocqueville, the realm in which people typically band together in pursuit of shared purposes. Abuses apart, it was joint agency that, par excellence, characterized democratic societies for him. “Will and reason are applied to bring success to a common enterprise.”26 However, the extent to which a “common enterprise” can be taken to imply the coming-together of each member’s individual purposes is a question not easily resolved. Interestingly, for Rousseau, the lack of success in this regard was attributable not (as we might presumably expect) to the weakness or absence of a common will, but rather to defects of perception, of vision and judgment,27 comparable to what Weber essentially meant by Augenmass – a point I return to later. In the main, this notion comprised for both a sense of measure and an eye for proportions, notably in a field of competing claims, such as that of politics, rather than in one of perfect equilibrium. From this perspective, a political realm, striving for self-mastery in its common enterprise, cannot afford to reject solutions merely because they are not perfect. According to Rousseau and Weber, what it can and must seek to attain is the combined invigoration of civic vigilance and governmental accountability. And even if either fails to ensure a reign of perfect lawfulness and civic mutuality, such a political realm is most likely to fare a great deal better than one being exposed to command, backed by force, if not outright terror. For, if nothing else, the recommended combination may induce governments to see themselves as trustees, in need of recurrent authentication, and not as absolute rulers, lording over a reign of flagrant arbitrariness.

26 Ibid., 193, 195. 27 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk ii, ch. 6.

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vii A sense of measure and an eye for proportions, even if their combined workings are not tantamount to what Weber intended by his notion of Augenmass, may nonetheless succeed in setting apart sober realities from sheer promotional loading of the kind that Rousseau and Kant despised as “political grandeur.” Similarly, this may help to distinguish hope for (virtually unattainable) perfection from altogether losing faith in achieving some degree of civic morality, some form of what Kant called “constructivism,” in moving from the given to the aspired. At a minimum, moreover, the distinction indirectly discloses that however much we prefer certain regimes, or solutions, as being superior to others, we cannot rule out the possibility that the aspired political order or solution could be prone to corruption in one way or another. This disclosure, it is true, does not necessarily invalidate our preferences; it does, however, prevent us from being wholly unprepared if the aspired turns out rather alarmingly different from what we had hoped for or expected. We may not, to be sure, be unduly perturbed, for example, to discover that democracy, while it softens the force of governmental power, nonetheless fails to eliminate it. We would, however, be seriously shocked to learn that the stench of corrupt democracy is no less nasty than the stench of corrupt dictatorship. Still, having opted for democracy, we may derive comfort from presuming that in our preferred system the stench will be detected and attended to in good time. Similar modes of reasoning would probably be applicable to lapses of obligations our preferred governance has pledged to honour – a feature of political morality I have sought to bring to the forefront of concern in an attempt to put utmost emphasis on public standards and their being flanked by a vigilant citizenry. It bears repeating in this connection that democratic governments can no more dispense with either than can any other kind of rule. At this point, I also repeat the oft-noted need for keeping in mind the limits of what is politically demandable of governments and, consequently, of what politicians can electorally offer with any chance of honouring their promises. To keep a watchful eye on governments is one thing, but to insist that whatever is demanded of them must be politically achievable is surely quite another. For, apart from raising false hopes and a great deal of real acrimony, such an insistence might easily detract from the importance of cultivating the political judgment that helps to distinguish mounting pressures by segmental lobbying groups from

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genuine needs by citizens as such. For there can be little doubt that fuelling segmental demands, each exercising maximum pressure, poses the threat of political fragmentation – a surplus of pluralism combined with the demise of political society as a whole. While the legitimacy of limits is in itself a somewhat slogan-like formula, it may nevertheless prompt governments as much as segmental groups to observe the bounds of both – the politically demandable and the politically achievable – if any political order is to remain viable. Boundless “pluralism” of segmental pressures, accordingly, needs watching no less than boundless politics itself, if society is to survive as a society.28 It follows, I believe, that however controversial it may be to establish antecedently what is or is not demandable, the risk of political “overload” is undeniably a serious problem, and is so in at least a twofold manner. For it not only overburdens the machinery of this or that political system but also dangerously extends the scope, if not the very meaning, of the politically achievable per se. The latter, clearly, is the most worrying, in that it leads to escalated expectations, on the part of both the citizenry and the political configuration as a whole, by creating an inflated image of its implementational capacities. The risk of either type of excessive loading is, in view of the magnitude of possible outcomes, not the least compelling reason for instituting effective safeguards ahead of time. For, if in place, they may prevent spillovers by way of seductive electoral practices and overly exuberant pandering to (segmental) lobbying pressures. Besides, safeguards in this direction might succeed also in arousing awareness of the frequently combined tendency of governments to focus almost entirely on short-term political pay-offs, at the cost of by-passing more authentic, but less stridently clamouring, civic needs. Admittedly, the real cost of any change cannot be precisely known ahead of actual outcomes. More closely monitoring electoral campaigning, party financing, and spurious “pluralist” activities, however, could

28 Generally, three sets of limits figure most prominently. First, they may usefully step in whenever issues defy resolution by the majoritarian principle only. Second, limits are called for whenever there are fundamentally diverse visions of the good society, and there is the danger of enthroning a single way of thinking. And third, limits are needed to prevent the total blurring of the distinction between mediated and unmediated sources of association, as previous chapters variously cautioned against.

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not but help to create a more level political playing field all around.29 Directly or indirectly, such measures might also reduce the risk of governments, as wielders of supreme political power, becoming disconnected from their contingently derived bases of authorization. With this risk in mind, I suggested the ongoing balancing of electoral and procedural sources of a regime’s governmental authentication. This suggestion, together with the other concluding proposals, is for the most part intended as a filtering lens through which to scan the range and the limits of whatever is politically demandable or politically attainable, although neither remain fixed once and for all. Yet, granted that this is so, in that goals and preferences do undergo mutation, a degree of continuity seems generally required to establish a contextual climate for the emergence of some abiding confidence in the possibility of promoting shared dispositions toward blending individual aims and values with civic mutuality. With such a climate in mind, I earlier suggested a form of public discourse that would act as an instrument of both civility and challengeability. This twofold requirement strikes me as of crucial importance, regardless of whether or not it also facilitates a situation in which people succeed in giving themselves the laws they want to obey in fashioning what Habermas has called their “life context,” or Rawls appears to associate with a morally and juridically overarching “public reason.”30 Nevertheless, given the recurrent need for adjusting our political lenses – not least to maintain or create an awareness of the distinction between the largely unmediated social and the essentially mediated political – we have to view the political world through a prism sui generis, notably to gain the possession of that degree of political judgment that

29 See John Plamenatz’s comment that there are forms of pluralism that give individuals and groups far more power than frequently “is good for their country or for democracy.” Democracy and Illusion (London: Longman, 1973), x. See also Thomas Christiano, who observes that “pluralist institutions have a place in democratic society, but it must be a subordinate one.” In The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Society (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 174. 30 Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in Bohman and Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: mit Press, 1997), 40. Further, John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997) 766–71, 787, 799. Somewhat obliquely, Nietzsche’s idea of Genealogy (see ch. 1, and n5) is a response to mutations of operative meanings in politics. See also Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, in his comments on Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–13, 27, 51.

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may enable us to move from the given to the aspired without encountering undue disenchantment, if not a total loss of hope for a better future. This groping for political judgment presupposed for Weber (we have noted) the acquirement of a kind of measured seeing which he associated with the notion of Augenmass. And there can be little doubt that for Weber this form of measured seeing was just as important as was measured willing for Rousseau and Kant. Presumably, the possession of Augenmass in politics is chiefly a matter of experience; but, just as conceivably, it may be a gift, not easily acquired, if it can be learned at all. Either way, we can surely ill afford to dispense with this cognitive aid in transitionally turbid times such as ours, especially if bridging is to forge a blending between convergence and contrast as a politically uniting force. In any case, most forms of mediating bridging demand settling for balance rather than perfection, notably where political unity is not enforced, but allowed to evolve among multiple values and attachments. Settling for less than perfection is not intended, however, as an excuse for failing to make fullest use of opportunities, such as they are, let alone for acts of outright negligence. Bridging, in the direction of societal balance, therefore, is closer to a perpetual trial than to the pursuit of some uniquely manifest destiny. If so, Augenmass, while undeniably an indispensable component of political judgment, hardly ever is sufficient as a source of “coming-intorelation” among citizens, and generating thus a sense of distinctly civic belonging. In its total absence, however, finding a path from the given to the aspired, or enabling people to view themselves as a people seems virtually foreclosed. Furthermore, to be moved into seeking such a path presupposes that humans have not ceased to cherish associative ends or lost the ability to set apart civic mutuality from personal companionship, or, for that matter, pluralism from disintegration and political contestation from civil strife. For, only then, in the final analysis, is there any point or scope in “mediation” achieving its conceptual intelligibility, together with its practical effectiveness as a politically employable notion.

Index

Abrams, Mark, on party advertising costs, 109 achievement thinking, and competitive striving, 30–1 agency, instrumental and intrinsic reasons, 209 Althusius, Johannes, on statehood as evolved, 98–9 animosity, as hostile attitude and hostile behaviour, 40–2 apathy, sources of, 126–7 Arendt, Hannah: on authority, 89; on civic humanism, 221–2 Aristotle: on the distinctness of statehood, 199; on governmental accountability to the citizenry, 132–3 Arnold, Matthew, on culture as moral perfectibility, 56 ascription, as constituent element within prevalently achievement societies, 28–30 Bachrach, Peter, on corporations as acting as macro-political institutions, 188–9

balance, as crucially important in blending and bridging, 227, 236 Bendix, Reinhard, on bureaucracy in business, 25 Bentley, Arthur F., on interest group theories concerning statehood, 161 Berlin, Isaiah, on clashing options and hard political choices, 94 bureaucracy and democracy, boundary problems, 179–81 Burke, Edmund, on rendering political power more gentle, 101 Burnham, James, on substituting industrial control for ownership, 25 capitalism, growth, concentration, and dispersal, 25, 35–6 cause as purpose, 15–16; causing and giving cause, 218 Christiano, Thomas, on confines of pluralism, 146 class: as signifying emergence of modern society, 22–3; as a way of self-positioning, 33–4 Cole, G.D.H., on purpose and function, 194–5

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Condorcet, Antoine Nicholas, Marquis de, on the “march of civilization,” 60–1 conflict, as antagonistic interaction, 40–4 convergence, rather than substantive unity, 218 cooperation, its conceptual relation to conflict, 43, 46–7 Coser, Lewis A., definition of conflict, 41 culture: as a complex whole, 49–50; culture diffusion, 60–1; as a component, mediating blending and balancing, 58–9 Dahl, Robert A., on bridging proposals, 144 Dahrendorf, Ralf, analytic interpretation of class, 26–7 democracy: different emphases, 130–2; electoral and procedural, 141–2; and interests groups, 157–9 demography, and civic unrest, 77 Diderot, Denis, on self-estrangement, 54 diffusion of political power, 143–4 double infusion, of culture and politics, 218–19 Duverger, Maurice, parties and politics,125–6 extended selfhood, 205 extremism within political parties, 110–11 Fishkin, James S., on principles of political legitimacy, 221 Friedrich, Carl J., on political authorization, 89

game, as a political analogue, 93–4 Habermas, Jürgen: on political will formation, 16, 152; on conditions no longer being changeable by revolution, 215 Herberle, Rudolf, on sociography of rural areas, 73 Hegel, Georg W., on the state as a rational necessity, 86 Herder, Johann G.: on the genesis of culture, 51–2, 58, 60; on internal balance of culture-relations, 64; on organicism in politics, being both plural and non-hierarchical, 87; on displaced alternatives, 203; on national belonging, 219 Hirst, Paul: on seemingly irreconcilable claims, 143–4; on not making the state redundant, 216 Hobbes, Thomas: on political power, 85–6; on two faces of freedom, 211–12 Horvath, Georgy P., on a self-transformation of minding, 213 Hume, David, on “parties from principle,” 112–13 interaction, and degrees of reciprocity, 67 interest groups, and democracy, 159 joint agency, and individual responsibility, 225 Kant, Immanuel: his antidemocratism, 134–5; his antihumbugism, 212; on civic constraints, 229; on degrees of civic morality, 233

Index Laski, Harold, on demystifying the state, 188 Liebknecht, Karl, on negative contexts, 213 Lijphart, Arend, on consociational democracy, 197 Lipset, Seymour Martin, on party extremism, 110–11 Locke, John: on limited government, 191; on limited paternalism, 229 Lovejoy, Arthur O., on association by sentiment and empathy, 181 Madison, James, on qualified faith in virtue and intelligence, 222 Malthus, Thomas, on population and economic welfare, 76–7 Marx, Karl: on society and statehood, 7–8, 186–7; on structures of capitalism, 24–5; and class, 22–3; and cooperative enterprise, 37 Mayo, Henry B., on democracy, 130 Merton, Robert K., on self-fulfilling prophecies, 9–1 Michels, Robert, on the “iron law” of oligarchy, 121 Mills, G. Wright, on non-formal political entities, 138 Mommsen, Theodor, on authority, 101 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, on relation of geography to politics, 70–3 Myrdal, Gunnar, on underdeveloped regions, 75 Neumann, Sigmund, on one-party integrative systems, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, on definitions, 6

239

Ostrogorski, Moisey, on democracy and oligarchy, 108 Parsons, Talcott, on achievement and ascription, 28–9 parties and pressure groups, 103 Plato, on free-choosing and rightchoosing, 229 Pocock, J.G.A., on civic humanism, 202 political overload, a serious risk, 234 Rapoport, Anatol, levels of conflict, 42–3 Rawls, John, on intentionality, 225 Rorty, Richard, on “larger loyalty,” 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on balance in nature and politics, 203; on generality and particularity, 189–90; on moral freedom, 231; on selfdeception, 205; on time having a corruptive influence, 223 Schumpter, Joseph, on redefining democracy, 128–9 Steinmetz, Rudolf, on “sociography,” 73 Thomasius, Christian, on delimiting authority, 168–72 Tocqueville Alexis de, on law of inheritance, 29 Vernon, Richard, on moral pluralism, 144, n23 Vico, Giambattista, on the human world being inherently cultural, 50–1

240

Index

Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet de, on culture producing diverse fruits, 54 Weber, Max: on boundary problems of bureaucracy and democracy, 129–30, 139–40, 183–5; on electoral and procedural democracy, 140–1

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, on the intelligible limits of language, 226 Wolin, Sheldon S., on the creation and delimitation of political space, 216, n47 Young, Iris Marion, on the politics of difference, 204, n34