Associative Democracy E-Book

Paul Hirst

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 409

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this book Paul Hirst makes a major contribution to democratic thinking, advocating "associative democracy"; the belief that human welfare and liberty are best served when as many of the affairs of society as possible are managed by voluntary and democratically self-governing associations.

Leseprobe

AssociativeDemocracy

New Forms of Economic andSocial Governance

Paul Hirst

Polity Press

Copyright © Paul Hirst 1994

The right of Paul Hirst to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1994 by Polity Press

in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1996

Transferred to digital print 2003

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For Jamie

Contents

Acknowledgements

1   A Changed Conjuncture

2   Associative Principles and Democratic Reform

3   Associationalist Ethics and the Logics of Collective Action

4   Associative Democracy and Economic Governance

5   Current Realities and Associative Economic Reform

6   Thick Welfare, Thin Collectivism

7   An Associational and Confederal Welfare State

Suggestions for Further Reading

References

Index

Acknowledgements

A great many people have helped me to formulate the argument in this book both through their writings and discussion. I would like to thank Anthony Barnett, Joshua Cohen, David Held, Barry Hindess, John Matthews, Rev. David Nicholls, Joel Rogers, Charles Sabel, Philippe Schmitter, Grahame Thompson, Garry Wickham, Erik Olin-Wright and Jonathan Zeitlin. I am especially grateful to Joanne Robertson and Joanne Winning for their help in preparing the manuscript and to the School of Architecture, University of Western Australia, for providing a congenial environment in which to write a substantial portion of it.

1

A Changed Conjuncture

At the end of the twentieth century we are witnessing the exhaustion of the great competing intellectual systems of social organization, liberal democratic capitalism and collectivistic state socialism, that came to fruition in the nineteenth century. These ideas set the terms of political debate and struggle for the next one hundred and fifty years. The recognition of the waning of these heretofore ruling ideas is no mere fin de siècle mood, rather the collapse of state socialism as a political project, and the fundamental stagnation of liberal democratic ideas, reflect important changes in both social relations and the expectations of individuals that have accelerated rapidly in the West since the 1960s.

The great conflict between liberal democracy and state socialism was at least in form a struggle over what was to be the predominant type of property relations, private property or collective ownership. This issue was the differentia specifica of a conflict that at times took the form of a bitter social war. In other respects, the two systems claimed (or had) actual common features. Liberal and socialist states both claimed to be democracies, and each claimed to represent a superior kind of democracy to the other. In both the socialist East and the liberal West the common social fact of greatest significance has been the growth of large-scale hierarchical administration, the growth of large-scale mass production, and the growth in the powers and functions of the state. Centralization and bureaucracy were common features of social systems that were radically divergent in their outcomes. However, in both types of society they were perceived as stemming from social and economic necessities that equated the large-scale with efficiency. It is that equation which is in question today.

Changing social relations are challenging the notion that bureaucracy and mass society are inevitable. In the West people have become increasingly sophisticated and individuated, they wish to control their own affairs by their own choices and refuse to be treated as part of a ‘unit of administration’ by officials. It is for these reasons that another set of ideas about social organization that was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associationalism, has once again become relevant after a long period of eclipse by state socialist and liberal democratic ideas. The late twentieth century offers new conditions in which ideas marginalized for many decades can be redefined and developed to serve as an alternative, radical means of reforming and reorganizing economic and social governance in Western societies.

These ideas lost all credence by the end of the 1920s because they seemed ill-adapted to a world dominated by the imperatives of hierarchical organization and bitter social conflict, which indeed they were. Collectivist socialism captured and continued to hold the imagination of an important section of the Western intelligentsia, as they sought to criticize their own society and to find an alternative to it. Social democracy was always a pragmatic halfway house that lacked ideological appeal, despite its vast practical achievements in social reform and economic management when in government. Social democracy accepted representative democratic institutions on the one hand, and liberal collectivist concepts of social provision on the other. It was thus defined by these compromises with liberalism. Vast quantities of intellectual energy were consumed in trying to find a model of socialism that would not share the brutal and authoritarian features of the Soviet system. This obsession with ‘true’ socialism drained away much of the energy and talent from other forms of radicalism. That diversion is now virtually at an end. Collectivist state socialism is finished as a viable alternative to liberal representative democracy and market-based economies. Actually existing socialism consistently failed to deliver either greater political freedom or greater economic equality, let alone prosperity, than Western democratic states. That has long been obvious to the mass of workers, since communist and radical socialist parties have been consistently rejected by mass electorates in Western democracies. The intelligentsia’s search for socialism has ended, but it has taken the implosion and collapse of Soviet socialism (and that of its satellites) to finally destroy that illusion.

Yet liberal individualism and free-market capitalism have gained no decisive victory from this failure of socialism. This is not just because the collapse of the latter has occurred at the same time as the onset of a major slump and myriad social problems in the West. Western liberalism has atrophied as a radical body of ideas committed to freedom, in part because the contest with the Soviet system was too easy, and in part because liberals retreated before the apparently inescapable demands of state bureaucracy and corporate power. Representative democracy and the free market have lost their main legitimation in the collapse of socialism. Authoritarian socialist states represented an external threat to the West, they made socialism an enemy. Such states served as a standing example of why liberal democracy, however flawed, was better than socialist dictatorship and why market-based societies, however unequal, offered the ordinary citizen a better standard of living. Western societies now have to be judged by their own standards and on their own merits.

The results of such judgements are not encouraging and quickly silence most of the nonsense about the ‘triumph of the West’. Representative democratic government is failing badly by the standards of liberal democratic political theory, rather than by the easy measure of comparison with inherently authoritarian polities. Even in the most effective and responsive of political systems, modern representative democracy offers low levels of governmental accountability to citizens and of public influence on decision-making. Democracy has become far more a means of legitimation of the centralized and bureaucratic government of the nation state than it is a check upon it. Representative government in mass democracies has become increasingly plebiscitarian in character, the popular vote determining which party or coalition of parties shall have exclusive control of the state machine for a period of years. Moreover, the majority of the West’s democracies are far from exemplifying the best of modern democratic practice. In countries like Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom defective electoral and/or party systems have allowed conservative parties to rule, singly or in coalition, for decades. Such ineffective political systems do not ensure the regular succession of parties in office that is essential to the health of representative democratic political competition.

Modern government is more and more difficult to make accountable by the political means promoted by nineteenth-century liberalism, that is, supervision by a representative legislature and the election of the highest executive office holders. The scale and functions of the modern state have developed out of all proportion to the states of the liberal era. Liberal representative democracy presupposed limited government. However, the functions and scale of government grew as the franchise extended, as the state was compelled to meet more of its citizens’ needs, and as social liberalism and conservative social engineering sought to stave off socialism with a partial collectivism. Big government is the creature of the drift toward collectivism, a drift strongly resisted by many liberals, by associationalists, and by many in the Labour Movement, but which sapped resistance the more it seemed inevitable. The sheer complexity of the social relations to be regulated, the pressing need to provide more and more services to relieve want and increase national efficiency, and the need partly to restrain and partly to support the activities of the modern large-scale business corporation, drove pragmatic social reformers of differing political hues into moves which steadily extended the scope and scale of government.

The final triumph of collectivism in Britain, in particular, came late. Not only liberals but also many in the Labour Movement feared central state control of social insurance and social welfare. State provision was by no means universally welcomed as the primary source of social insurance, it was opposed by significant sections of employers and unions alike. Even into the 1940s social liberals like William Beveridge continued to support the voluntary principle, and envisaged a continued role for the Friendly Societies and other forms of private insurance. Aneurin Bevan’s nationalization of the local authority and voluntary hospitals into the National Health Service in 1947 was resisted not just by vested interests, but also by sincere supporters of voluntarism and anti-centralist advocates of municipal services. Until recently such resistance was portrayed as either self-interested or old-fashioned; anyway it was perceived to be doomed in the face of modernization and the efficiency of uniform large-scale national administration. Now it seems sensible and prescient.

Modern states became, particularly under the pressures of wholesale social mobilization during the two world wars, omnicompetent administrative agencies capable of influencing by their actions the fate of their societies and virtually every person in them. Legislatures typically became the creatures of the executive, and the executive itself became dependent on the administrative machine for advice and information. Laws were and are made to facilitate administration and to extend its powers of regulation. Legislatures turned into engines for what Carl Schmitt (1943–4) called ‘motorised legislation’, and have thus undermined the rule of law by giving rule-making discretion to officials and by the sheer bulk of the regulations thus created. Elected officials and the leaders of the dominant party have extensive capacities to intervene in society through the policies of the state, which they at least nominally direct, but they have few means of authoritatively determining and responding to citizens’ wishes about the course of such policy whilst in office. Just as an election creates and legitimizes their power, so only the threat of failing to be re-elected acts as an effective constraint on politicians. Better that constraint than none at all, yet the electoral threat is infrequent and its influence touches only that small portion of the policies and practices of the state that reach public notice and become a matter for controversy.

The arguments mounted in mitigation of low levels of accountability to the citizens are that they are the inevitable trade-off for the promotion of public welfare through the services big government provides, and that bureaucrats are constrained most effectively by their own professional codes and hierarchical supervision. Neither of these arguments is compelling if the benefits of public welfare can be had without large-scale state bureaucracy. If services can be provided in public, but non-state and effective, ways that are accountable to the ordinary citizen, then there need be no such trade-off. Bureaucracies do not have to be either corrupt or incompetent to pose a threat to the democratic capacities of citizens. Honest and competent administration can close-off citizens’ choices and impose its own judgements as to what it deems best for its charges far more effectively. Big government has grown at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. The attempted uniformity of state policy and forms of social provision has meant the imposition of common rules and standard services on the increasingly diverse and pluralistic objectives of the members of modern societies. Imagine a system that combined citizen choice with public welfare. That is what associationalism has to offer.

Associationalism also offers a principle of administrative renewal, a way of restoring the ideal of committed public service in the face of widespread bureaucratic failure and retreat. Voluntarily-based organizations can be tenacious and effective. They tend to endure as forms of organization, where they are supported by the right kinds of laws and institutions. They can combine choice for their members with a more creative role for professional administrators and service providers. Bureaucracies, by contrast, tend to be fragile and rigid. They so easily lose impetus and their officials quickly lose esprit de corps in the face of crises of funding and function. Top-down administration appropriates the service from those for whom it is provided, and they have little capacity to redirect a failing bureaucracy toward meeting their needs. Associations, by contrast, empower those for whom services are provided in diverse ways. Voluntary association is an alternative to top-down bureaucracy in the competent provision of services. It is not the case the there is no choice except that between hierarchy and inefficient amateurism in methods of administration today.

By the end of the Second World War associationalist arguments were virtually marginalized. The nation state had become omnicompetent and vital to the welfare of the citizen. This was not merely the result of a political or bureaucratic ‘will to power’ in building the state machine. The nation state had first become the locus of effective military administration. It then became from the late nineteenth century onwards increasingly the key locus of social welfare provision, and from the 1930s onwards the locus of effective macro-economic management. The intensified competition of states and, in particular, the two great wars of this century, stimulated the growth toward centralization and reinforced the legitimacy of the state’s claim to sovereignty. Only the nation state could draw on and mobilize all the resources of society in order to ensure national survival. These international pressures made the ‘nation’ the key locus for resources, facilities and administration; government and people alike did not want to be without the means to effective national economic and military autonomy in a conflict with an enemy state. Enemies without are a powerful stimulant to, or at least a rationale for the imposition of, social solidarity. ‘National defence’ provided an unanswerable argument for economic intervention, even in as ideologically laissez faire a polity as the USA.

No sooner had the nation state become firmly established as the dominant form of social organization, managing both economy and society, than its primacy began to be threatened. The internationalization of economic relations in recent decades has resulted in the radical reduction (although by no means elimination) of the capacities of national economic management. The changing international conjuncture and the collapse of the Cold War have weakened the military imperatives that sustained the nation state. The national level has lost its automatic primacy in the governance of economic and social affairs, and with that loss much of the rationale for the central state’s claims to ‘sovereignty’ and omnicompetence have gone too. The nation state as a single multifunctional political agency that concedes only such power as it deems necessary to ‘lesser’ public and private bodies, and that is answerable to no ‘higher’ power, is now threatened with becoming as obsolete as were decentralized feudal systems in the face of the new national monarchies (Held, 1993). Supra-national and regional institutions and processes of governance are beginning to become more necessary to cope with the complexities of both a more internationalized and a more localized set of economic and social relations. Multi-national companies are less dependent on a given nation state (although the number of truly transnational corporations located on a global scale is few, and likely to remain so) and international voluntary bodies, like aid agencies and political pressure groups, grow steadily stronger and more influential.

Liberal-democratic politics centred on the nation state are entering a period of growing problematicity, in which their democratic effectiveness and legitimacy are questioned. So too are the dominant methods and doctrines of national economic management. Market-based Western national economies are exhibiting increasing problems of coordination and regulation that prevent sustained growth. Western publics are dissatisfied with existing economic performance, but are currently offered no coherent alternative measures that can address those problems of co-ordination and regulation, and perhaps enable a return to growth and a more widely shared prosperity. A sure sign that the conventional structures of politics that have dominated the past century are in crisis is that the economic difficulties of the late twentieth century have not led to a consistent and widespread return to social democratic pragmatism in countries that have experimented with conservative and economic liberal regimes. Social democracy is closely tied to both state centralization and to liberal collectivism, yet the compulsory and uniform provision of services is less and less popular with more sophisticated and diverse publics. Social democracy has relied on Keynesian national economic management, but, as we shall see in Chapter 4, this is less and less effective as a means of restoring full employment and maintaining growth.

The failure of social democracy is one more sign that politics is moving away from the great left-right oppositions created in the nineteenth century. The creation of a coherent spectrum of political forces from left to right derived from two factors. First the domination of politics by the ‘social’ question, that is, the politicization of property relations. Second, because the political forces in question struggled for exclusive control in the same political space, each seeking to monopolize power in a ‘sovereign’ state in order to impose their vision of society and compel others to live as they directed. Within the nation state’s exclusive control of its territory, subject to a single sovereign political will, and to a coherent system of national administration, there could be but one ‘policy’. Left and right both strove to make their control of the state permanent and that policy irreversible.

Politics is no longer dominated by one great question. It looks less and less like a social war over the forms of property that are to prevail. It is centred less and less on a single structure of authority; supra-national, national, regional and non-state forms of governance are all possible contenders to influence policy. The issues and the forums of political competition are changing. This has resulted in the rise of new political forces that cannot be accommodated on the old political spectrum of left to right. Politics was never entirely dominated by the left-right contest, but it was more important than a superficial glance at the other political issues influential in this century might lead one to suppose. Nationalism qualified but did not alter the dominance of the ‘social’ question. Many nationalist movements were of the left, most colonial national liberation movements for example. Moreover, once national aspirations were met in an independent state, the ‘social’ question reappeared with full force, dominating the politics of the new entity.

The new political forces are too diverse, too concerned with different issues, to be placed on a single spectrum. There are new types of nationalist and regional autonomist parties, and ethnic and religiously-based campaigns. There are also new forms of politics centred on resistance to racism, gender issues, the environmental question and on lifestyles. New political problems and new social expectations are ill-accommodated by the old party systems in many Western states, and the traditional parties of both left and right command less and less popular support. In Italy, which is the clearest example, the ‘old’ parties suffered a rapid and major loss of support following the end of the Cold War. The national state, bloated and corrupt, parcelized between and dominated by the old party cliques, was seen as more the problem and less the source of solutions to Italy’s manifold economic and political problems. In the United Kingdom too, both the major parties were and are viewed by substantial sections of the electorate with increasing suspicion, as being incapable of offering real solutions to the economic crisis or social renewal. Throughout the West mainstream electoral politicians have fallen in popular esteem and are widely distrusted.

The main threats to the stability of Western societies are no longer class war within or enemy states without, they are diffuse social problems and sources of unrest. Centralized bureaucratic and repressive structures cope so badly with these more amorphous threats of crime and drug addiction, for example, that these problems can hardly provide the old state structures with a convincing raison d’etre. The real sources of these social problems stem from the failure to sustain full employment and from the side effects of collectivist welfare. In the USA, in Britain, even in Germany, we face the growing reality of a two-thirds versus one-third society. The notion of an ‘underclass’ is both graphic and yet absurd, since its members will not accept their ‘place’ at the bottom. A differentiated society cannot work if elementary freedoms of movement and association for all are to be preserved. Unless effective work and welfare are offered, in a way that both targets and empowers the members of this ‘class’, then the way is open to an escalating conflict between crime and deviancy and disablingly authoritarian measures which aim at the protection of the majority. This is a new and difficult social question, quite unlike the old. The members of the underclass are not stupid. They know that wealth and success are, in part, capriciously distributed, that is, that they depend on the chances of social position and geographical location. Property will never be legitimate unless it offers real welfare, that is, a stake in society to all in return. The retreat to pure police protection of the property of the ‘haves’ is ineffective and constitutes the theft of opportunity from the ‘have nots’. The disaffected cannot overthrow society, but they can make it impossible to live in.

The only effective answer to this problem is a mixture of social crusading by those ‘haves’ who care and the empowerment of the ‘have nots’. That can best be achieved by adequately publicly funded and committed voluntary associations working in partnership with the poor and excluded. Only by resourcing associations that help the poor to organize themselves and then funding projects to transform ghettos and slums can the state help to reverse this corrosive process of social decline. Socialists have by and large written themselves out of this task, by identifying welfare with state provision, by simply demanding ‘more’ of it as the solution to social problems, and by spurning the voluntary sector as mere ‘do gooding’. Socialists long ago abandoned the task of building security and welfare through mutual institutions in civil society. At present it is not the old political forces of the left, who continue to advocate failed collectivist solutions, but religious and community groups who see the need for activism and cooperation to build a ‘civil society’ for the poor and excluded.

Many are frightened by this erosion of the old political certainties, by the weakening of the old political forces and the old solutions. Many are frightened by the growth of crime and social disintegration, and many see the source of these social problems in specific groups, for example, in immigrant communities. It is also widely feared that the inheritors of this social crisis will be one of the old political forces, the ultra-right. The fear is that nationalism and racism will become the core of a new politics of protest against the established order and that liberalism and democracy will be rejected as a response to the problems encountered by Western representative systems. It would be foolish to be complacent about the return of the ultra-right, but one must remember that political conditions today are not like those of the 1920s and 1930s when the ultra-right made its political breakthrough to power. Then fascism derived a very significant power of appeal by appearing to offer a ‘third way’ in the social war between capitalism and communism. Fascism promised to smash the left within, to tackle the Soviet Union without, and yet to cure mass unemployment and to check the powers of big capitalism. Moreover, fascism depended for its appeal on the centrality of the nation state; it would restore national glory, eliminate internal enemies and promote autarchic national economic policies. These claims are hardly a recipe for success today. The experience of Nazism remains rooted in the imagination of Western publics, and will limit the appeal of the most virulent racism. A politics of ethnic homogeneity that led to the gas chambers has, at best, a limited appeal. The barbarity of ultra-nationalism and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia serve as a timely reminder of what the far right has to offer, and, fortunately, horrify the mass of decent citizens in the West. Of course Germany has its racist thugs, but it also has millions of citizens determined to prevent any return to the horrors of the Nazi era, and who demonstrate in their hundreds of thousands against racism.

The ultra-right will not capture the new political agendas, and we are, therefore, unlikely to enter a new dark age. The problems of ethnic and cultural pluralism in Western societies remain, however, and they will continue to create tension and sustain the far right unless an effective solution is found to them. These problems are not confined to or caused by migrant communities, and, therefore, they will not be solved simply by restricting migration. A positive policy of creating the political and social structures for a truly plural society is the only coherent long-term response, and in Chapter 3 we will consider these issues. In particular, how voluntary self-governing associations might contribute to providing facilities for different communities and also serve as a means of lessening tension between such communities in the public sphere. At present ‘pluralism’ has become a policy of the state, promoting ‘multi-cultural’ programmes within uniform structures of provision that satisfy no community and at worst degenerate into a decultured pap.

We have entered an era when the old certainties of politics have dissolved, in which politics and society are more pluralistic and less capable of being dragooned by the ideological programmes of left and right. It would be foolish simply to celebrate the new diversity and to welcome the ‘end of ideology’, as many of the naive supporters of the importation of Post-Modern ideas into politics do. We are unlikely to escape our manifold problems with-out new political ideas and without new practices of institutional reform. The world is tired of brutal and utopian ideologies, but it cannot either prosper or progress in a state of intellectual catatonia about the possibilities for change in our political institutions and forms of socio-economic governance. Francis Fukuyama in his original essay ‘The End of History’ (1989) offered a vision of a world purged of ideology, in which history had come to an end because there are no alternatives to the institutions of the present, representative democracy and the market. The future would, therefore, be the endless repetition of more of the same, with no ideological sturm und drang, but rather a politics centred in bureaucratic problem-solving, limited social engineering and liberal compromise.

That is to see the future in terms of the ‘alternatives’ of the past. The old ideologies, like socialism, fascism or dogmatic liberal individualism, are undermined and the pragmatic substitutes for them like social democracy or Christian democracy are deeply flawed and unable to surmount existing problems. An alternative cannot consist in a totalizing ideology that seeks to rebuild the social world anew according to the dictates of a single and exclusive principle. The most readily available alternative, associative democracy, is not of this kind. It is not an idea that involves the wholesale supplanting of existing institutions, rather it provides a vital supplement to them that enables their defects to be meliorated.

Associationalism makes accountable representative democracy possible again by limiting the scope of state administration, without diminishing social provision. It enables market-based societies to deliver the substantive goals desired by citizens, by embedding the market system in a social network of coordinative and regulatory institutions. It is a political idea that is big enough to offer the hope of radical reform, and to mobilize political energies in doing so, but it is specific enough to be developed within and added to our existing institutions. It requires neither a revolution nor the building of a new society, merely the extensive but gradual reform of the old at a pace directed by the realities of politics and the choices of citizens.

Associative democracy not merely lacks the totalitarian potential of the old ideologies, it is their direct opposite, since it offers room for the projects of the most diverse social and political forces. It is not tied to any given part of the old left-right political spectrum. It can appeal to and be used as a guiding political doctrine by a wide variety of political and social groups subscribing to very different beliefs. The concept of the governance of social affairs through voluntary associations can enable groups to build their own social worlds in civil society; for example, conservative religious groups, radical feminists, those seeking a self-sufficient ecologically sustainable form of life, can all live as they wish, and compete politically by soliciting the voluntary choices of individuals. In this respect associationalism is the one great system of political ideas born in the nineteenth century that is likely to continue into the twenty-first with real intellectual enthusiasm and the energy for social renewal driving it forward.

It is not surprising that associative democracy has not generally appealed to the intellectual left as they have sought to respond to the collapse of state socialism and the eclipse of Marxism. The left has discovered democracy and civil society, but in ways that tend to make it indifferent to associationalism. On the one hand, a ‘new republican’ current based on the concept of citizenship, advocating a return to stronger majoritarian democracy and the active involvement in common, core political institutions. The new republicans seek to use democratic ideals against existing flawed representative institutions and the concept of citizenship to extend social and political rights. The new republican idea of restoring a more communal and committed politics is ill-adapted to current circumstances. It re-emphasizes the idea of a single effectively self-governing political community at the very moment when the nation state is being undermined and a complex multifocal politics is developing. Insofar as the new republicans accept existing representative democratic institutions, then they are stuck with the very real limitations that those institutions impose on governmental accountability and citizen participation. The ideas of majoritarian democracy and a common ideal of citizenship are ill-suited to a pluralistic society in which social objectives are increasingly divergent. Citizens need a political community that will enable them to be different, and not one that exhorts them to be the same.

On the other hand, sections of the left have given great emphasis to ‘civil society’ and to the new social movements, the very forces of anti-racism, feminism, environmental politics, etc. that have contributed much to undermining the old left-right political spectrum. The problem here is the tendency to see those movements in oppositional terms, as a source of renewal against the state and the old politics. Without a change in political institutions, without a state more accommodating to the creation of social communities in civil society, the new movements will be constrained and limited. Moreover, by treating these movements as part of the ‘left’, as inherently oppositional, this perspective reimposes the divisions of the old political spectrum and ignores the common cause that very different movements may find in gaining the freedom to build their own self-governing communities in civil society.

The intellectual left’s embrace of democratization of state and civil society as a substitute for the goal of socialization of the means of production has had little concrete political impact. Movements for political reform in states with defective democratic institutions, like Charter 88 in the United Kingdom, have been successful precisely because they have confined themselves to advocating changes that would constitute existing representative democratic best practice. The only way radical ideas will gain ground is by arguing for new types of institutions and doing so for a constituency that goes way beyond the left. To respond to the changed conjuncture we need political ideas that can cope with decentralization, that are not utopian about the prospects for such change, and that do not confuse decentralization with participatory democracy. Only thus can we hope to promote conceptions of non-collectivist means of ensuring a well-governed and adequately serviced society, open to the aspirations of diverse social groups. Those ideas are most readily developed out of the framework of associationalist political theory.

2

Associative Principles and Democratic Reform

New times for an old idea

Associationalism is not a new idea. It developed in the nineteenth century as an alternative to both liberal individualism and socialist collectivism, and as a criticism of state centralization and the growth of bureaucracy. It was international, and not less intellectually sophisticated than its opponents. It enjoyed considerable success and support. It had several distinct strands, and it was not exclusively a movement of the left. Associationalism had two characteristic features as a social doctrine. The first was the advocacy of a decentralized economy based on the non-capitalistic principles of cooperation and mutuality. The second was the criticism of the centralized and sovereign state, with radical federalist and political pluralist ideas advanced as a substitute. The associationalists believed in voluntarism and self-government, not collectivism and state compulsion. Some associationalists combined the economic and political components of the doctrine, others gave emphasis to one or the other.

Associationalism has several distinct sources. The English advocates of industrial and social cooperation like Robert Owen and George Jacob Holyoake stressed cooperative, self-regulating economic communities. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon combined brilliant advocacy of a mutualist economy, centred on artisan and cooperative production, with alternative non-profit making financial institutions, and the creation of a decentralized state organized on bottom-up federal principles. The English political pluralists, F.W. Maitland and John Neville Figgis, derived from Otto von Gierke’s theory of association, a conception of a pluralist state that would have limited powers in respect of voluntary self-regulating associations. Neither gave great emphasis to the economy, but Figgis supported the autonomy of both the churches and the unions from the state. Figgis inspired the two major English associationalist writers of this century, G.D.H. Cole and Harold J. Laski. Cole developed between 1917 and 1920 a comprehensive Guild Socialist system of economic and social governance. Laski brought English pluralist political theory to its most rigorous level in his A Grammar of Politics (1925). Associationalism then went into a rapid and almost total decline, the reasons for which will be considered when we examine the demise of Guild Socialism in Chapter 4.

Other ideas paralleled or influenced associationalism, such as French labour and administrative syndicalism, and some of the French and German corporatist ideas. Most corporatist ideas were authoritarian and, if anti-capitalist, favoured a state administrative or neo-medievalist guild society solution to the problems of modern society. Hegel had developed the idea of a ‘civil society’ distinct from the state. The corporation was as one of the main agencies of governance of economic relations in civil society. He did not see these bodies as free associations but as compulsory regulative agencies. Moreover, he imposed above civil society a state with attributes that no associationalist committed to voluntarism and individual liberty could accept for a second. The corporatist tradition did contain an important truth, that economic organization and the public power must be brought into coordination. Laissez faire ignores this necessity and socialism overcompensates by, in practice, subordinating society to the state. Many associationalists and corporatists argued that representative democracy was a fundamentally inadequate system of representation, that it gave effective expression neither to the actual wills of individual electors, nor to the social interests. Thus they proposed a system of functional democracy based on the major social interests represented through corporatist structures. As we shall see, functional democratic ideas contain important defects and cannot be a substitute for representative democracy. Inadequate as most democratic systems are, few modern citizens would want to lose the vote. There is, however, an important point in these arguments if different forms of representation are not seen as a substitute for representative democracy, but as a supplement to it. Emile Durkheim’s work is especially relevant in this respect, not least because he redefined and extended what democracy was. In his The Division of Labour in Society (1964), published in 1893, he offered a non-socialist critique of the laissez faire principles of economic liberalism, arguing that the idea of a socially-disembedded, purely economic market mechanism was unsustainable. Durkheim rejected socialism as giving all power to the state, and argued that the economy could be regulated by less draconian means. In his Lectures on Civic Morals (collected in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1957)) he argued for corporatist representation as a new form of democratic communication between the state and the key professional groups in the economy.

Associationalism never congealed to form a coherent ideology. It never became a political movement capable of exercising power. It did not lack powerful ideas, but they made little headway against the notions that centralization and the large-scale are the most efficient and historically inevitable ways of organizing social relations. Marx has much to answer for in this respect. Maxists, like other collectivists and unlike most associationalists, were successful because they realized the need to compete for, and capture, state power by parliamentary or revolutionary means.

Imagine, however, that Marx and Proudhon had had a better relationship in Paris in the early 1840s, that Marx had accepted that comprehensive state collectivism must ruin liberty and that Proudhon had accepted greater pragmatism about the need to control political power. Or imagine that Beatrice Webb had been convinced by J.N. Figgis of the virtues of the pluralist state. In that case socialists might have tried to build their socialism in civil society, whilst ensuring, through seeking politically appropriate representation, a state at least not hostile to this enterprise. Such a socialism would have been based on mutual welfare through organizations like the Friendly Societies, on the organization of distribution through non-profitmaking stores like those of the English Cooperative Movement, and on the organization of production either through worker-owned cooperatives or labour-capital partnerships, in which workers took a part of their income through equity.

Such developments were eminently possible, for the Friendly Societies and the ‘Co-Op’ were very successful. Such a socialism would very likely still exist, since it would have been built in civil society and would have been relatively independent of the state. It would have been non-authoritarian, competing with other institutions for the membership and custom of individuals. It would not have been so threatened by the changes in state policy that have wrecked the nationalized industries and battered the welfare state created by the 1945 Labour Government. The fact is that as the twentieth century progressed, the voluntary and cooperative elements in the British Labour Movement became weaker and weaker. Wage labour and state provision seemed the easier option, especially in the post-1945 period of full employment and the welfare state. Socialism in Britain, once so strong, so pragmatic and fundamentally humane, died through its dependence on the state no less than did the brutal Soviet state collectivist version.

Associationalism was never just the preserve of socialists, however, nor is it trapped in its past. Associative democracy can become a new idea because of the changed political and economic context. Associationalist ideas are no longer compelled to perform the same role that they did in the great contest of systems of social organization in the nineteenth century. They can be reformulated on a revised theoretical basis and in a new political conjuncture. The purpose of this book is not to retrieve and restate associationalist ideas as they were developed by a range of politically diverse nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers. Rather the aim is to draw on those ideas to reconstruct a political doctrine suitable to the present, changing many of the substantive intellectual proposals but also some of the underlying theoretical assumptions of the classic associationalist writers. As this book proceeds, and particularly in Chapter 3, it will be clear that a great deal of previous associationalist argument will either be abandoned or radically redefined. It is hardly possible that an intellectual tradition that was so thoroughly marginalized by the mid-1920s could remain instantly relevant today.

Many associationalists did not see associative democracy as a supplement to existing social relations but as a ‘new society’. Associationalism contained strong elements of utopianism, although even apparently highly utopian writers like Proudhon in his economic writings developed ideas that were practical in the context of the relatively decentralized and artisan-based economy of mid-nineteenth century France. Many associationalists did seek to replace entirely representative democracy with a new functional democracy, and also to replace the market-based economy with a socialist system of a non-collectivistic type. I shall argue that neither of these aims is sustainable. Modern associative democracy can only be a more or less extensive supplement to liberal representative democracy, it cannot seek to abolish the individual right to vote on a territorial basis, nor to abolish the state as a public power that attempts to protect the rights of individual citizens and associations. In that sense associationalism extends and enhances liberalism and does not seek to supersede it. Likewise, the introduction of associative forms of governance of the economy and associational forms of welfare provision are designed neither to supplant a market-based economy nor to reduce levels of publicly-funded welfare. On the contrary, associative economic governance is conceived as extending those forms of social embeddedness of markets that enable market economies to work better, and associative welfare is designed to extend individual control and choice, which collectivistic systems fail to do, whilst offering extensive and primarily publicly-funded services.

Associative democracy is deceptively simple in its most basic political claims. These can be stated briefly as follows. Associationalism makes a central normative claim, that individual liberty and human welfare are both best served when as many of the affairs of society as possible are managed by voluntary and democratically self-governing associations. Associationalism seeks to square the aims of freedom for the individual in pursuing his or her chosen goals with the effective governance of social affairs. Individualism is rejected because associationalists argue that in a purely competitive market society many people will lack the resources to achieve their objectives, they will not have the freedom denoted by the capacity to control their affairs, and in consequence many of the dimensions of social life will be ill-governed. Whilst associationalism gives priority to freedom in its scale of values and defines freedom as the ability of individuals to pursue their chosen purposes, it contends that freedom can only be pursued effectively by the majority of persons if they are both enabled and supported by society in joining with their fellows in voluntary associations in order to do so. Associations must, therefore, be protected by a public power that can enforce the rule of law and also, where necessary, be funded by the public through taxation.

Associationalism seeks to combine the individual choice of liberalism and the public provision of collectivism. It is by no means a substitute form of collectivism. Collectivism is opposed because a fundamental contention of associationalist writers like Figgis or Laski is that modern societies are pluralistic, they are composed of different partial societies with distinct objectives and beliefs, and those diverse ends cannot be accommodated by uniform methods of compulsory provision through the state. Associationalists were opposed to the collectivistic schemes of Fabian writers like the Webbs for this very reason. Collectivism is rejected as such, and not just in its totalitarian form in Soviet-style socialism. Associationalism attempts to construct a political framework within which individuals and the groups they create through voluntary association, one with another, can pursue different public goods whilst remaining in the same society. Plural groups share a limited, but common, set of public rules and regulatory institutions, which ensure that their differing goals and beliefs can be accommodated without undue conflict or the infringement of the rights of individuals and associations.

The institutional changes proposed in an associative democratic reform of existing forms of representative democracy and centralized bureaucratic state administration can be summed up in three principles of political organization:

1 that voluntary self-governing associations gradually and progressively become the primary means of democratic governance of economic and social affairs;

2 that power should as far as possible be distributed to distinct domains of authority, whether territorial or functional, and that administration within such domains should be devolved to the lowest level consistent with the effective governance of the affairs in question – these are the conjoint principles of state pluralism and of federation;

3 that democratic governance does not consist just in the powers of citizen election or majority decision, but in the continuous flow of information between governors and the governed, whereby the former seek the consent and cooperation of the latter.

We now turn to examine how associationalist and corporatist writers developed these principles and how they may be given expression today. This discussion is the core of our exposition of the specifically political institutions of associational governance.

Three principles of associationalist political organization

Primary associations as democratic governance

The conception that voluntary self-governing associations become the primary means of democratic governance of economic and social affairs involves two processes. First, that the state should cede functions to such associations, and create the mechanisms of public finance whereby they can undertake them. Second, that the means to the creation of an associative order in civil society are built-up, such as alternative sources of mutual finance for associative economic enterprises, agencies that aid voluntary bodies and their personnel to conduct their affairs effectively, and so on. This is not intended to be a once-and-for-all change, but a gradual process of supplementation, proceeding as fast as the commitment to change by political forces and the capacity to accept tasks by voluntary associations allows. This development can be seen in two ways, as a necessary means of reforming representative democracy, and as a desirable method of organizing economic and social affairs in and of itself.

The principal aim of an associative supplement to representative democracy is to reduce both the scale and the scope of the affairs of society that are administered by state agencies overseen by representative institutions. Existing legislatures and elected government personnel are hopelessly overburdened by the sheer size of modern bureaucratic big government, and the multiplicity of the functions of social provision and regulation undertaken by modern states. The result is to undermine representative democracy, weakening accountability to the people through their representatives of both policy-making and the delivery of services. Associational governance would lessen the tasks of central government to the extent that greater accountability both of the public power and of the devolved associationally-governed activities would be possible.