Democracy and Difference

Anne Phillips

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745610979, 9780745610962
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A new emphasis on diversity and difference is displacing older myths of nation or community. A new attention to gender, race, language or religion is disrupting earlier preoccupations with class. But the welcome extended to heterogeneity can bring with it a disturbing fragmentation and closure. Can we develop a vision of democracy through difference: a politics that neither denies group identities nor capitulates to them?

In this volume, Anne Phillips develops the feminist challenge to exclusionary versions of democracy, citizenship and equality. Relating this to the crisis in socialist theory, the growing unease with the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality, and the recent recuperation of liberal democracy as the only viable politics, she builds on debates within feminism to address general questions of difference. When democracies try to wish away group difference and inequality, they fail to meet their egalitarian promise. When yearnings towards an undifferentiated unity become the basis for radical politics and change, too many groups drop out of the picture.

Through her critical discussions of recent feminist and socialist theory Anne Phillips rejects this democracy of denial. She also warns, however, of the dangers on the other side. The simpler celebrations of diversity risk freezing group differences as they are, encouraging a patchwork of local identities from which people can speak only to themselves. Her arguments then combine in a powerful restatement of the case for a more active and participatory democracy. It is only through enhanced communication and discussion that people can respect and learn from their differences.

1

Fraternity

In the gloom of present-day politics, socialists may well lose themselves in nostalgic dreams of fraternity. We feel ourselves hemmed in by a world of self-interest, and experience the daily weakening of those bonds of class and community which gave the socialist movement so much of its strength. The world we now inhabit seems markedly individualist; we cast around in trepidation for some surviving signs of collective feeling.

We talk forlornly of the old back-to-backs with their bustling street life, compare them wistfully with anonymous tower blocks. We recall the mining communities where workers shared their poverty and danger, then shudder at the new towns with their semi-detacheds and their holidays in Spain. We have, perhaps, fond memories of the extended family where each generation played its role, and we shake our heads at its nuclear substitute with granny condemned to an old people’s home. It is a theme extensively developed by Jeremy Seabrook, and the popularity of his writings shows how widely his anxieties are shared.¹ Self-help, self-interest, self-protection – these seem the catchwords of today. Fraternity, solidarity, even co-operation, look sadly out of place.

Socialists do their best to resist nostalgia, but even the strongest will quail before such images. Socialism has always invoked some vision of community and usually frowned on unrestrained individualism. The ideal has been solidarity rather than division, working together rather than alone, collective rather than individual action. Partly this is no more than efficiency: to change the world we need the weight of numbers; to end poverty we need the power of socialized production. But for most of us there is a positive as well as a pragmatic side. The ‘social’ in socialism has always had at least two senses. Socialists believe in co-ordination, arguing that conscious planning will serve us better than unregulated competition. But we also value the very process of working together, tending to the view that this is a good in itself.

Thus it has long been a complaint against capitalism that it turns what should be social into an individual affair. The mechanics of the market put a barrier between us, leaving little space for co-operation or concern. Builders, to take one example, are paid to build – and whether they erect houses for the homeless or yet another office block is no concern of theirs. Train drivers are employed to run the trains on time – and who or what they carry is nothing to do with them. Capitalism encourages us to keep ourselves to ourselves, to do the job, take the money, then spend it as we will. It does not promote a caring society, and reserves its greatest praise for those who ‘go it alone’.

Socialists have challenged such individualism, and this is one of the points at which we diverge from classical liberals. Socialists would never define their objectives solely in terms of liberty and equality: the finest liberty and most scrupulous equality would still be inadequate if they left us isolated and alone. Social ownership, socialized production, even socialized consumption, are regarded as positive goals. A socialist society would be one in which we acknowledged and developed our common concerns; the movement to create such a society would be one of cooperation and solidarity. Hence large units of production have been favoured over smaller ones, and not just because of economies of scale. Communal child care has been favoured over caring for children exclusively at home, and not merely because it means less of a drain on the energies of parents. Mass meetings have been favoured over ballot boxes, and not only because they give greater weight to the opinions of activists! In all these cases there is a powerful belief that more social means better. As a sceptic might put it, socialists prefer to share their cake in a dingy canteen rather than divide it into equal pieces for each to eat at home.

This aspect of the tradition has been attacked as illiberal and oppressive, and socialists themselves differ over how much importance to attach to it. But wherever each of us draws the line – between the public and the private, the social and the individual – there can be no doubt that the tradition as a whole values the social. It is because of this that we experiment with collective living, because of this that we exhibit such a marked propensity for going to meetings. We worry (perhaps more than we should) over our privatizing tendencies. We are inspired (much less often than we would like) by public demonstrations of solidarity. Every one of us will have some emotional memory of collective action, or some evocative dream of future unity. For many the formative experience was on demonstrations, rallies or picket lines: we remember the confidence we gained from marching with thousands of others; the thrill of counting union banners from every trade and region; the emotion, perhaps, when the Yorkshire miners arrived to take their place in the Grunwick picket line. Socialism draws much of its intensity from such experiences, and the suggestion that these are passing will arouse deep concern.

I share this concern, but I also worry that it can make us uncritical of what went before. Those who mourn the lost community are often on shaky ground, with an over-romantic view of the past and unnecessarily bleak picture of the present. The mining communities were, after all, never typical of working-class existence; the back-to-back terraces contained all the frustrations of poverty as well as the comforts of belonging; on numerous criteria (the proportion of old people in institutions, the number of young people who leave their home town in search of work) communities are now more stable and caring than they used to be. And, as far as fraternity itself is concerned, we should surely start with the admission that solidarity is not socialist in all its forms, that there are versions of it that repel as well as ones that attract. When we hear talk of the old boys’ network, or the clannishness of the old school tie, we do not thrill to these exhibitions of community spirit. Solidarity can divide as well as unite, and some of what we have lost we should be glad to leave behind.

Fraternity in particular has a richly archaic ring and I want to argue we should leave it that way. Trade unionists, we know, are still brothers and send fraternal greetings, but now that one trade unionist in three is a woman such language has come increasingly under fire. Our ears are now more finely tuned to the tensions of sexual division and, when the longing for unity is expressed in terms of men, it begins to strike a discordant note. However grand the ‘brotherhood of man’ once sounded, today it is out of date. When we review the problem of solidarity, we should beware of slogans that seek to unite in the name of division.

I want in this essay to reassess the tradition of fraternity, arguing against any simple strategy of rehabilitation. As a model of solidarity it is flawed and partial, celebrating the unity of men and exclusion of women. As a basis for future action it is increasingly anachronistic, ignoring major changes that have occurred in the composition of the labour force. Crucial as the problem of solidarity is for socialists, we must first acknowledge the defects in our previous traditions, then see what alternatives we can develop to put in their place.

When ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ was proclaimed in 1789, fraternity was already stamped by an earlier history. Family imagery was a recurrent feature of feudal life, in France as elsewhere in Europe, and, in the centuries before the Revolution, brotherhood was the other side of the more authoritarian patriarchy. Craft masters claimed their authority from their role as ‘fathers’; when pressed to explain themselves, kings tended to play the same card. Patriarchy was the dominant model for authority, and fraternity was its (largely uncritical) complement. Trades and professions typically organized themselves into corporations or confraternities; monks were brothers; so too were freemasons, who flourished in eighteenth-century France.

This kind of fraternity had both its positive and negative aspects. When journeymen, for example, formed themselves into illicit brotherhoods, they were in some ways prefiguring the later trade unions; the brotherhoods found jobs for their members, arranged accommodation for the journeymen on their weary trek around the country, and even put pressure on masters who tried to cut wages or worsen conditions. More impressively still, they brought together journeymen from a variety of trades, spanning the closely guarded boundaries of the medieval world. But, against these progressive aspects, they generated an intense division between one brotherhood and another. When journeymen swore loyalty to their fellow ‘brothers’, they were also swearing hostility to those outside, and rival compagnonnages (brotherhoods) were often at each other’s throats.

The rivalries between the sects were passionate and sometimes deadly. Compagnons made up scores of songs insulting their rivals, and these were sung at all occasions. When compagnons of different sects encountered each other, they staged ambushes, skirmishes, and occasionally pitched battles, and serious injuries and even deaths could result. Sometimes different sects came to control different cities, and sometimes single cities were effectively partitioned between sects. But mutual hatred, suspicion, and the threat of open warfare were always present.²

As a model for socialist solidarity, such a hectic fraternity left much to be desired. The unity was premised on exclusion, and it was a unity derived from a womanless world. The life of a journeyman was that of a single man who roamed from town to town in pursuit of his trade. Women could appear in this world in the guise of ‘mothers’ – and indeed the women who ran the compagnons’ boarding houses were usually addressed as such. There was, however, no room for them as sisters. A young woman was no comrade, but rather the prize the journeyman might seek at the end of his travels. Getting a wife was both proof of success (who but a master could afford to marry?) and guarantee of future prosperity (how else would you find the sons to work in your workshop?). But while you were still a journeyman, women were largely out of bounds. Hence the brotherhood functioned as a community for single males; the bond that drew them together was their shared experience as men.

When the revolutionaries raised their cry of ‘fraternity’ they thought to distance themselves from the closed world of feudal France – but traditions have a habit of reasserting themselves. On the face of it, the Revolution pursued a new ideal, one closer to that of Rousseau. Instead of the old complex of brotherhoods and guilds and corporations, there would be a new community where individuals united as citizens, with no subgroupings to deflect their common interest. Particularism and exclusivity were anathema to these revolutionaries; what they wanted was a fraternity of all brothers in a single nation.

This produced its contorted moments. In 1791, for example, the market women of La Halle donated funds from their corporation (or guild) to the national treasury, and they were thanked by the President of the Assembly in the following terms:

Mesdames:

It is not one of the lesser benefits of the Constitution to have destroyed the spirit of individual corporations, so as to make of all Frenchmen only a family of brothers closely united by the indissoluble and sacred bond of Fatherland. In consecrating today to the public cause what previously had been only a symbol of union between a few individuals, you give a new proof of (that) patriotism which had distinguished you since the beginning of the Revolution.³

Note how the ‘spirit of individual corporations’ and the ‘unions between a few individuals’ are now dismissed with scorn. But note too that what replaced these remnants was a fraternity of men. With all their determined universalism, the revolutionaries overlooked their sisters: in this case, not so much overlooked them, but even thanked them for their services to the family of men! Did no one note this oddity? Was no voice raised to suggest that fraternity is far from universal when it defines itself as a brotherhood of man?

On this occasion we can hardly plead historical naivety, since the revolutionaries were indeed informed of the universal implications of brotherhood. In 1794, for example, they were forced to recognize that if all men are brothers it is nonsense for some men to be slaves. In a remarkable moment of revolutionary fervour, the National Convention declared that the aristocracy of skin was as abhorrent as the aristocracy of birth, welcomed three delegates from San Domingo (including one ex-slave), and announced that slavery was henceforth abolished in the French West Indies. Admittedly it had taken the revolutionaries some years to reach this conclusion, and when they did it was with a cynical eye to the chances of mobilizing ex-slaves to defend their territories against Spanish or British invasion. But they did at least draw the necessary implication. If fraternity was to mean anything, it must extend itself to all men.

Women were not slow to make similar points for themselves. Olympe de Gouges was one of those to speak out against racism, arguing that fraternity must challenge the despotism of colour. She also wrote in 1791 a Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Rewriting the constitution to read ‘woman’ instead of ‘man’, she pointed out the irony of a declaration which proclaimed the freedom of men and remained silent on the slavery of women. Women, she suggested, should qualify for every duty and every privilege now claimed by the men: they had the ‘right to mount the scaffold’ and should be allowed the equal right to ‘mount the rostrum’. As it was, she argued, the revolution had legitimized inequality. ‘Enslaved man’ had freed himself, but, ‘having become free, he has become unjust to his companion.’⁴

Olympe de Gouges was a minority voice, and her complaints could be discredited as those of an anti-revolutionary. Her declaration took the form of an appeal to the queen (in the much mistaken belief that Marie Antoinette could be persuaded to speak in the name of all women) and in 1793 she was executed as a royalist sympathizer. But there were other women, more vocal in their support of the revolution, who also claimed their rights as women. The exclusively female Society of Revolutionary Republicans made no overt criticism of male bias in the constitution – indeed its members took upon themselves the role of defending this constitution against the backslidings of the new moderates. But when they agitated in 1793 for women to wear the national cockade, they too were making the point that women must be citizens. The tricolour was the symbol of the Republic and the badge of citizenship; when they insisted that all women be compelled to wear it, the Revolutionary Republican Women were staking their claim for their rights and duties. Admittedly they found few followers in this, and indeed made themselves extremely unpopular among the women of Paris. Female challenges to male fraternity were still few and far between, but the challenge was there – however easily dismissed.

Through the nineteenth century, fraternity continued on its varied career and, with the development of the European labour movements, began to take on a heavily masculine form. The fraternity of the French Revolution was undoubtedly male and exclusive, but compared with later manifestations it was still a pretty feeble affair. Eighteenth-century France hardly lent itself to the vision of an all-embracing unity; society was too complex and divided; even a brotherhood of men seemed a farfetched idea. Fraternity as subsequently developed by trade unionists was to tell a different story.

Capitalist industry had little time for the finicky distinctions of the feudal world and, as it asserted its dominance, workers found their similarities beginning to outweigh their differences. It was this of course which inspired Marx and Engels to their vision of a united and class conscious proletariat. As they argued in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism seemed to be destroying the previous basis for division and distinction. ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.’ It had broken up the ‘old local and national seclusions and self-sufficiency’, making ‘national one-sidedness and narrow mindedness’ ever more impossible. Capitalism, they argued, was fast diminishing all those distinctions of skill, age, gender, nationality, payment, which once so miserably divided us. Out of this melting pot a new solidarity would surely be forged, and it would be based on the common concerns of class instead of those of trade or nation or gender.

So what happened? Capitalism fell far short of its early promise and failed to deliver a homogeneous working class. Instead of internationalism we have witnessed strident forms of nationalism; instead of unity between the sexes, a continued – and in some ways intensified – divide; instead of common conditions and wage levels for all, a systematic demarcation between the skilled and unskilled, high paid and low paid, black and white, ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’. The unity that did develop was considerably narrower than that envisaged by Marx and Engels, and was concentrated mainly among male manual workers. These workers did indeed come to see themselves as part of a working class (and to this extent the Marxist diagnosis has been vindicated). But they were aided in their imaginative leap by a partial redefinition of ‘working class’ as male. Instead of class solidarity we have seen a more mongrel variant, in which class and brotherhood are subtly elided. Instead of transcending gender difference, solidarity became almost inextricably linked with masculinity. Instead of countering the narrow fraternities of the craft unions, it drew its inspiration from the old brotherhoods of the manual trades. Workers did come to see themselves as brothers, not in the abstract phrases of the ‘brotherhood of man’ but as real, live, working men. Class unity became the prerogative of male workers.

Of course solidarity as practised has never been exclusively male, but solidarity as imagined has taken its images from the trade union brother. Unlike the earlier journe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Fraternity
• 2 So What’s Wrong with the Individual?
• 3 Universal Pretensions in Political Thought
• 4 Citizenship and Feminist Theory
• 5 Democracy and Difference
• 6 Must Feminists Give up on Liberal Democracy?
• 7 The Promise of Democracy
• 8 Pluralism, Solidarity and Change
• Index
• Back Page