The Pluralist Theory of the State

Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski

Paul Q. Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138156180
• eBook ISBN: 9781134967223
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

English political pluralism is a challenging school of political thought, neglected in recent years but now enjoying a revival of interest. It is particularly relevant today because it offers a critique of centralized sovereign state power. The leading theorists of the pluralist state were G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski, and this volume brings together their most important ideas, making accessible a crucial body of work on radical political theory. It includes their major writings, mostly out of print and difficult to obtain, and here gathered together in an anthology for the first time. Current in the first two decades of this century, English political pluralism offered a convincing critique of state sovereignty and proposed a decentralized and federated form of authority - pluralism - in which the affairs of society would be conducted by self-governing and independent associations. Paul Hirst's comprehensive introduction situates English political pluralism historically and gives a critical account of its main theoretical themes and the debate surrounding them. The book will be of interest to those who see radical reform as vital for the future health of democracy, to students of political theory and the history of political thought and also to students of jurisprudence and legal theory interested in the pluralist debate as it affects the concept of legal sovereignty.

Part One
THE SOCIAL THEORY

G.D.H.Cole

Chapter One
SOME NAMES AND THEIR
MEANING

Every developed community may be regarded as giving rise to an organized society, within which there exists a vast complex of social customs, institutions, and associations, through which the members or citizens express themselves and secure in part the fulfilment of the various purposes which some or all of them have in common. There are in this sentence at least seven words upon the clear definition of which success in our subsequent inquiry largely depends.

Community is the broadest and most inclusive of the words which we have to define. By a ‘community’ I mean a complex of social life, a complex including a number of human beings living together under conditions of social relationship, bound together by a common, however constantly changing, stock of conventions, customs, and traditions, and conscious to some extent of common social objects and interests. It will be seen at once that this is a very wide and elastic form of definition, under which a wide variety of social groups might be included. It is, indeed, of the essence of community that its definition should be this elastic; for ‘community’ is essentially a subjective term, and the reality of it consists in the consciousness of it among its members. Thus a family is, or may be, a community, and any group which is, in a certain degree, self-contained and self-subsistent is or may be a community. A medieval university, a monastic brotherhood, a cooperative colony—these and many more may possess those elements of social comprehensiveness which give a right to the title of community.

‘Some names and their meaning’ first appeared as Chapter Two of G.D.H.Cole (1920) The Social Theory.

But, if the word is wide and inclusive enough in one aspect, it is essentially limited in another. In order to be a community, a group must exist for the good life and not merely for the furtherance of some specific and partial purpose. Thus, a cricket club, or a trade union, or a political party is not a community, because it is not a self-contained group of complete human beings, but an association formed for the furtherance of a particular interest common to a number of persons who have other interests outside it. A community is thus essentially a social unit or group to which human beings belong, as distinguished from an association with which they are only connected.

Yet, despite this wholeness and universality which are of the nature of community, it is not the case that a man can belong to one community only. A community is an inclusive circle of social life; but round many narrow circles of family may be drawn the wider circle of the city, and round many circles of city the yet wider circle of the province or the nation, while round all the circles of nation is drawn the yet wider and more cosmopolitan circle of world civilization itself. No one of these wider circles necessarily absorbs the narrower circles within it: they may maintain themselves as real and inclusive centres of social life within the wider communities beyond them. A man is not less a member of his family or a citizen of his city for being an Englishman or a cosmopolitan. Membership of two communities may lead, for the individual, to a real conflict of loyalties; but the reality of the conflict only serves to measure the reality of the communal obligation involved.

Our definition does not, of course, enable us to say exactly and in every instance what is a community and what is not. Being a community is a matter of degree, and all communities, being actual, are also necessarily imperfect and incomplete. There may often arise, not merely a dispute, but an actual doubt in the minds of the persons concerned to what community they belong, as for instance in a border country which hardly knows with which of the peoples it lies between its community of tradition, interest, and feeling is the stronger. Again, a province or a town may be merely an administrative area, with no common life or feeling of its own, or it may be a real and inclusive centre of social life. Moreover, it may pass by insensible stages from one condition to the other, as when a depopulated strip of countryside becomes first a formless urban district and then gradually assumes the form and feeling of a town or city, changes and developments in administrative organization usually, but not necessarily, accompanying the change in feeling. There are groups which obviously deserve the name of communities, and groups which obviously do not deserve it; but there are also countless groups of which it is difficult to say, at any particular moment, whether they deserve the name or not

It is plain, then, that our thing, ‘a community’, does not necessarily involve any particular form of social organization, or indeed any social organization at all. It is not an institution or a formal association, but a centre of feeling, a group felt by its members to be a real and operative unity. In any community larger than the family, however, this feeling of unity, with its accompanying need for common action, almost necessarily involves conscious and formal organization. The feeling of unity makes it easy for the members of a community to associate themselves together for the various purposes which they have in common, and, where the community is free from external hindrances, such association surely arises and is devoted to the execution of these common purposes. Where a community is not free, and an external power hinders or attempts to prevent organization, association still asserts itself, but instead of directing itself to the fulfilment of the various social needs of the group, almost every association is diverted to subserve the task of emancipating the community from external hindrances. This, for instance, is the position in Ireland at the present time.

We are concerned in this study with community as a whole, and with communities of every kind; but our chief interest is necessarily with those larger and more complex communities which have the largest social content and the most diversified social organization. It is, indeed, in relation to these that the principal difficulties arise. The simple fact of community is easy enough to appreciate; but in a large and highly developed social group, internal organization, and cross-currents of organization which, assignable to wider communities, overleap the frontiers of the smaller groups and communities within them, often loom so large that the fact of community itself tends to disappear from sight. The desire to counter this tendency is, as we shall see later, one of the principal causes of the facile, but fatal, identification of community with ‘state’, which is so often made by social theorists.

‘Every developed community’, we began by declaring, ‘may be regarded as giving rise to an organized society’. In the small community of the family this distinction does not today, or usually, arise. But for larger communities the distinction is of vital importance. In every such community there is a part of the common life which is definitely and formally organized, regulated by laws and directed by associations formed for social purposes. I mean to use the term society to denote the complex of organized associations and institutions within the community.

I am conscious in this use of giving the word ‘society’ a more definite meaning than those with which it is customarily employed. Indeed, the meaning here assigned to it is to a certain extent artificial, but by no means entirely so. We do in fact constantly speak of society when we wish to denote neither the whole complex of community nor any particular association or institution, but the sum total of organized social structure which is the resultant of the various associations and institutions within a community….

‘Society’, then, is not a complete circle of social life, or a social group of human beings, but a resultant of the interaction and complementary character of the various functional associations and institutions. Its concern is solely with the organized cooperation of human beings, and its development consists not directly in the feeling of community among individuals, but in the better coherence and more harmonious relationship of the various functional bodies within the community.

We have seen that a developed community, larger than the family, can hardly exist without institutions and associations; that is, without society. Society, on the other hand, may exist, if imperfectly, yet in a developed form, without real community, or with only a very slender basis of community. The union of Ireland and Great Britain under a single Parliament, and with a large system of associations and institutions extending to both, is an instance of a society with but the shadow of a basis of community. In such a case, as we shall see, the more artificial an association or institution is, or the greater the element of coercion it includes, the more it is inclined to persist, whereas the more voluntary and spontaneous forms of organization find it hard to live under such conditions. The growth of a purely Irish Labour Movement, with a tendency to break away from the British Movement, is an example of this difficulty.

Society, as a complex of organizations, cannot stand for, or express, all human life within a community, or the whole life of any single human being. Indeed, it is probably true that what is best and most human in men and women escapes almost entirely from the net of society, because it is incapable of being organized. Society is concerned mainly with rights and duties, with deliberate purposes and interests. While the community is essentially a centre of feeling, society is a centre, or rather a group of centres, of deliberation and planning, concerned far more with means than with ends. It is, of course, true that an association or an institution can arouse in us and make us attach to it sentiments of loyalty as well as calculated adherences; but at least the better part of our feelings of love and devotion are put forth in purely personal relationships, or in the narrow but intense community of the family. It is essential that associations and institutions, and even that society itself, should be able to appeal to our sentiments of loyalty and devotion, but it would be wrong to desire that these sentiments should be absorbed in them. As long as human life remains, most of the best things in it will remain outside the bounds and scope of organization, and it will be the chief function of society so to organize these parts of human life which respond to organization as to afford the fullest opportunity for the development of those human experiences and relationships to which organization is the cold touch of death.

Society, like community, is a matter of degree. It depends not only on the volume and extent of associative and institutional life in the community, but still more on the coherence and co-operative working of the various associations and institutions. Where associative and institutional life is vigorous, but there exist distinct castes and classes, each with its own network of organizations, not co-operating but conflicting and hostile, then society exists indeed, but only in a very low degree. The highest development of society consists not only in the general diffusion of associations and institutions over every organizable tract of social life, but also in the harmonious cooperation of all the various bodies, each fulfilling its proper function within society, in harmony and agreement with the others….

We have so far spoken of associations and institutions uncritically, without any attempt to examine their nature, or to define the sense in which the terms are used. To do this is our next task. We have seen that every developed community includes a network of associations and institutions of the most various kinds, and we have now to explain their character….

By an association I mean any group of persons pursuing a common purpose or system or aggregation of purposes by a course of co-operative action extending beyond a single act, and, for this purpose, agreeing together upon certain methods of procedure, and laying down, in however rudimentary a form, rules for common action. At least two things are fundamentally necessary to any association—a common purpose or purposes and, to a certain extent, rules of common action.

The primary condition of all association is a common purpose; for the object of all associations being the attainment of some end, there can be no association unless the attainment of that end is the purpose of the members. The ‘end’, ‘object’, or ‘interest’, or, as I prefer to call it, the ‘purpose’, is the raison d’être of every association. But, while this is a fundamental point, it is important that it should not be pushed too far. The presence of a common purpose does not imply that it must be fully and consciously apprehended by all or, even in the case of already established associations, a majority of the members….

Second, it must be borne in mind that very many associations have, not a single, clearly definable purpose, but a number of purposes more or less intimately related one to another. In these cases, while, except in the circumstances contemplated above, each member is as a rule conscious of at least one of the purposes of the association, it does not follow that each member is conscious of, or shares in the desire to forward, each of the purposes in view. This may occur either because a member does not fully appreciate the interrelation of the various purposes, and therefore fails to appreciate the significance of some of them, or because he does really differ from his fellows as to some of the purposes contemplated by the association, while agreeing with him about the rest, and feeling the association to be worth while for their sake alone. For example, when a trade union or an employers’ association combines political and industrial activities, there will be some who, agreeing with the principal objects of the association and therefore desiring to remain members, will dissent from some of its purposes and methods. The Osborne Judgment controversy some years ago, and the recent controversy about the use of ‘direct action’ for political purposes, alike served to force this issue to the front in the case of trade unions….

Third, we must remember that associations are sustained by human beings, and are therefore capable of constant development. Changing circumstances, or a changing appreciation of the same circumstances, may impel the members of an association to widen or to narrow its objects, or to vary them from time to time. All associations possess a considerable elasticity in this respect, the degree of their elasticity varying largely with the amount of coherence they possess—which in turn depends mainly upon the intensity of the communal feeling which inspires them. But there is for every association a limit of elasticity, and, strained beyond this point by the inclusion of new purposes, the association will break, and a new one have to be created to fulfil the new purposes. The atrophy of the original purposes causes associations to decay. They may renew themselves by assuming new purposes; but, if the change is too big or too violent, they break. Decay or breakage is the fate of every association in the end; and as, from one cause or the other, associations disappear, men create new ones to take their place.

So much for the common purposes which are the moving and sustaining principle of all associations. But, as we saw, there is a secondary characteristic which is essential. Every association must, in some degree, prescribe common rules of action for its members. These rules may be very few and very rudimentary, and they commonly deal with the conduct of the members only in relation to the purposes of the association, though they often include written or unwritten moral rules of conduct designed to preserve the reputation of the association…. These rules generally include both general rules designed to cover particular cases as they arise, and particular directions issued by the governing body of the association for guidance in particular cases directly….

Our definition of the word ‘association’ is clearly very wide indeed. It excludes momentary groups formed, without definite organization, to carry out some single immediate object; but it includes all organized groups possessed of a purpose entailing a course of action. It draws no distinction between groups whose purpose is in some sense political or social or communal, and groups whose purpose is purely sociable or recreational. It covers a football club or a dining club fully as much as a church, a trade union, or a political party.

Of course, it makes a great difference in the importance of an association, not only how far it is representative of those concerned in its purpose, but also how important its purpose is. But it is impossible to draw a theoretical line of distinction between associations which are ‘social’ and associations which are only sociable. For some practical purposes, as for representation upon public bodies, it is no doubt essential to draw such a distinction; but it is necessary to recognize that, however drawn, it cannot be more than empirical. All associations are, in their various manners and degrees, parts of society.

We can now turn to the word which, in the early part of this chapter, was so often used in close conjunction with the word ‘association’. What is an institution, and in what sense is the word used in this book? I find the thing for which the word stands difficult to define at all, and impossible to define in any but a largely negative manner. It is not, though it may manifest itself in or through, a group or association, nor has it, strictly speaking, any members. It does, of course, being a social thing, appear in, and operate through, human beings and associations; but it depends for its institutional status, not upon a particular group of persons who are its members, frame its rules, and seek to effect through it a common purpose, but upon a general acceptance and recognition by the members of the community, backed by a sustaining force of custom or tradition, with or without the sanction of law. It is easily recognizable in some of its principal instances—marriage, monogamy, monarchy, peerage, caste, capitalism, and many others belonging to different ages and civilizations….

It is important to notice that, in the sense in which we are using the word, army, navy, church, and state are not ‘institutions’, but associations in which institutions may be held to be embodied or expressed. Thus the church is an association in which the institution of religion is more or less perfectly embodied, the state an association more or less perfectly embodying the institution of political government, army and navy associatio...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: THE SOCIAL THEORY
• PART TWO: CHURCHES IN THE MODERN STATE
• PART THREE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY AND OTHER ESSAYS
• PART FOUR: STUDIES IN LAW AND POLITICS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY