The roots of pluralism

In Europe pluralism began as a reaction to the notion of monism and the idea of an absolutist state. In the United States pluralism developed as a more practical response to the desire to limit state power in the new consti­tution.

(a) that liberty is the most important political value, and that it is best preserved by power being dispersed,

(b)that groups should be regarded as ‘persons’, and

(c) that ideas of state sovereignty should be rejected.

The central tenet of pluralism derived from liberal thought; the importance of liberty and a distrust of the state which means that state power needs to be limited. However, the early English pluralists opposed the individualism of liberalism, seeing groups as the main constitutive element of society. For certain pluralists, individuals have no independent existence other than through groups. For all pluralists group identities and representation are an important element of the political structure. For Laski groups had a personality and we personalize them because ‘we must’:

We do it because we feel in these things the red blood of a living personality. Here are no mere abstractions of an over-exuberant imagination. The need is so apparent to make plain the reality beneath.

For the English pluralists, and for the later American pluralists, groups are the building block of politics and the state. However, much pluralist thought is shaped by a failure to problematize either the state or state/civil society relations. Laborde (2000: 177) illustrates how for English pluralism the distinction between state and civil society is one of the fundamental principles of pluralism but points out that: ‘such a distinction was hardly couched in antagonistic terms. The state was seen as an unproblematic instrumental requirement and the border between public and private was confused in pluralist writings’. The English pluralists were concerned with two elements in their understanding of the state. One is the notion of sovereignty and the second is the role/relationship of groups.

In keeping with their opposition to monism, pluralist theorists rejected the notion of a single and indivisible sovereignty embodied in the state. Figgis, Cole and Laski embodied the pluralist suspicion of the state, rejecting its claims to universality and contesting notions of sovereignty (Laborde 2000: 70 and 74). Like liberals, they believed that the state should be constrained. The mechanism for constraint was the distribution of social organization through a myriad of groups and associations. The conception of public/private organization was not far from the way the British state and civil society was organized up until the First World War. Public goods were provided by a combination of public, private and voluntary groups and the state played a minimal role.

In the United States, pluralism also developed out of a reaction to monism - and more directly in opposition to a powerful imperial state - and in many ways shared similar concerns with the British pluralist move­ment. It developed in particular through the work of Dewey and Follet (Stears 2002). Like the English pluralists, they were concerned with the power accrued by the state as a consequence of industrialization and the First World War. Follet was strongly opposed to the impact of individu­alism and to the notion of an overbearing state.

The development of pluralism has to be understood within the context of particular political circumstance. In Britain the development of pluralism in the early twentieth century reflected concerns about an increasingly strong state and was built of the notion of a strong civil society - through volun­tary organizations and trade unions - delivering public goods. However the period between 1914 and 1945 effectively destroyed the liberal state form that existed in Britain. The British state nationalized the pluralistic delivery of public goods so that the services delivered by the voluntary sector, private business and local government were taken over by the central government (for example supplies of gas or the creation of the NHS). In addition, the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty and the Haldane conception of the civil service - which saw decisions being made within a symbiotic relationship between ministers and officials - meant that power was monopolized within a closed and elitist state. Whilst Middlemas (1979) emphasizes a corporate bias in the British state - the role of groups was always mediated through a sovereign core executive and was highly limited in the influence on policy. Whilst pluralist conceptions existed within British political discourse, particularly in the high Toryism of people like Quentin Hogg and Harold Macmillan, the reality of British government was an increasingly centralized, sovereign state.

In the United States the state form was not so suffocating of pluralist thought. There, despite the very considerable expansion of state activity during the New Deal in the 1930s, the state was never sought or developed the capabilities to draw all areas of activity into its domain. A compre­hensive welfare state failed to develop, local and state government retained considerable autonomy, the private sector remained strong - there was no attempted beyond specific sectors in planning or nationalization - and the central state was institutionally fragmented as a consequence of the separa­tion of power entrenched within the constitution. Consequently, there was sufficient plurality in the political system to ensure that pluralism continued to reflect some elements of the reality of American politics. The period between the First World War and the end of the 1960s saw pluralism becoming the dominant conception of the American state.