Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–25

248 Pages·2000·1.051 MB·English

by  Cécile Laborde (auth.)

Pluralist Thought and the
State in Britain and France,
1900–25
Cécile Laborde
St Antony’s Series
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Pluralist Thought and
the State in Britain and
France, 1900–25
Cécile Laborde
Lecturer in European Political Thought
King’s College
London
in association with
Palgrave Macmillan
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-40681-4 ISBN 978-0-230-59960-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230599604
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-22934-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laborde, Cécile.
Pluralist thought and the state in Britain and France, 1900–25 /
Cécile Laborde.
p. cm. — (St. Antony’s series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-22934-4 (cloth)
1. Political science—Great Britain—History—20th century.
2. Political science—France—History—20th century. 3. Pluralism
(Social sciences)—Great Britain—History—20th century.
4. Pluralism (Social sciences)—France—History—20th century.
I. Title. II. Series.
JA84.G7L292 1999
320'.01'1—dc21 99–42554
CIP
©Cécile Laborde 2000
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-73202-1
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P0LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Types of Pluralism 9
III State and society 9
III Social regulation: organic v. contractual 11
III State regulation: co-ordination v. integration 16
2 Contractual Co-ordination: Edouard Berth,
Maxime Leroy and Anarchist Pluralism 19
III The individual and the state: radical anti-statism 21
III Syndicalist society: contractual anarchism 27
III The individual and the group: syndicalist
individualism 35
3 Organic Co-ordination: John Neville Figgis and
Whig Pluralism 45
III Individuals and Gemeinschaft-like groups 46
III Group personality 53
III The state and group liberalism 58
4 Contractual Integration: Harold Laski,
G.D.H. Cole and Socialist Pluralism 69
III The state demystified 70
III The participatory state 77
III Conclusion: individualism and pluralism 95
5 Organic Integration: Léon Duguit and
Corporatist Pluralism 101
III The intimation of a pluralist state 102
III The rehabilitation of the monist state 109
III Status groups and the organic state 115
6 Pluralism in National Context 125
III The labour movement and the state:
a study in radicalism (to 1914) 130
III The new syndicalism and guild socialism:
contrasting fates (1914–25) 140
v
vi Contents
III Pluralism, corporatism and state traditions 153
Conclusion 181
Notes 185
Bibliography 210
Index 238
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised version of my DPhil thesis. My three doctoral
years at Oxford were made possible by the generous funding of the
Rhodes Trust, to which I am grateful for offering me a scholarship. The
University of Exeter provided me with a congenial environment and
with both the time and the financial support to complete the book.
Revised versions of chapters have appeared in Political Studies, History of
European Ideas and The European Legacy; their editors kindly gave me
permission to reproduce material.
In completing this work I have benefited from the help of a number
of people. I am grateful to Trevor Barry for making it all possible in the
first place. My doctoral supervisor Jack Hayward provided unfailing sup-
port throughout. John Burrow and Jeremy Jennings examined the the-
sis and offered unerring advice. I have also greatly benefited from the
insights of Michael Freeden, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Julia Stapleton,
Stuart Jones, Marc Stears, James Meadowcroft, Elizabeth Frazer, David
Miller, and the late David Nicholls. Richard Bellamy read the manu-
script and made a number of challenging comments, which I wish I
could have answered more fully. All remaining errors and imprecisions
are my own.
Mark Hewitson patiently endured endless discussions on pluralism,
and improved both the quality of this work and the morale of its
author. As for my family back home, I would not blame them if they
find that this book is not quite enough to make up for all the birthdays
I have missed.
vii
Introduction
‘If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our
“individuals” are becoming groups. No longer do we write “the Man
versus the State”, we write “the Group versus the State”’.1 On the eve
of the First World War, the British political scientist Ernest Barker, a
sympathetic critic of the theory of political pluralism, thus eloquently
captured something of the mood of his age. He was right to suggest
that one achievement of pluralist theory had been to displace the two
central categories of modern political thought – namely, the state and
the individual. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the spectre of
a bureaucratic Leviathan towering over an atomized society, the plural-
ists warned that individualism and statism were two sides of the same
coin, and urged that only a revival of intermediary associations could
circumvent both evils.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, our political world and the
vocabulary we use to make sense of it have changed beyond recogni-
tion. And yet, strangely, our concerns are not dissimilar to those of
Barker and his contemporaries. As liberal–democratic states find them-
selves plagued by problems of over-centralization, democratic deficit,
widespread inequalities, social breakdown and political apathy, the
‘group basis of politics’, to recall Earl Latham’s seminal expression,2 is
being rediscovered. Groups are once again promoted as means to cor-
rect the chronic tendency of democracy to foster its own opposites:
bureaucratic centralization, inequalities of power, and anomic individ-
ualism. To be sure, the contemporary corpus of group theory is wide
and heterogeneous. Associationalists, for example, seek to reform tradi-
tional structures of governance by increasing the participation of
groups in the design and implementation of economic and social pol-
icy.3 Communitarian pluralists stress the importance of a buoyant,
1
2 Pluralist Thought and the State, 1900–25
autonomous and diversified civil society, both as a bulwark to state
power and as a privileged locus for the cultivation of community val-
ues.4 Multiculturalists stigmatize the inability of universalist democ-
racy to accommodate ethnic, cultural, or gender-based differences, and
advocate the representation of minority groups at the state level5 or
the attribution of special rights to minorities.6 Participatory democrats
argue for the extension of democratic practices to non-democratic
spheres, such as the workplace.7
Different though these proposals are, most of them would have been
found congenial by early twentieth-century pluralists. That the plural-
ists engaged with such a variety of issues is testimony to the wide-
ranging and eclectic ambitions of early group theory (it is perhaps also,
a contrario, testimony to the fragmented state of contemporary political
science). The early pluralists were not, however, exclusively interested
in group theory, narrowly conceived. In their broad attempt to concep-
tualize the triangular relationship between state, groups and individu-
als, they anticipated two other recent developments in political theory:
the renewal of interest in the state as a concept,8and the philosophical
debate between liberals and communitarians about the relationship
between self and society.9 Early pluralist writings may have lacked the
analytical depth characteristic of contemporary political philosophy,
but this was more than compensated for by their multidisciplinary
breadth. One ambition of this book is to illustrate the richness and
intricacy of early pluralist thought, thus shedding a historical light on
contemporary group theory.
Nevertheless, although the pluralists raised questions that are still at
the heart of political reflections, we should beware of treating them as
if they were our contemporaries. We may learn from them, but perhaps
the greatest lesson is one of historical humility. Pluralist reflections
were answers to questions that made full sense only in relation to par-
ticular historical contexts. Among the latter was the often invisible
background provided by intellectual traditions specific to individual
countries. National traditions constitute elusive, if undeniable, parame-
ters of political thought, which have attracted the recent attention of a
number of historians of ideas.10 This book pursues such a line of
enquiry, drawing attention to the national dimension of political
thinking through a comparison between French and British formula-
tions of pluralism.
While there has been no shortage of studies of the British strand of
political pluralism,11few have paid any sustained attention to the exis-
tence of a comparable movement in France, a pardonable omission