Abstract
In a recent article in Political Studies, Mark Wenman advances a critique of Paul Hirst's theory of associative democracy. In response, we argue that Wenman overstates the importance of G. D. H. Cole in the formation of Hirst's theory, that he therefore misrepresents important aspects of Hirst's argument, and that, as it stands, his own theory of ‘agonistic pluralism’ is less the ‘alternative’ he claims than an observation about the ineradicability of social conflict that Hirst would have regarded as true, but sought to move beyond in thinking about how a viable pluralism could be politically constructed and sustained in modern societies.
Hirst and the English Political Pluralists
Mark Wenman's argument proceeds from the claim that Paul Hirst's associative democracy was ‘shaped by the ideas of the English tradition of pluralism, and especially by Cole’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 801). Indeed, the demonstration of this intellectual relationship is key to Wenman's critique of Hirst, because he believes that he inherited from Cole an essential ‘tension’ or ‘contradiction’ between a commitment to voluntarism and pluralism on the one hand and what Wenman characterises as a view of ‘unified social purpose’ on the other (Wenman, 2007, p. 812, p. 816).
Wenman overstates the extent of the intellectual continuity between Hirst and the English pluralists. Hirst's interest in them is demonstrated by his editorship of an anthology of their key writings (Hirst, 1989), and he certainly strove to revive interest in their work. Nonetheless, the origins of his theory of associative democracy lie not in their work but in his own concerns about politics and social theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Hirst's interest in Cole is apparent as early as 1980, as is witnessed by Law, Socialism and Democracy (Hirst, 1986 – an important collection of essays to which Wenman makes no reference). As can be seen there, Hirst's motivation in referring to Cole arose from his acknowledgement that socialism had since lost its way by becoming associated exclusively with state power. Importantly, though, Hirst was not looking to an earlier pluralism for some theoretical foundation for contemporary political practice. His concern, he insisted, was with the current conjuncture of political forces and the opportunities it afforded for political change.
Wenman tends to underplay the importance of these conjunctural political concerns for Hirst, and as a result does not fully appreciate the political character of the theory of associative democracy. But there were certainly also important theoretical aspects to Hirst's turn towards pluralism that Wenman fails to recognise. He mentions in passing Hirst's critique of ‘Marxist class essentialism’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 801), but nowhere seems to register that Hirst's critical engagement with Marxism, and particularly with Althusserianism, had already put in place the main theoretical assumptions that informed his political pluralism. What Hirst took out of his engagement with Althusserian Marxism was a rejection of the notion that entities such as ‘classes’, ‘capitalist society’ or ‘the people’ have any real effects in constructing social relations (Hindess and Hirst, 1975; 1977; Hirst, 1985). But this did not lead him to individualism, either in politics or social theory. Rather, if we were to understand the organisation of modern capitalist societies with democratic political systems, we had to see them as cohering around a plurality of collective actors, each with its own constitutive procedures of calculation, decision making and execution. Hirst's turn towards pluralism, then, came out of his critique of Marxism. He argued that any effective future for socialist politics required acceptance of the multiple economic and social loci of contemporary capitalist democracies, and the need to take seriously their political organisation.
It is in this political and theoretical context that Hirst engaged with the English pluralists. But his pluralism did not, therefore, simply adopt the same theoretical or political assumptions. Indeed, in many important respects, Hirst departed from their premises. Wenman paints a misleading picture of the extent of the ‘influence’ of the English political pluralists on Hirst, and this lends itself to his misunderstanding of Hirst's associative democracy.
Associative Democracy
Wenman cannot, then, simply damn Hirst by association with Cole. Cole's pluralism may have been compromised by his commitment to a substantive conception of the common good (Wenman, 2007, p. 807), but if Hirst's pluralism is vitiated by his subscription to what Wenman describes as a principle of ‘social unity’, he needs to demonstrate exactly how this is so. But when it comes to explicating this concept of ‘social unity’ that supposedly operates in Hirst's argument, what we find in Wenman's account is a series of misunderstandings and misrepresentations that have the overall effect of providing a skewed impression of the political character and intent of associative democracy.
This can be seen in three main areas. First, with respect to Hirst's ‘functionalism’, Wenman claims that Hirst argued that ‘industrial productivity, efficient economic governance and welfare provision represent impartial and incontestable axioms of social organisation. Despite his professed commitment to pluralism, Hirst presumed to know what citizens really want’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 802) and his ‘implicit recourse to a notion of the common good contradicts his professed commitment to voluntarism and pluralism’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 810). Now the problem here is not with Wenman's claim that Hirst did indeed argue for the importance of economic efficiency, productivity and welfare as key components of associative democracy. But just what does it mean to say that he saw these as ‘incontestable axioms of social organisation’, that he ‘presumed to know what citizens really want’ and that he relied on ‘a notion of the common good’? These are claims that Hirst himself nowhere makes, so we have to take them as Wenman's characterisation of his theory. But here Wenman should have recognised the full significance of the fact that Hirst was thinking about associative democracy in a very specific context – that of late twentieth-century Western European states. And in that context, he was quite justified to claim, as we can see in widespread support for parties of the centre right and centre left, that what the large majority of citizens in these states wanted from public power, broadly speaking, was material prosperity, welfare and social peace and security (though they obviously differed over exactly what these things entailed and how they could be achieved). Of course, not everybody agreed with these very broad outcomes of public policy. Economic efficiency and welfare were not, in that sense, ‘incontrovertible axioms of social organisation’ – but Hirst never claimed that they were.
Second, Wenman suggests that Hirst's pluralism is undermined by his commitment to ‘corporatism’ and democracy as ‘efficient government’. Wenman is correct in saying that Hirst rejected the ‘radical republican’ view of democracy as an end in itself, or as an expression of the collective will of the people. Instead, he supported a conception of ‘democracy as communication’ – ‘that is democracy as effective governance based upon an adequate flow of information from governed to governors, and the coordination and implementation of policy through ongoing consultation with those affected by it’ (Hirst, 1996, p. 35). Wenman thinks that Hirst's view of democracy involves ‘the exorbitant reduction of democracy to efficiency … [and] can only be justified on the assumption of an underlying unity of purpose that is taken as axiomatic’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 811). But it is difficult here to make sense of Wenman's claim. The whole purpose of democracy as communication is to allow for a more effective articulation and coordination of the interests of a large range of self-governing, voluntary associations. Hirst's ‘corporatism’, as Wenman seems to recognise, is not intended to be hierarchical and state centric, and it is conceived of as a supplement to other forms of democratic representation. And, unlike Cole, it is simply not the case that Hirst sought to exclude associations that did not contribute directly to ‘industrial productivity’ from the pluralist system of governance (Wenman, 2007, p. 812). The charge, then, that Hirst's view of democracy and corporatism is based on an axiomatic ‘assumption of an underlying unity of purpose’ is quite misleading, and without further elaboration simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
Thirdly, Wenman seems to pose as a major objection to Hirst's associative democracy the fact that in modern capitalist democracies there are bound to be heterodox groups which do not support the majority's broad concerns for public power to oversee economic efficiency, welfare and social security (Wenman, 2007, pp. 808–10, p. 812). But the obvious riposte here is: so what? Hirst's position on such groups as religious conservatives and deep greens, as Wenman acknowledges (Wenman, 2007, p. 809), was that they could be part of the associative state, and that they would enjoy the same liberal rights of voice and exit as any other association of citizens. Of course, if such groups took up arms to try to impose their particular world view on the majority, they would have to be suppressed by the state. Is Wenman arguing against this? the problem of the limits of toleration in a pluralist society is a difficult one, but the suggestion that Hirst's associationalism has authoritarian tendencies is, except from the perspective of a crude anarchism or nihilism, simply mistaken. It can find no support in anything he wrote about associative democracy.
Associative or Agonistic Pluralism?
In concluding his article, Wenman confronts us with a choice between associative and agonistic pluralism. But the notion that agonistic pluralism represents an alternative to Hirst's associationalism rests on a categorial confusion. As Hirst presents it, associative democracy is certainly a normative political theory, but it is intended as an intervention in politics, a set of proposals for the construction and maintenance of an institutional pluralism in capitalist democracies. In contrast, we can see how Wenman might defend the idea of agonistic pluralism as a normative theory, but he clearly proposes it as a metaphysics of social life. According to Wenman, following such authors as Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, agonism ‘posits the ineradicability of social antagonism’, ‘the agonist recognises that antagonism is a perennial feature of domestic and international politics‘(Wenman, 2007, p. 802, p. 815, emphasis in original). However, put in this vague and general way, these are claims from which Hirst would hardly have demurred. Wenman should know this because of Hirst's quite direct and explicit engagement with and approval of Schmitt's concept of the political (Hirst, 1999), but instead he tells us that Hirst's use of Schmitt shows us that he should have adopted ‘a more agonistic interpretation of pluralism’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 814).
Unlike Wenman and Schmitt, Hirst was far from satisfied with simply ‘positing’ antagonism. Instead, he attempted to think through how the specific forms of antagonism characteristic of modern capitalist liberal democracies are constructed through the operation of particular social and political institutions and relations. He did not seek to eradicate antagonism, but to elaborate ways in which antagonism might be contained and channelled beneficially. In fact, it is unclear how far this project differs from that of Wenman's agonistic pluralism: ‘m[I]t is the question of the exclusion of antagonism through the exercise of sovereign power as a condition of agonism (i.e. relatively cooperative social and economic relations)’ (Wenman, 2007, p. 816, emphasis in original).
Perhaps the real point of difference here is that Hirst was not hung up on trying to define the concept of politics:
How to define the ‘political’? Don't try too hard – my suggestion would be to remain simultaneously aware of the definitions offered by Aristotle, Bernard Crick and Carl Schmitt, centering on community, the negotiation of differences, and friend–enemy relations respectively. If you ignore any one you are in trouble; if you try to synthesise them, in worse trouble (Hirst, 2002, p. 4).
‘Agonistic pluralism’ might be accused of the former error, in that its understanding of the political as a realm of ‘ineradicable antagonism’ neglects the question of how associations form and cohere and, therefore, how a viable and effective pluralism could be constructed in modern societies. It is because Hirst's associationalism addresses precisely this question that it remains an invaluable resource for those concerned with reforming contemporary capitalist societies by extending and deepening democracy.
Footnotes
The authors would like to thank Grahame Thompson and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier draft of this response.